As we continue LOOGy week (also known in some circles of the United States as Thanksgiving week), we thought we’d back up a bit and ask the question, what exactly is a LOOGy, anyway?

Uber-stat resource Baseball Prospectus defines LOOGy simply as "Lefty One Out GuY – a left handed reliever specializing in getting one out, often in game critical situations" without any apparent quantification. The earliest codification of the Lefthanded One-Out Guy that we’ve found comes from the seminal work of THT’s Steve Treder back in April 2005 (the earliest reference on SABR-L, the moderated discussion board of SABR, is from 2006). Treder defined a a LOOGY season "as any by a left-handed pitcher that meets the following conditions":

• At least 20 appearances
• Fewer than 1.20 innings per appearance
• Fewer than 20% Saves per appearance

We’d like to tweak Treder’s definition a bit, going to the mound to make the following double switch:

• Minimum four batters faced per appearance (for "fewer than 1.20 innings per appearance")
• Minimum 40% lefthanded batters of total batters faced (for "fewer than 20% Saves per appearance")

The rationale for using batters faced rather than innings pitched is simple: If we’re dealing with pitchers who often face just one batter at a time, we’re going to miss out on some data if the batter doesn’t make an out. Or, as former Atlanta LOOGy John Foster once said, "I’m basically a pitcher who pitches at-bats, not innings." In addition to switching to batters faced, we’ve also admittedly made the qualification a bit more stringent. Treder’s original cutoff of 1.2 IP/G comes to around five batters faced per game; our change requires no more than four batters per outing.

The other change is to remove the Saves-rate maximum. As it is no longer the 1980s, the Save no longer serves any useful purpose of its own merit, and, while we understand Treder’s rationale for using it, it also doesn’t help define LOOGy to us: after all, a lefty who gets a save by coming in to retire only the last batter of the game doesn’t make him any less a LOOGy (in fact, it makes him the quintessential one). LOOGy is not necessarily synonymous with setup man, in our opinion. He is a specialist — in particular, a lefty designated to put out lefty batters, so we used a different criterion: Percentage of batters faced who are themselves lefties. Put another way, a lefthanded pitcher who is adept at pitching to righties — a pitcher whose percentage of batters faced is more heavily weighted toward righties — he is certainly a useful pitcher, but it’s difficult to consider him a lefty "specialist." As a side note, the minimum LHBF rate tends to weed out closers, anyway, since the Billy Wagners (LHBF: 25.0%) and Brian Fuenteses (20.7%) of the world generally face their share of righthanded batters.

So with these revised criteria, who were the most successful LOOGys in 2008? Here are the best by Relievers Expected Wins Added:

It appears that the Cardinals, then, have offers out to two of the best available LOOGys, under the new working definition. More interestingly, Rhodes and Miller were the top two in baseball in percentage of of total batters faced who were lefties.

Now if one of them would only sign.

This entry was posted by Pip on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.