Zack Greinke and Anibal Sanchez: Closer Than You Think

Zack Greinke's megadeal with the Dodgers made him the highest paid pitcher on an annual basis, at $24.5 million per season. The second-best arm on the market, Anibal Sanchez, seems likely to settle for something closer to $15 million per season. Is there really a $10 million per year gap in performance between these two 29-year-old righties, though? When it comes to the holy trifecta of pitcher skills -- whiffs, walks and preventing homers -- Greinke and Sanchez are much closer than you might think.

Whiffs

Over the past three seasons, Greinke has gotten hitters to miss 22.2% of the time that they have swung. That's well above the 20.2% average for major league starters. Sanchez, however, has actually induced more whiffs (23.3%) over the same time frame.

Greinke gets many of his whiffs on pitches thrown below the knees and out of the strike zone...

Greinke's contact rate by pitch location, 2010-12

...Whereas Sanchez does a better job of limiting in-zone contact...

Sanchez's contact rate by pitch location, 2010-12

Greinke has managed to rack up a higher strikeout percentage (23.3% of batters faced from 2010-12), but Sanchez (21.1%) isn't too far behind.

Walks

Sanchez has thrown more strikes (64.8%) than Greinke (62.9%), whose rate is actually somewhat below the 63.4% average for starters. Sanchez pounds the zone, throwing a much higher percentage of pitches over the plate (52.5%) than the MLB average for starters (48.7%):

Sanchez's pitch location, 2010-12

Greinke, by contrast, throws more arm-side pitches out of the strike zone. He has tossed 46.3% of his pitches in the zone from 2010-12:

Greinke's pitch location, 2010-12

When you take intentional walks out of the equation, Sanchez has issued just slightly more free passes (6.7% of batters faced) than Greinke (6.1%).

Homers

Both hurlers have progressively scorched more earth, with Sanchez (47% ground ball rate) and Greinke (48.1%) besting the 45.5% average ground ball rate for starters. Sanchez and Greinke both get grounders on pitches that go below hitters' knees or tail in on their hands:

Sanchez's ground ball rate by pitch location, 2010-12

Greinke's ground ball rate by pitch location, 2010-12

 

With above-average worm-burning skills, Sanchez and Greinke have each allowed 0.8 home runs per nine innings pitched.

Overall, here are the totals for Sanchez and Greinke over the past three seasons:

Sanchez: 587 IP, 3.70 ERA,  3.40 FIP

Greinke:  604 IP, 3.83 ERA, 3.16 FIP

You can certainly make the argument that Greinke deserves more dough. The most serious item in his injury history is some cracked ribs suffered during a pick-up basketball game, while Sanchez has Tommy John and shoulder surgeries in his past. Greinke also has the lower Fielding Independent ERA, suggesting he may reverse Sanchez's edge in ERA in future seasons. But the gap between Greinke and Sanchez hardly seems worth $10 million per year. Considering how close his resume is to Greinke's, Sanchez could be a bargain if he ends up signing for something like five years and $75 million.

Sanchez Fools Batters and Computers

Anibal Sanchez of the Florida Marlins threw the fourth low-hit game of his career on Saturday.  Sanchez raises an interesting question based on how PITCHf/x classifies his throws.  If a pitcher can fool a computer, does he also fool batters?

The following graph shows the spin of Anibal's pitches in the 2011 season:

Anibal Sanchez, spin by velocity, 2011.The big orange spots represent his fastballs.  The green spots below are the slider and change up, the slider moving toward left-handed batters, the change up toward right-handed batters.  The blue blob at the lowest point on the chart represents his curve ball.

PITCHf/x has trouble with the slider, however:

Anibal Sanchez, slider spin, 2011.Does Sanchez throw a hard and a soft slider?  Probably not:

Anibal Sanchez, slider and cut-fastball spin, 2011.There is a fastball that the computer model doesn't identify well.  It mostly looks like a cutter, but supposedly, Sanchez does not throw a cut fastball:

Sanchez throws five pitches:
A four-seam fastball that has a good deal of cutting action but doesn't sink like many other cutters.

Compare that to his four-seam and two-seam fastball, the latter called a sinker by PITCHf/x:

Anibal Sanchez, fastball spin, 2011.Notice that there is some overlap between the fastball and what is called the cutter.

So are batters fooled? They are a combined 61 for 254 on the slider-cutter combination, a .240 BA.  They hit .252 overall against Sanchez, so that combination does seem to fool them a bit.  Batters slug .378 on the pitches, versus .402 overall, so they drive these pitches less as well.  Finally, they strike out 29% of the time on the slider-cutter, 24.2% of the time overall.  The pitches that are fooling the machines are fooling the humans as well.

Baseball-All-Starlytics: Tim Lincecum vs. Anibal Sanchez

Joe Capozzi in an entry to his  Fish Tank blog on the PalmBeachPost.com site had an interesting piece on Sunday where he talks about how Marlins manager Jack McKeon is frustrated both that pitcher Anibal Sanchez is not going to the All Star game and that Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum is going.

His bottom line comment was this: 

“He’s on his team. And he’s a good pitcher, don’t get me wrong. But do we reward for what you’re doing now or do we reward for what you’ve done in the past? …

“I think the guys, there are lot of guys who will never make the All Star game again who are worthy of being on that team and will never get another chance.

“If he’s not having an all star year, are we voting for all stars for this year? In other words you go out and you bust your tail and have a good year this year, you can’t make it because some guy is hitting 240 that happened to make it the last couple of years. Reward the guys for this year.”

McKeon of course is right. There s always a tendency on the part of voters and selectors to opt for the old "star"with the reputation versus the new "star" with the numbers, but that is a sports tradition. However, that doesn't prevent us from comparing the numbers.

Who is the All-Star: Tim Lincecum or Anibal Sanchez?

Here is Lincecum this season:

Batters are hitting .230 against Lincecum and slugging .339Here is Sanchez this season:
Batters are hitting .238 against Sanchez and slugging .376

The numbers between the two are strikingly close:

• Lincecum has a 3.14 ERA; Sanchez has a 3.30.
• Lincecum has a 1.193 WHIP; Sanchez an identical 1.193.
• Lincecum has surrendered seven homers; Sanchez has given up nine.
• Lincecum has struck out 126 (26% batters faced); Sanchez 11 (24.7%).
• Lincecum has walked 41 (8.5%); Sanchez 33 (7.3%).

Here's the reality:

Yes, on paper, these two are remarkably similar, so if one makes the All-Star squad , the other should as well. But, who has the casual fan heard of: Tim Lincecum or Anibal Sanchez? Who will that fan tune in Fox to see?

After all is said and done, I'm sure that Sanchez and McKeon know the answers to that question, so now Sanchez just needs to wait to see which NL pitcher bails on the game and he is added to the squad.