I was reading over at "The Book Blog" and saw a great graph created by Lookout Landing's Graham comparing the Game Scores of Felix Hernandez and CC Sabathia. I love the concept so I figured I would use it to compare the Game Scores of the Royals so far this season.
Game Score was "devised by Bill James to determine the strength of a pitcher in any particular baseball game". It is not a perfect method for measuring a pitching (some people are looking at improving on it), but is decent for comparing the strength of starts. Here is how the Royals starters compare this season:
Some notes:
- Our starters besides Zack were really, really bad. In other news, during the day the sky is blue.
- It seemed that Chen pitched much better than Bannister over the season, but both had similar results. Bannister did have a few complete duds.
- Zack pitched 17 better games games than Sullivan's best game.
One issue with the graph is that not all the pitchers had the same number of chances for good and bad games, so here are the average values for each pitcher
Pitcher | Average Game Score |
Z.Greinke | 54.1 |
L.Hochevar | 48.2 |
B.Chen | 47.0 |
K.Davies | 46.4 |
B.Bullington | 42.0 |
B.Bannister | 41.4 |
G.Meche | 39.8 |
A.Lerew | 38.7 |
S.O'Sullivan | 36.9 |
Those values seem to make a little more sense with Hochevar, Chen Davies lumped together and Bannister and Bullington together. I am not sure how next year's starting staff will shake out, but I would only consider seeing Greinke, Hochevar, Chen and Davies come back fighting for spots in the rotation. The rest should be added to the pen, sent to the minors or released.