Outcomes: First Batter Faced

(Brian Kersey/Getty Images)

I've often wondered what hurts more to a pitcher, giving up a home run to lead off an inning or giving up a walk and then seeing that batter come around to score. Thoughts on the matter really started to bubble as this Blue Jays season trundled along, and Ricky Romero piled up the walks. To me, it felt like he was issuing free passes early in innings, leading to trouble.

To determine if my eyes were deceiving me, or worse, I was falling prey to the chatter of the Jays' commentators, I looked through Romero's game logs going back to 2009 and pulled the outcome of the first at bat of every inning in which he pitched. The results amounted to a pretty unwieldy workbook which I have pared down to the following:

	2009	2010	2011	2012
1st Batters Faced	185	215	232	166
Reached Base	84	70	79	66
BB	29	22	21	24
Ball in Play	48	42	41	32
HR	3	4	12	6
HBP	4	2	5	4
Out	101	145	153	100
Strikeout	28	35	47	17
In play, Out	73	110	106	83
1st Batter OBP	0.454	0.326	0.341	0.398
LOB%	75.5%	70.2%	79.2%	64.6%
FIP	4.33	3.64	4.20	5.09
WAR	2.8	4.1	2.9	0.5

To put those results in context, I pulled the same data for David Price, as he was suggested by both Baseball Reference and Brooks Baseball as the closest comparable pitcher for Romero. Here is his 1st batter table:

	2009	2010	2011	2012
1st Batters Faced	134	214	230	179
Reached Base	48	67	67	51
BB	15	21	11	8
Ball in Play	29	40	47	36
HR	4	5	7	5
HBP	0	1	2	2
Out	86	147	163	128
Strikeout	18	42	53	31
In play, Out	68	105	110	97
1st Batter OBP	0.358	0.313	0.291	0.285
LOB%	68.5%	78.5%	73.3%	82.2%
FIP	4.59	3.83	3.32	3.21
WAR	1.3	4.1	4.7	4.1

As expected, Romero's 2009 numbers aren't spectacular, but it was his rookie season. What is troubling -- glaring, actually -- are the K/BB rate and OBP for first batters faced, and the LOB% for the current season. Price's numbers are trending towards excellent, as a young pitcher's numbers should as they progress through their career, but when it comes to Romero, it seems as though the bottom just fell out.

Gettin' on
Out of the 166 batters Romero has faced to lead off an inning so far this season, almost 40% of them have reached base. Out of that group, just over half did so by way of an outcome under the pitchers' control: BB, HR & HBP. David Price on the other hand, has only allowed 29% of the first batters he has faced on base, and only 29% of those batters (15 out of 51) reached by way of walk, home run or HBP.

Strollin' along
It has been well documented that Ricky Romero's K/BB is a league worst 1.22 this season, but that drops to an abysmal 0.71 with no outs and no one on. Compare that to the 2.23 for the season and 2.24 against first batters that he posted in 2011, and well, you just shake your dang head. Again, if you look at David Price, he has a sparkling K/BB of 3.88 against the first batter in an inning, and 3.24 for the season.

Bringin' them around
Roll that up with a left on base percentage that is second worst in the league at 64.6% and you have to wonder if early inning control issues have lead to the mess he is mired in. So far this season, David Price has a LOB% of 82.2, so when batters do manage to get on base, very few of them come around to score.

It's easy to say "Don't let them on early and you won't worry about them coming around", but we all know pitching is not easy - it is by far one of the most difficult tasks in all of sports, and I have the utmost respect for Ricky Romero for what he does. It's just so strange, so intriguing and flat-out frustrating to see the numbers fall off a cliff for no apparent reason, and to dive in to try and figure out what's going on is part of what makes baseball so interesting.

Ratios, damn it. Ratios.

This is a post about Ricky Romero.

Sort of.

It seems pretty simple, so tell me if I'm getting this wrong. As a pitcher, if you're going to walk a lot of guys, you're going to have to strike out a hell of a lot more of them. "They" say a good ratio of strikeouts to walks is 2:1, "they" being the local team's television commentary duo that shall remain nameless. Fangraph's 'average' K/9 and BB/9 rates are 7.1 and 3.3 respectively, therefore, one can imagine that an 'average' K/BB is 2.15 and an 'above average' or good ratio would look more like 2.68. Here's a table, dangit.

Rating	K/9	BB/9	K/BB
Excellent	10.0	1.5	6.67
Great	8.5	2.3	3.70
Above Average	7.5	2.8	2.68
Average	7.1	3.3	2.15
Below Average	6.0	4.0	1.50
Poor	5.0	4.5	1.11
Awful	4.5	5.0	0.90

Looking solely at this stat, Ricky Romero is hovering between 'below average' and 'poor', with a K/BB of 1.29. As of this writing, the only qualified pitchers worse so far this season are the new-New York Yankee, Derek Lowe with a K/BB of 1.00, and Carlos Zambrano at 1.28. Ricky's 2012 troubles have been expertly summed up at both Getting Blanked and Fangraphs, so I'm not going to try and reinvent the wheel here, nor am I going to point to this and say "Bingo-bango, sugar in the gas tank" as if this is the only reason for his slumping season. There are probably all sorts of issues be they mechanical or mental contributing to this years' struggles.

What is curious to me, and what drove me to look into this stat, is the significant drop-off in his K/BB rate. In 2009, his rookie season, he posted a so-so 1.78. He followed that up with a closer to league average 2.12 in 2010, and 2.23 in 2011 (league averages were 2.17 and 2.3 respectively). The loss of almost an entire strikeout per walk from one season to the next is shocking to me as this appears to be a number that stays relatively level for a pitcher over their career.

He is three walks away from matching last season's total. With a BB/9 of 4.82, he stands a good chance of taking care of that tonight against the Chicago White Sox. (Thankfully, for Romero's sake, the White Sox are one of the least patient teams at the plate, ranking 26th in the league with a 7.3 BB%)

One could take solace in the thought that this drastic rise in walks and decline in strikeouts is merely an anomaly on an otherwise positive, upward career trajectory. On the other hand, he pitches in Toronto, where the panic button is constantly in the shop for repairs from overuse. With about 9 starts left this season, it will be interesting to see where his strikeout to walk ratio ends up, and what it looks like going forward. I'll be watching, that's for sure.