Ron Shandler and co. at Baseball HQ are always hammering home the idea that “once a player displays a skill he owns it”. Now I’m not so sure this is correct, but as my tagline states, I’m not one to do the actual math. I am one to pick apart the concept, however.
Lets take the example of Joel Pineiro (he’ll be the subject of many posts this off-season). I got into quite a row with some fantasy blogger about a month ago concerning whether Pineiro’s K/9 rate can return to 2001-2004 levels of 6.5-7.1 vs. his current 4.4 K/9 this year. He asserted that Pineiro can actually improve from this year by upping his K/9 rate while maintaining his new GB% because Pineiro “owns” the skill of that higher k/9 rate.
I dissent. You can’t look at Pineiro’s K/9 “skill” in a vacuum. Instead, we must look at much more complicated skill of “demonstrating a K/9 while throwing this set of pitches”. Pineiro’s old K/9 rate was with his old arsenal of pitches. Now, he is throwing a sinker. So the skill we are looking at is “the ability to strike out batters while throwing a sinker that gets 60% GB”.
So will his K/9 rate go up? Maybe through regression, more familiarity with the sinker, etc, yes. Because he’ll return to his old skill? No, that’s silly.
Tags: Fantasy Concepts, Joel Pineiro, Shandler, Skills
