Basic Stats

The next pitcher I wanted to take a look at was the recently acquired Tim Redding.  Redding began his major league career in 2001 with the Houston Astros posting a 5.50 ERA in 55 innings.  He spent 4 years with the Astros before leaving in 2005.  He split time between the Yankees and Padres in 2005 going 0-6 with a 10.57 ERA in that year.  He spent the next year and a half in AAA, but in 2007, the Nationals decided to give him another chance.  Redding ended up posting a 3.64 ERA for the 2007 season, the lowest in his career.  Last season, Redding won 10 games but his ERA skyrocketed back up to 4.95, right around his career mark of 4.92. 

Let’s take a look at some of Redding’s peripheral statistics.  Redding is not a strikeout pitcher by any means, however he did post a K/9 rate of 5.93 last season, not great but his highest career since 2003 in that department.  One thing that’s alarming is he tends to give up a lot of home runs.  Redding gave up 27 Home Runs last season in 182 innings pitched, the 16^th most in all of baseball.  Hopefully Citifield’s outfield configuration will help Redding.  Let’s take a look at Tim Redding’s pitches through Pitch F/X.

1) What Does He Throw

Using data from MLB Gameday application, we can look further in detail to what Redding threw in 2008.  Redding threw 3138 pitches during the 2008 season, of these gameday has tracked 2998 of those pitches.

Tim Redding has 4 different pitches.  His main pitch is a 4-seam fastball.  As we will see later on, this is by far Tim’s best pitch, getting above average velocity and a good amount of vertical movement.  What he gains in vertical movement (over an inch better than average), he lacks in horizontal movement.  I haven’t seen Tim pitch a whole lot but my guess is that he throws a bit more overhand than your average pitcher.

Redding also has a slider.  By looking at the movement, it’s not very good.  He gets decent horizontal movement, however he does not get nearly enough sink on it.  The 5.30 vertical movement is probably one of the highest I’ve seen yet on a slider.

The next pitch is the curveball.  This is probably Tim’s second best pitch.  Tim uses this pitch quite often as his go to pitch in strikeout situations.  He gains a lot of horizontal movement and not a whole lot vertical movement.  This pitch to me seems like more of a mix of slider and curveball than a true curveball.

Redding’s last pitch is his changeup.  As you can see, he doesn’t throw this pitch very often.  You typically want to see a difference between the fastball and changeup around 10mph and Redding generates about 8 mph.  Also, this pitch (as with the fastball) lacks horizontal movement.  The changeup is Redding’s worst pitch.

2) When Does He Throw It?

Next lets breakdown Redding’s pitches between Lefty vs. Righty

Redding does a good job incorporating his other pitches besides his fastball.  He consistently throws his fastball and curveball the same percentage to both lefties and righties.  The biggest difference comes from the slider and changeup.  Redding will hardly throw a changeup to a right handed batter, preferring his slider.  Against lefties, Redding reduces his usage of the slider and adds the changeup.

Let’s breakdown Redding’s pitch by count

Redding will throw either a first pitch slider or fastball nearly 89% of the time.  Usually Redding introduces his changeup on 1 strike counts (1-1, 2-1).  It seems like his big strikeout pitch is his curveball, using it nearly 24% of the time on 0-2, 31% of the time on 1-2, and 22% on 2-2.  Once he gets to 3 balls, you can pretty much bet your going to get a fastball 3-0 and 3-1.  He all but eliminates the curveball and changeup once he gets to 3 balls.  This might suggest he has a lack of confidence in throwing those pitches for strikes.  Later on, we’ll check the balls/strike pct for his pitches.

3) What Happens When He Throws It?

In the past I have been trying to breakdown all events by pitch type to see what success a pitcher had with each particular pitch.  The problem with that type of analysis was that I was only focusing on balls in play.  This time I want to try something a bit different that I saw in a hardballtimes article I saw.  I decided to use batting runs to determine the run value of each pitch.  Batting runs is a linear weights run estimator developed by Pete Palmer.  The formula is used to estimate the amount of runs scored/allowed in a season.  Since we aren’t really estimating runs here for the future, I tweaked the formula to use linear weight values from 2008.  These values are the following:

These are the weights for 2008.  We know this because Retrosheet maintains play by play data.  The above means that the average single will net you .47 runs.  So you can plug these values into the batting runs formula and it will tell you how many runs above or below average a player is.

To determine run values by pitch count, I had to take it a step further.  The run values above tell me the values for balls in play; however it does not help me will all other balls and strikes.  The next step I had to do was figure out the value of a ball and strike in each count.  To do this, I used 2008 data from Baseball Reference.  I looked at the split data for the batting lines for each count.  The values were as follows:

Once I did this, I was able to figure out the run value for a ball and strike on each count.  Also the run values for the balls in play had to be adjusted as well per count as shown in the following table:

A note as to why the run values needed to be adjusted.  The average single gives you .47 runs. On an 1-0 count, the single gives you .434 runs, a difference of .036  Since you already have given the value of .036 on the 0-0 count (the value of the ball to get you to 1-0) the single is simply the difference of the two. This was done to all events. 

The next thing to do was simply take all the events and multiply them to their appropriate weights.  When doing this, I eliminated the 2 strike foul balls.  A 2 strike foul ball does not change the count, thus does not change value either.  While I do believe 2 strike fouls have some value (ie. wearing the pitcher down) I had to eliminate them here.  If you guys have a better idea of what to do with them, let me know.  Anyways this explanation went further then I wanted it to so here are the Run Values for Tim Redding:

Since the count of each pitch is different, I added a run value per pitch column so that it’s easier to compare pitches.  Overall, Redding allowed 11.937 runs more than average.  As a result, Redding is 1.19 wins below average.  This is consistent with the numbers from both Fangraphs and Hardball Times Annual.  Here you can see the fastball is clearly his best pitch saving 5.7 runs and his changeup was his worst pitch.  What this chart means is that his fastball is -0.003 greater than the average pitch.  It does not mean it’s better than the average fastball.  To determine that, we would have to figure out whether or not the average fastball saves or allows more runs than the average of the other pitches.

Lastly, a comment about the unknown column.  The reason the run value is so high here is partly because Redding allowed 7 intentional walks.  This unknown column also incorporates any pitch that pitch F/X did not track.

4) Ball/Strike Percentage

If you guys are still with which I’m sure is a very small number by now, I wanted to take a look at one more table.  Here are the percentages per pitch

As you can see from the table, Redding doesn’t throw his changeup or curveball for a great percentage of strikes.  The fastball and slider produce the most called strikes as well as the most foul balls.  The slider and curve produce the most swinging strikes.  The curveball and change produce the most balls in play.

What’s In Store for 2009

Not much.  Tim Redding will be an average pitcher at best and a couple wins below average at his worst.  Pretty much every aspect of his game is below average.  Since I’d imagine that most 4 and 5 pitchers are a run or two below average, Redding seems like a solid option for the 5^th spot if the Mets do not find anyone else.