Is Sabathia on the up and up

Watching baseball tonight reminded me of C.C. Sabathia and how good he was last year and how horrible he was this year until the last few games.

My belief is that release point is usually critical to a pitcher's success or failure. Major league hitters are freaks of nature in terms of eyesight, recognition, and reaction to pitches thrown at you close to 100MPH at times. Pitch F/X data thankfully has begun to fill the void that was missing from staticians, scouts, managers, pitching coaches, GMs, and even the players themselves.

I decided to take a look at Sabathia and his release points so far this year. Below are closeups of his 6 starts:


Based on the real life results, one would expect that there would be a large difference in the release point from the first four starts where he was absolutely horrendous and the last two where he was lights out. But that's not what I find. His release points were essentially identical throughout all of the starts.

Where does that lead us? Why was he so ineffective in his first four starts and so amazing in his last four starts. Let's look at BABIP in each of his starts to see if it can provide an answer.

	H	HR	AB	K	SF	BB	BABIP
1st start	6	2	22	7	0	3	0.308
2nd start	6	1	22	2	0	4	0.263
3rd	12	0	21	4	2	2	0.800
4th	8	2	20	1	0	5	0.353
5th	4	0	21	11	0	2	0.400
6th	4	1	28	8	0	1	0.158
SUM	40	6	134	33	2	17
					Total		0.351

The average BABIP is approximately .290 according to many people including those at Baseball Prospectus and Voros McCracken. Sabathia's overall BABIP is above it at roughly .350. What is of real note to me is how much that one horrible start factored into his BABIP. Remove that one start and you come back with the following:

	H	HR	AB	K	SF	BB	BABIP
1st start	6	2	22	7	0	3	0.308
2nd start	6	1	22	2	0	4	0.263
4th	8	2	20	1	0	5	0.353
5th	4	0	21	11	0	2	0.400
6th	4	1	28	8	0	1	0.158
SUM	28	6	113	29	0	15
					Total		0.282

Overall numbers that are perfectly within normal parameters. So with the BABIP at normal levels, his struggles in the first several games cannot be attributed to bad luck. in this department.

So ruling out release point and BABIP, only leaves us with more questions than when I started. One final thing that I decided to look at was a statistic of Baseball Prospectus called stuff. It is defined according to their website as:

"A rough indicator of the pitcher's overall dominance, based on normalized strikeout rates, walk rates, home run rates, runs allowed, and innings per game. "10" is league average, while "0" is roughly replacement level. The formula is as follows: Stuff = EqK9 * 6 - 1.333 * (EqERA + PERA) - 3 * EqBB9 - 5 * EqHR9 -3 * MAX{6-IP/G),0}"

His Stuff rating was 15, while in the previous 2 years it was 28 and 29 respectively. This is the first thing that I saw that lead me to believe that his control, his location of pitches were what was really causing him problems.

Looking at the location of pitches with the pitch FX data, (courtesy of Dan Brooks and his online web based tool for evaluating pitch fx data). Please click on the charts for a zoom view.

Game 1 - Horrible control of fastball and slider











Game 2 - Horrible control of fastball in the zone and out of the zone.










Game 3 - His horrible start. He hung any a sliders and changes to the hitters.





Game 4 - Another horrible outing. Once again he hung many sliders, left too any fastballs in the zone that were hittable, and hung any changeups in the zone as well.







Game 5 - His first very good game. His slider was down in the zone
or out of the zone as was his changeup. While his fastball was still
somewhat erractic, it was not nearly as bad, and it was also not in the zones where right handers could get their arms extended to drive the ball.





Game 6 - His last game. He had amazing break on his pitches and
was once again able to locate his pitches well. He mixed his speeds
well and he had a lot of success.








From looking at everything above, I'd say the culprit was just missing his locations. Once he was able to regain that touch and control he was once again dominating.

I would recommend him in all formats except I still have this nagging worry about his workload last year. Yes, he is a big boy and might be able to handle the stresses more. If his release point is similar throughout the entire previous year, then it's likely this is the case. I would monitor him for at least 1-2 more starts prior to trading for him but I think that he has clearly recovered from his early season woes.