Mark Buehrle

The inaugural pitcher for my new pitching feature will be Mark Buehrle.

First his true pitching line:

Year Team INN GS W L S K BBI HA ERA WHIP 2008 CHW 42.3 7 1 4 0 27 11 52 5.32 1.49 He has also given up 4 HR.

I know, not good at all. 1-4 is never good. Nor is the ERA or WHIP. In order to decide which pitchers are "unlucky" I've decided to use QuickERA and BABIP from Baseballprospectus.com

To sum up QuickERA uses BB rate, SO rate, and GB% as stats. These stabilize much faster than other statistics and thus are much better used for analysis when the IP isn't very high. BABIP measures how many batted balls fall in for hits. Voros McCracken and others have shown that the average is .290 and a range of .270-.310 is part of the "normal" distribution.

So applying those stats to the above line I get the following changes:

Hits allowed decreases from 52 to 44
QuickERA decreases to 4.27, a difference of 1.04
WHIP decreases to 1.30, a difference of .12

Are these earth shattering changes? No. They absolutely would help a fantasy team though. Especially considering the other options out there in most leagues, Mark clearly looks to have a disadvantage in the luck department so far.

I recommended picking up Buehrle immediately if he is on the wire. If he is on your team keep starting him. If he is on another team see if you can trade for him, as other people likely value him as a 5th or 6th starter.

Currently owned in 77% of CBS leagues and only 33.7% in ESPN leagues.