Brad Lidge, Victim??
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by user 74.192.150.208
With all the Brad Lidge buzz, I Remember Dome Dogs decided to do some digging to see what we could come up with. Here's our post from today:
Well, yesterday Evan and I mentioned that we might have something of note to say about Brad Lidge’s woes of note. Evan and I did some “digging” today. What we found speaks to the fact that Brad Lidge is, as just about everyone not Phil Garner and Tim Purpura suspected, Brad Lidge is not the victim of bad luck as Phil was quoted yesterday as saying. What we found is pretty interesting and has caused us much head scratching. We started off by thinking about Brad Lidge’s BABIP because Phil was citing bad luck as Brad’s biggest foe. So we looked at that, and what we found is that Brad has a pretty large BABIP in both 2005 and 2006. Yet, we thought for a minute about BABIP and Brad Lidge’s role in it. Brad Lidge was known as a Houdini act making people look down right silly and over powering people with his heat. So then we looked at his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching (Hits, Walks and HR – K; look it up if you’re still confused). Evan and I assumed that if Brad’s Lidge’s BABIP was high when he was doing well and when he wasn’t, that obviously the only factor that was variable could be him. Well, here’s what we found
Brad Lidge---BABIP----FIC
2005----------.355-------2.05
2006----------.329-------3.70
Essentially what you see is that he wasn’t getting the job done for himself a lot in 2006. We took this further and decided to see, just in save opportunities, how often he surrendered hits, and how often he allowed those hits to turn into runs.
Brad Lidge------Save Ops w/hits--------Hits become runs
2005-------------25 ------------------------8
2006-------------18-------------------------11
This correlates with what we saw in his FIP, but we think this speaks louder than just giving up more hits. It says that Brad Lidge has lost his ability to work himself out of a jam or provide a minimal level of containment. While what we are saying probably isn’t shocking for most of you who have been watching, seeing a 91% increase in Brad’s inability to not let hits turn into runs is relevant because his FIP essentially is telling us to have expected on average about 1.5 extra runs. Yet, looking at the number of runs he allowed in 2005 and 2006, this is striking, because his RA (in save opportunities only, again) was 1.93, a 24.5% increase from what was expected of him (and his BABIP dropped 70 points). What this all boils down to is this- not only does Brad get himself into trouble with a greater frequency, he no longer bears down the way he once did in order to remain unscathed in such situations. This is seen in his higher real ERA, BABIP and FIC. Most importantly, this is seen in a less stable Astros bullpen, smaller numbers in the “W” column, and more sports clichés uttered by Phil Garner.
