Quickie: R.A. Dickey Does It Again September 13, 2011
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Cheap Wins, Dickey gets the shaft, Hiroki Kuroda, Jeremy Hellickson, Mike Nickeas, Quality No-Decisions, quality starts, R.A. Dickey, Tough Losses
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Last night’s Mets game offered a familiar situation: R.A. Dickey started the game and pitched seven strong innings. He allowed only three runs. He was also the losing pitcher.
By any measure, his 7 innings, 3 runs (2 earned), no walks and 7 strikeouts were a quality start. (They gave him a game score of 58, and matched the 6-inning, 3-run criterion MLB uses for a quality start.) Three innings was enough, though, to give the Mets the loss. The Mets have given up an average of 4.57 runs per game this season, putting them .39 above the NL average and 13th in the league. That’s not too bad – except that they only score 4.44, and that extra 13% of a run adds up over time. (Note that when I crunched numbers for home field advantage, the Mets’ home advantage was quite high, at 1.4 more runs scored at home, so last night’s performance was quite a letdown.) The Mets weren’t running a September callup lineup, either – Mike Nickeas was at catcher, but the rest of the lineup was pretty consistent.
Dickey’s had a rough year. A loss in a quality start is called a Tough Loss, and he’s had six of them. That doesn’t lead the league – Hiroki Kuroda and Jeremy Hellickson split that honor with eight each – but it’s tough to pin all of the blame on Dickey when he’s pitched to six tough losses. Worse, he has seven Quality No-Decisions, which are, predictably, no-decisions in quality starts. Those are more common, but it means that of Dickey’s 30 starts, with 19 of them quality starts, a whopping 13 of them haven’t gotten him a win. By contrast, of his 8 wins, only 2 came in non-quality starts. (We call those Cheap Wins.) That kind of breakdown shows a lack of support from the team.
It’s not like the Mets are this unsupportive all the time, though – Dickey’s six Tough Losses were over one-third of the 17 Tough Losses earned by the team this year, and his seven Quality No-Decisions are around one-third of the Mets’ 22 quality starts with no-decisions for the pitcher. His two Cheap Wins? The Mets have sixteen.
Dickey just can’t get lucky this year.
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