Mumbai Memos: 38.009: Pure Quality Starts

[HoosierVic]

The Sabre’s Point
A statistical blog of the Unified Middle Eastern Baseball Association

By Alvin Gale
Sabre’s Point Contributor

As an ex-pat stat-head living in Mumbai, I’m naturally drawn to the Metro Stars for both my baseball and statistical fixes.

I was ruminating the other day about fantasy baseball guru Ron Shandler’s neat pitching stat, the Pure Quality Start, which has seen a couple of incarnations, and I thought, “Hm. Wonder how the Mumbai starters are faring so far?”

So, I checked.

Before we get to what I found, though, a quick definition. The Pure Quality Start, or PQS, measures how starting pitchers perform in five key skill areas, game by game. Here’s how it works:

1. If a starter goes more than 6 innings (6.1 innings or more), he gets 1 point. This measures stamina.

2. If he allows fewer hits than innings pitched, he gets 1 point. This measures hit prevention.

3. If he has 5 or more strikeouts, he gets 1 point. This measures dominance.

4. If he strikes out at three times as many batters as he walks (or has at least 3 K’s if he hasn’t walked anyone), he gets 1 point. This measures command.

5. If he allows no home runs, he gets 1 point. This measures his ability to keep the ball in the park.

Five points is the best possible score, zero points is the worst. A range of 0-1 for a game is a disaster; 2 to 3 is decent, or about average; 4 to 5 is dominant.

To quote Shandler: “Note the absence of earned runs. No matter how many runs a pitcher allows, if he scores high on the PQS scale, he has hurled a good game in terms of his base skills. The number of runs allowed – a function of not only the pitcher’s ability but that of his bullpen and defense – will tend to even out over time.”

Basically, if you’re hurling a two-hit shutout or giving up three runs while striking out 11 in seven innings pitched, you’ve thrown an excellent game. If you get yanked after allowing seven runs on five hits in half an inning, or get pulled after the 5th inning after allowing 6 runs on 11 hits, you sucked. And your PQS score will show it.

So, how did the Metro Stars staff do in the first month-plus of the season? Here are the PQS scores for each Mumbai starter so far:

Armando Figueroa: 3; 4; 2; 4; 2* (injured while pitching, out five weeks).
Salvador Gonzáles: 4; 2; 4; 1; 0; 0; 2.
León González: 4; 4; 1.
Rafael Cruz: 2; 0.
Takeshi Tanaka: 3; 1; 0; 1; 4; 4; 2.
Denilde Trovisquiera: 0; 5; 4; 3; 2; 3.
Mike Manning: 2; 5; 0; 0; 2; 2.

So, what can we learn from these scores? Several things:

• Before he got hurt, Figueroa was the team’s most consistent starter.
• Despite the Bancroft “Pitcher of the Month” award and celebratory elephant ride around the Ballpark of Mumbai, Trovisquiera has not exactly dominated. He’s been decent, but he ain’t the UMEBA version of Steve Nebraska yet.
• León González, a setup guy in the bullpen right now, might merit a longer look in the rotation.
• Mike Manning might merit a shorter look.

PQS isn’t a revolutionary stat, but it is useful for tracking how a team’s starters are doing game to game.

If you ask nice, I’ll check back in on them periodically.

And if you ask real nice, I’ll do a follow-up study on Pure Quality Relief scores.

But for now, see ya!

[RonCo]

Very cool, he says, asking nicely.

[HoosierVic]

Alvin’s pretty flaky, but I suspect he’ll accommodate ...

[Ted]

THis is neat. Makes me want to look for my own team.

[Lane]

Nice. Not sure I'd heard of this before.

[usnspecialist]

Nice. Not sure I'd heard of this before.

I agree on both counts.

[HoosierVic]

Shandler is best known as a Fantasy Baseball guru, although he does a lot of straight sabremetric research, too. He publishes an annual book called the Baseball Forecaster, and PQS was introduced in its original formulation back in the 2002 edition, I think. An updated version came out a couple of years ago, and there’s a similar stat for relief pitchers that’s been around awhile, too. I’ve used them both in another league (PEBA) and keep track of the scores in a little notebook - I’ve found them both very useful. I’ll have “Alvin” write up PQR in the next day or two, so you can see how to figure it.