Andrew Miller
Baseball Prospectus Goes All Ugueto Effect on Us
Submitted by Rogers Reilly on Tue, 02/24/2009 - 18:00(note: this is a pay link- I'm just tagging it "Andrew Miller" because the rest of the breakout pitchers aren't revealed by the teaser.)
I don't care so much about their analysis--I don't believe much in using stats to pick breakout pitchers, beyond the basics--but listen to this paragraph:
"The primary difficulty is that the up-and-down nature of most pitching careers means that pitchers of any age might post high Breakout Rates, particularly when their recent performance includes injury-related ineffectiveness. Among the small handful of pitchers with at least a 30 percent rate are veterans Randy Johnson, A.J. Burnett, Jeremy Bonderman and Ervin Santana, and that's after weeding out the small workloads (either due to injury-related attrition or to relief roles) and Ugueto Effect equivalents. Even after eliminating the noise, the Breakout Rates among our meaningful set of hurlers wind up being about half those shown by the hitters."
You gotta love dropping "Ugueto Effect" without explanation.
