Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
How is a season an arbitrary variance?
A month is. A series is. A season absolutely isn't. With every off-season, an aging player's body bounces back a little differently. A younger player learns something a little different.
A season is the least 'arbitrary variance' possible, especially when noting declines. Besides, you act as though there is random chance at work in baseball when you cite the gamblers fallacy. If you honestly believe that, then there's simply no point in the conversation because it tells me you actually know little about BABIP apart from what the acronym stands for. It's not like there's a 50/50 shot of Franklin getting owned everytime out. Nor is it random that the guy has been fairly successful for 4 straight seasons.
When he does it every season for 4 straight and you still just call it luck, you're essentially arguing that we should play baseball via strat-o-matic. The guy gets outs, period. He has for his entire Cardinal career.
And like I said - go ahead and call it appearances. The guy didn't just get lucky for 260 appearances.
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I said a season is an arbitrary designation, not an arbitrary variance.
The gambler's fallacy was related to aberrational seasons, it had nothing to do with individual AB's. You're either trying to purposely mischaracterize what I said, or you didn't understand it. So here it is again:
If a guy has two aberrational years and 8 that fall within a normal range, will the two never coincide back to back? He could just as easily have aberration seasons in years 1 and 10 as he could in years 8 and 9. If 5 is the aberration on the roulette wheel, and it hits, is it any less likely to hit on the next turn? No.
He hasn't done it for four straight seasons. If he had, your argument would hold water, but it doesn't.
This is a guy who put up BABIP's consistently in the .290 range before coming to St. Louis. His numbers dropped precipitously the first year in St. Louis, went above .300 in 2008, then dropped back down the next two years.
What you posited is that Franklin is having physical decline catch up to him, and that does have element of truth to it, but it's not manifesting itself in the ways you claim--his velocity is not down, and his walk rate is not dramatically up. It's up drastically in comparison to 2010, but it's only up slightly from 2008 or 2009.
If we believe that Franklin really was as good as the last two years, which one is the outlier:
2008: 3.43
2009: 3.59
2010: 1.38
2011: 3.86
Those are his walk rates over the last four years
Here are his Groundball %s:
2008: 42.7%
2009: 45.6%
2010: 44.7%
2011: 45.0%
We have a groundball pitcher who is not having a demonstrably worse year in comparison to either his walk rates, groundball rates, line drive percentage, or his velocity.
So, why is he all of a sudden worse?
Some of it could be due to worse defense behind him, which is unquestionably true, but a lot of it is also bad luck, which is important, because this is a period of correction for him. Not only is he being quite unlucky in this small sample size, there aren't any other metrics that show a demonstrable decline in his stuff.
Fastball velocity is identical, as it is on all other pitches. I don't know about movement on said pitches, but at the very least, his control of those pitches isn't greatly worse. One of the things that could lead to the slightly increased walk rate in comparison to '08 and '09 is the fact that he's just throwing his fastball, the pitch you most often throw for strikes, less often.
I realize this is the internet, so nuance is the devil, but let's inject a little here, because that's what my stance was all about.
Is Ryan Franklin the 2002 version of BK Kim? No, but neither was he really the guy making All-Star appearances in 2009. The truth, as it quite often does, lies somewhere in between.
He's a guy who can give you an ERA of around 4 in middle relief appearances, not a guy who is going to give you the ERA of 2.70 in the highest leverage situations.