In this post on measuring a player’s scrappiness, commenter Eric Garcia said “Next up, measuring a pitchers’ craftiness.” I liked this idea and thought I would give it a shot. Of course, the first problem is deciding what makes a pitcher “crafty”. Eric Garcia gave his suggestions and we will look at them eventually. I, however, thought about pitchers that came to my mind when the word “crafty” is used and looked at what they had in common. Generally, they do not have an overpowering fastball and don’t throw it that often. They usually don’t have that many strikeouts, but also don’t walk that many, so they still have a decent WHIP. The perception is that they are good at pitching out of jams, either by inducing ground-ball double plays or popups.

There were 81 pitchers that qualified for the ERA title in 2013. I found the average of this group in four categories: fastball velocity, strikeout percentage, WHIP, and LOB%. For each player I calculated how many standard deviations from the mean they were in each of these categories. I then summed these up (using the negatives for fastball velocity, strikeout percentage, and WHIP). Though “crafty” often seems to be used as a synonym for “left-handed”, I feel that you should be able to be crafty with either hand, so I did not use handedness at all. I considered using fastball percentage instead of velocity, but felt velocity better captured what we are looking for. Pitchers I think of as crafty seem to often outperform their FIP, so I considered using ERA-FIP, but felt that since the outperformance is often the result of a low strikeout rate and generally good WHIP, that it was already taken into account. The numbers are not league adjusted, so National League pitchers get a slight advantage.  So, using these criteria, here are the 2013 leaders in craftiness:

Considering the model used here, Bronson Arroyo being on top is not really a surprise (though I really thought Dickey would probably wind up on top and he would have easily if I had used fastball percentage instead of fastball velocity).  Now some people might protest that a low strikeout rate should not be required.  They would argue that it is certainly possible that a pitcher might still be considered crafty and have a fair number of strikeouts.  If we remove the strikeout percentage from the stat, we get the following:

When the poster Eric Garcia suggested this, his idea of a crafty pitcher was someone with a low velocity, high ERA, and a decent number of wins.   If we use those criteria and the same methodology, we come up with the following list:

I doubt these numbers have any real value and are just presented here for entertainment.  What do you think makes a pitcher crafty?  Let me know in the comments.