Strasburg’s Debut vs. 29 Other Clubs

What if Stephen Strasburg had debuted against a team that can actually hit? In what should strike anyone as a ridiculous criticism, there have been a few people to point out that Strasburg didn’t exactly face a “real” major league line up in his record breaking major league debut. (A friend of mine joked that he made his 7th AAA start on Tuesday.) Yes–record breaking. I’ll add to Jack Moore’s point: Since 1920, only there have been only 67 games in which a  pitcher has struck out 14 or more batters and walked none. Strasburg’s outing was noteworthy because his is the only one in which that happened with 24 or fewer batters faced. Given that only 66 other pitchers have ever done something like what Strasburg did in his debut, the level of the team he faced seems like a pretty trivial point. This was dominance like we rarely ever see.

Nevertheless, what if Strasburg had faced a “real” line up in his debut? One of the beauties of sabermetrics is that we get to have this argument with math. If, against a real line up, you think he would have looked ordinary and I think he would have looked pretty amazing, we can set aside arbitrary opinions, lay out some points of agreement, and use our calculators to answer the question. Well, that’s a stretch. But at least we can get a sense of the significance that the Pittsburgh lineup made.

Strasburg was obviously on last night. Did he bring his best stuff? Maybe. What we saw last night wasn’t his true talent level. Nobody is that good consistently. Let’s call the talent level Strasburg brought to his debut his instantaneous talent level. That instantaneous talent level faced was in the run scoring environment that the Pittsburg Pirates create. The comination of the two was a .194 wOBA.  Sabermetrics gives us a tool for calculating match-ups known as  a log5 calculation. If we assume that a .298 wOBA is the Buc’s real talent level, we can isolate Strasburg’s instantanous talent level and give the most rational possible answer to the question “what if he’d faced a real line up?”

I’ll cut to the chase and save you some algebra: his instantaneous wOBA-against was .218.

Going back to our log5 calculations, that means the Yankees, if they brought their MLB leading .361 wOBA to face Strasburg last night would have wOBA’d .248. That’s something like the Astros without Lance Berkman or Hunter Pence.

Here’s the same calculation for every other team in the league.

Yankees		0.243
Red Sox		0.240
Reds		0.234
Brewers		0.227
Tigers		0.226
Twins		0.225
Blue Jays	0.223
Rays		0.223
Braves		0.222
D-backs		0.220
Rangers		0.219
Cardinals	0.219
Phillies	0.219
Rockies		0.219
Royals		0.217
Nationals	0.216
Dodgers		0.216
Cubs		0.215
Marlins		0.213
Mets		0.213
Angels		0.212
Giants		0.212
White Sox	0.210
Athletics	0.210
Padres		0.202
Indians		0.202
Orioles		0.196
Mariners	0.195
Pirates		0.194
Astros		0.182

Anyway, we’ll never know what St. Stephen would have looked like against one of 29 other clubs on June 8th, 2010. That’s not the point. The point is that we witnessed one of the great pitching performances in the history of baseball. It was dominance. This post sheds a little light on what dominance means.