The Ray Searage Effect

Much has been made of Ray Searage, and his ability to get the most out of Pitchers. In April Jeff Sullivan wrote an article on FanGraphs about Ray Searage’s work on Arquimedes Caminero and his rise in fastball velocity. Another article was written on Rant Sports last October about how the Pirates are lucky that Searage has not been offered a manager’s job due to his proven ability to get the best out of his pitchers. There have definitely been numerous examples of pitchers who have improved once they got to Pittsburgh, including Burnett, Liriano, Volquez, Worley, Caminero (as mentioned in Sullivan’s article) and this year J.A. Happ. Happ was the pitcher who motivated me to do this article, since he has had so much success after coming over from Seattle, with another great outing last Friday night against the Cardinals. With all these examples of pitchers improving on the Pirates, it seemed like there might be something here that could be quantified.

cFIP

I wanted to use Jonathan Judge’s new statistic cFIP (FIP in Context) to quantify the pitchers’ success, since it adjusts for ballpark, league, defense and many other things, including opposition quality which many other statistics fail to do. cFIP, much like FIP-, is set to a scale on which 100 is average, and 100 – x means the player was x% above average. If a player is x above 100, they would be x% below average (For example, a cFIP of 90 would be 10% above average, and a 110 would be 10% below average). This stat will account for almost any advantage you can think of when switching teams, so whether it was a hitters or pitchers park, strong or weak division, it should not matter. Not only that, but this article by Judge for the Hardball Times shows how cFIP is better than pretty much every alternative in predicting future performance, and shows what the player’s true-talent level is. If there is a consistent improvement in cFIP for these pitchers, it would point to a change in skill which could be attributed to Searage. On the other hand, if the cFIP did not seem to change considerably, then it would be more likely that either the Pirates were good at finding players who had an unlucky season (which cFIP can show) the year before and the uptick in success could be them preforming at their true-talent level. Either that or as always possible, the Pirates could just be getting lucky. Of course this could also be the case, if the pitchers did see an increase in cFIP.

The Process

First, I found all the pitchers who played one full season with the Pirates and one full season not with the Pirates in consecutive seasons. I grouped them based on whether or not they played with the Pirates on the first of the two seasons. Their Pirates season had to occur in 2011 or later, since that was Searage’s first full season as pitching coach. I limited the group to just starting pitchers who had started at least 10 games both seasons. I found the players cFIP on Baseball Prospectus and put it in an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, players like Happ who switched to the Pirates mid-season could not be included, since cFIP was not recorded for players before and after they were traded, and only for the full season of data. I found the difference in cFIP between the Pirate and non-Pirate seasons (first season minus the second season), and used that to find a weighted difference based on their total games started between the two seasons (cFIP Difference * Games Started). I then averaged all players weighted differences in the group, to get the averaged weighted difference. For example, let’s say pitcher A has 50 total games started with a cFIP difference of 4 and pitcher B has 25 games and a difference of -6. The weighted average would be pitcher A’s games * difference + Pitcher B’s games * difference all divided by total games (You could add in a third, fourth, fifth pitcher and so on). This would turn out to be (4*50) + (-6*25) / (50+25) = 50/75, which is a 2/3% improvement.

Results

Here are the two tables of results with the weighted average difference in the bottom right corner.

Pitchers Joining the Pirates

Name	Year	Team	GS	cFIP	Total GS	Weighted Net cFIP	Average cFIP Improvement
A.J. Burnett	2011	NYA	32	102
A.J. Burnett	2012	PIT	31	97	63	315
A.J. Burnett	2014	PHI	34	113
A.J. Burnett	2015	PIT	21	95	55	990
Edinson Volquez	2013	TOT	32	112
Edinson Volquez	2014	PIT	31	111	63	63
Francisco Liriano	2012	TOT	28	92
Francisco Liriano	2013	PIT	26	84	54	432
Kevin Correia	2010	SDN	26	117
Kevin Correia	2011	PIT	26	122	52	-260
Vance Worley	2013	MIN	10	124
Vance Worley	2014	PIT	17	101	27	621
Total					196	856	4.37

Pitchers Leaving the Pirates

Name	Year	Team	GS	cFIP	Total GS	Weighted Net cFIP	Average cFIP Improvement
A.J. Burnett	2013	PIT	30	81
A.J. Burnett	2014	PHI	34	113	64	-2048
Edinson Volquez	2014	PIT	31	111
Edinson Volquez	2015	KCA	26	105	57	342
Erik Bedard	2012	PIT	24	100
Erik Bedard	2013	HOU	26	102	50	-100
Kevin Correia	2012	PIT	28	123
Kevin Correia	2013	MIN	31	116	59	413
Paul Maholm	2011	PIT	26	106
Paul Maholm	2012	TOT	31	105	57	57
Total					287	-1336	-4.66

As the tables show, when pitchers joined the Pirates, they gained a little more 4% on the league, but when pitchers left, they lost that 4% and even a tiny bit more. If these results were accurate, it would seem that the Pirates helped their pitchers in a way that could not be attributed to anything on the field, such as defense, since that is accounted for in cFIP. It could have to do with some sort of chemistry or some other sort of edge, that didn’t stay with them when they left. One hypothesis is that it could be attributed to the fact that they are one of the few teams to have a clubhouse traveling statistician who relays information to the players from the front office. I decided to take a little bit further look at these tables, however, and I found some other interesting results.

In the first table, the only pitcher to pitch on the Pirates in 2011 was Kevin Correia. This was Ray Searage’s first year as pitching coach, and you could easily say that he was still learning on the job, and that if he was giving some sort of edge, he had not mastered his skills yet. If you take out players who pitched for the Pirates in 2011, here is the new table.

Pitchers Joining the Pirates 2012-2015

Name	Year	Team	GS	cFIP	Total GS	Weighted Net cFIP	Average cFIP Improvement
A.J. Burnett	2011	NYA	32	102
A.J. Burnett	2012	PIT	31	97	63	315
A.J. Burnett	2014	PHI	34	113
A.J. Burnett	2015	PIT	21	95	55	990
Edinson Volquez	2013	TOT	32	112
Edinson Volquez	2014	PIT	31	111	63	63
Francisco Liriano	2012	TOT	28	92
Francisco Liriano	2013	PIT	26	84	54	432
Vance Worley	2013	MIN	10	124
Vance Worley	2014	PIT	17	101	27	621
Total					144	1116	7.75

You can see that the results are changed pretty dramatically, as now pitchers are improving by about 8% compared to the average pitcher. This is very significant, and we will get back to it later. Another change you could make to the Leaving Pitchers table is to take out Burnett, who seems to be an outlier (-2048 cFIP). This could lead to some interesting results, although there isn’t as much of a reason to take him out. After removing Burnett, as well as Maholm who pitched for the Pirates in 2011, you are left with only 3 players, but here are the results.

Pitchers Leaving the Pirates 2012-2015 (minus Burnett)

Name	Year	Team	GS	cFIP	Total GS	Weighted Net cFIP	Average cFIP Improvement
Edinson Volquez	2014	PIT	31	111
Edinson Volquez	2015	KCA	26	105	57	342
Erik Bedard	2012	PIT	24	100
Erik Bedard	2013	HOU	26	102	50	-100
Kevin Correia	2012	PIT	28	123
Kevin Correia	2013	MIN	31	116	59	413
Total					166	655	3.95

This time the results change even more significantly then before, as now pitchers improve by 4% on the league when they leave the Pirates. I am not suggesting that you can just remove Burnett from this list, as he definitely counts, but the fact that the results do a 180 reversal by removing one player (Maholm would have made the pitchers improve even more) shows two things. 1) That the data isn’t very conclusive, but also 2) that it looks like there is not much of a trend.

Putting this new information together, you can come to another conclusion. It seems recently that pitchers improve rather significantly when they come to the Pirates, but there isn’t much evidence they regress back to their original performance when they leave. This points directly to the option that Ray Searage is improving these players in ways that stick with them once they leave. There is by no means conclusive evidence with such a small data set and there are many other possible hypotheses, but by weeding through this data, it certainly looks like a strong possibility. The Pirates definitely should be thrilled that Searage has not gotten a job as a manager, even though he may provide more of an advantage as a pitching coach, where he can focus solely on helping his pitchers. If he keeps this up however, and a bigger sample size of data backs up these results, you can bet that he will at least get some interviews for a manager’s job.

Questions or comments are much appreciated.