Starting pitchers in their last inning of the game

In my previous post I compared the FIP for starting pitchers in their final inning of the game to the FIP of their team's bullpen, and found that they're being left in the game too long. Today I'm just going to present three tables that I created from the R code used to make that post. I limited the data to the AL in 2009 in the previous post because the bullpen data had to be collated manually, but no such barrier exists this time, so I used both the AL and NL from 2002-2009, limiting the data to pitchers who started at least 50 games over that time.

This first table looks at pitchers who had the most significant drop-off (all of them had p-values less than 10^(-6)) from their non-final inning numbers to their final inning numbers. 233 of the 241 of the pitchers in the sample had a significant drop-off (p-values less than 0.05), but these were the most severe. I don't know how much this difference really means because the important number for managerial decisions is the late FIP, but many of these guys are good pitchers, and are probably pitching in close games pretty often (unlike somebody who has a really high FIP throughout the game), and their team would benefit if the manager got them out one inning early. Of course knowing when the pitcher is going to start getting knocked around in a given game is impossible - sometimes they might be getting pulled in the 8th, other times in the 7th, etc. However it seems managers should be extra aware about these pitchers, and get them out of the game as soon as they're showing even a slight decrease in velocity.

pitcher	early FIP	late FIP
Burnett, A.J.	3.351	5.907
Byrd, Paul	4.182	7.196
Fogg, Josh	4.529	8.090
Garland, John	4.210	7.301
Hernandez, Livan	4.039	6.670
Lackey, John	3.538	5.755
Lohse, Kyle	4.332	7.152
Meche, Gil	3.940	6.950
Ortiz, Russ	4.183	7.639
Pavano, Carl	3.536	7.049
Perez, Oliver	4.176	7.506
Robertson, Nate	4.160	7.473
Santana, Johan	2.915	5.337
Silva, Carlos	4.143	7.384
Trachsel, Steve	4.444	7.597
Wakefield, Tim	4.149	7.193

This table is less interesting, but these were the only eight pitchers who didn't have a significant last inning FIP increase.

pitcher	early FIP	late FIP	p-value
Williams, David	5.131	6.063	0.187
Smoltz, John	3.114	3.827	0.089
Litsch, Jesse	4.510	5.820	0.085
Ryan, Brendan	4.148	5.208	0.073
Kuroda, Hiroki	3.400	4.561	0.071
Santos, Victor	4.556	5.713	0.066
Galarraga, Armando	4.760	6.435	0.056
Hammel, Jason	3.976	5.410	0.050

The final table shows the nine pitchers who had a last inning FIP over 9.00. I don't think any of them are still starting games. Rick Reed had a good career and my data set just caught the tail end of it. Most have been tried as relief pitchers, and Darren Oliver has actually become a pretty good one.

player	early FIP	late FIP
James, Chuck	4.240	10.827
McClung, Seth	4.669	10.280
Oliver, Darren	5.053	9.661
Kinney, Matt	4.037	9.640
Waechter, Doug	4.830	9.609
Reed, Rick	3.531	9.534
Helling, Rick	4.162	9.433
Owings, Micah	4.872	9.243
Mays, Joe	4.595	9.032

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at "www.retrosheet.org".