The Reading Mirage: Pitching Overview

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Yesterday we took a look at the hitting trends as hitters progress through Reading on the way to AAA.  The goal today is to give a much shorter overview for pitching stats.  There are more gaps in this group of players, and it is further muddied by the combination of starters and reliever.  Additionally the group as a whole is fairly week due to trades and burnout before reaching AA.

For this study we followed Jon Pettibone, Kyle Kendrick, Trevor May, Vance Worley, Phillippe Aumont, Jake Diekman, Justin De Fratus, J. A. Happ, Michael Stutes, B.J. Rosenberg, Tyler Cloyd, Austin Hyatt, Jesse Biddle, Carlos Carrasco, JC Ramirez, David Buchanan, Adam Morgan, and Joe Savery.  For the stats we are looking mostly at fielding independent statistics, so BB/9, K/9, HR/9, and FIP. 

So if we average out the statistics this is what we get across the three levels:

IP BB/9 K/9 HR/9 BABIP ERA FIP
Clearwater 89.15 2.92 8.63 0.70 0.286 3.13 3.54
Reading 97.09 3.49 8.42 0.72 0.296 3.59 3.80
Lehigh Valley 69.08 3.70 8.16 0.72 0.300 3.53 3.78

As a whole we see pitchers decline statistically across all levels, with a very slight ERA and FIP uptick in Reading.

Now this seems to disprove the idea that Reading is just a horrible place to pitch and that in general pitching just gets harder and harder to do.  On a whole I think this is true, but more than hitting I expect individuals to make large leaps as they advance.

The other issue I have with the data is the sample group.  The list is heavy on college pitchers with pedestrian stuff.  They were able to handle younger inexperienced hitters at lower levels before running into problems against hitters they couldn’t get out.  Some of this is Phillies developing, the other is the large quantities of trades that shipped out upside prospect pitchers, either way the quality is lacking in terms of upside.

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About Matt Winkelman

Matt is originally from Mt. Holly, NJ, but after a 4 year side track to Cleveland for college he now resides in Madison, WI. His work has previously appeared on Phuture Phillies and The Good Phight. You can read his work at Phillies Minor Thoughts

7 thoughts on “The Reading Mirage: Pitching Overview”

  1. This goes counter to several of your conclusions from the article on hitters. HR did not really increase at Reading and did not decline going from Reading to Allentown. Better fielding at the higher levels did not cause BABIP to decline. Under the hitters section, you also concluded that the larger Allentown park allows pitchers to go after hitters, leading to the observed decline in walk rates. However, our hitters walk more at AAA than at AA.

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  3. Thanks for your opinion Matt. You need a larger data set and much more thinking through the many variables that influence outcomes at Reading. I’m happy you addressed the issue. It is an area that should be studied.

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  4. Here are some minor league park factors:
    http://minorleaguecentral.com/parkfactors

    For our main parks (4 numbers are R/H/2B/HR park factors):

    LKW: 87 | 96 | 94 | 72
    CLW: 97 | 97 | 87 | 111
    REA: 106 | 102 | 91 | 128
    LHV: 94 | 99 | 93 | 86

    The largest effect seems to be on homers. All our main parks have a big effect on HRs one way or another. Important to keep in mind.

    (As a side note, I really don’t understand why teams don’t make more of an effort to modify their parks so they play fairly neutrally).

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    1. I should note that those numbers are from 2013, and they are not entirely stable by year. For instance, here are the HR park factors for 2012 from the same website:

      LKW: 77
      CLW: 111
      REA: 117
      LHV: 105

      LKW and CLW are about the same, but a pretty large change for REA, and LHV is completely different.

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