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Jeff Niemann Mr. Consistently Inconsistently Consistent

As many of you are aware there have been a couple of posts lately pertaining to the issue of pitching and volatility.

I initially took a look at it and one of the conclusions that I found was Jeff Niemann was the consistent, albeit definitely not the best, pitcher on staff

Sandy Kazmir then took their previous work a step further and estimated wins based upon pitcher volatility combined with run distribution (in the form of "FIH)

Those articles can be found here: Intro to Volatility and Updated Deserved Wins

Those articles as well as Niemann’s recent performance raised my interest into Mr. Niemann. If you browse around DRaysBay, The Heater, talk radio, and other outlets you’ll see quite a bit of praise on Niemann. Of course the level of knowledge is vastly different based upon the source, but its exists nonetheless. Some of the praise that you’ll hear is that Niemann is improving, he is consistent, one of our best pitchers, etc.

It is very easy to see why Niemann’s 2009 is perceived the way it is. All you have to do is look at the histogram of earned runs. ER is still a popular mainstream metric although it is obviously very flawed. He has given up 3 earned runs or less in 80% of his starts. Oh by the way he is leading the team in wins. For the public that is excellent.

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Does the perception equal the reality? And if so is the reality sustainable?

Earned runs just do not tell the whole story. Lets see if the reality matches using FIP. Firstly lets look at a good and interesting comparable to Niemann, Rick Porcello. As you can see by just looking at the graph Niemann has been more consistent than Porcello even using FIP. I also added a trendline for Niemann’s starts and as we can see his FIP is trending downward. That again is excellent.

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via lh5.ggpht.com

Now lets really see if the reality matches the perception. I took a sample of a good handful of pitchers, as well as the 2009 Rays starters and measured their volatility. Niemann rates very well on this scale as he is 5th out of 22.. Niemann’s 1.795 Standard Deviation is in fact closer to the leader of this sample, Adam Wainwright at 1.60 than it is to the 6th most consistent at 2.01. As you can see Niemann does have a lower volatility than Porcello here confirming out suspicions founded in the previous graph. It appears the perception may be the reality.

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On the other hand we see a few Rays trailing at the back of the group. Hopefully they can pick it up and become more consistent.

Out of this sample Niemann’s average start posts a FIP of 4.79 which puts him 14th out of 22 in this group. His "yearly" FIP on fangraphs is 4.69. I’ve been doing a bit of research on looking at volatility and FIP in this manner and I have found a correlation (looking at 2006/2007/2008/some 2009) of around ~.6-.7. In other words this means as the average FIP per start raises so does the volatility. Note this exercise is done for around 15 starts for each of these 22 so the sample size will have to bear out. What I’ve seen so far (in looking at 06/07/08/09 is that there is certainly a fair amount of year over year change in volatility for pitchers; however, generally there appears to be distinct ranges for pitchers. Some pitchers certainly seem more consistent than others when looking..

Either way this is the first anomaly for Niemann. Medium to high average FIP per start pitchers just cannot seem to sustain this low volatility. Niemann in fact has the highest spread between average FIP by start and volatility in this sample. This could be a bad sign in the future.

The next stage is to break down Niemann’s FIP to see what is really driving his consistent numbers. In this analysis we are just going to look at the basic components of FIP: HR, IP, K, BB. There has been some analysis on this site that has looked at how Niemann may improve those metrics. One way would be to throw more curves. However here we are just going to look at how those counting stats change over time by start.

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via lh4.ggpht.com

Unfortunately we cannot take too much out of this graph. However it does begin to paint the picture that Niemann has in fact been all over the map (mainly IP) rather than the extremely consistent pitcher his start by start ER and FIP show. To further break this down we are going to look at the rates.

I decided to compare Niemann to Mr. Big Game James. I found this compelling because we all love Shields, think Shields is a great pitcher, he is a Ray, we think of him as consistent and yet he in fact has had higher volatility than Niemann. So let’s see how real that difference is or if it has been just a product of luck.

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Out of everything in this post this is by far the most important. I’ve presented the data in both table and graph form. As you can see Shields has in fact been more consistent on a per start basis on each component than Niemann other than HRs (which Niemann is due for a regression). Shields has also flat out been better. The consistency and excellence of Shields over Niemann isn’t even close. Of course this Shields being better isn’t unexpected, but it does help us reach some not so great conclusions about Jeff.

This leads us to why Niemann has actually posted more consistent FIPs than Shields. The answer is simply luck. It appears that Niemann has little control over things like K, walks, or even the innings he pitches. He has simply been getting a "good combination" of those in each start equaling roughly the same FIP. However since each metric is very volatile it is only a matter of time before he has a "bad combination" such as high walks, low k’s, and low innings.

I’ll sum up with some pro’s and con’s

Pro’s:

  1. Niemann’s FIP by start is trending downward
  2. 80% of Niemann’s starts have resulted in 3ER or less; 87% of 4 ER or less
  3. He has not given up a home run in his last 6 starts
  4. James Shields is rock solid. You know exactly what you are getting out of him every single start.

Con’s:

  1. Niemann has been wildly inconsistent with his strikeouts, walks and innings pitched. It is really only a stroke of luck that he hasn’t produced wildly inconsistent (and bad) FIPs because of it.
  2. His HR rate is due for a regression
  3. Pitchers with high average per start FIP typically cannot sustain this low volatility
  4. Sonny and Kaz haven’t been as bad as what people think (see my previous and Sandy Kazmir’s work), but wow they’ve been embarrassing as a whole. To have that type of volatility you really have to be all over the map.
  5. We really have no idea what we are getting when Niemann takes the hill. He can give us a few innings or a complete game. He can give us literally 0 strikeouts and walks or he can do than at a rate of one per inning. The range is enormous and Niemann must be able to gain some consistency within his performance to become a reliable starter.

Hopefully Hickey and the crew can teach Niemann some new tricks in order to be consistent. Or perhaps they should take RJ’s advice and throw more breaking pitches. Or perhaps it will just take a bit more maturing and experience. However if all else fails it is very likely Niemann could be excellent trade bait at the end of this year. His "mainstream" numbers will be very good given that he is a young pitcher, but his underlying numbers may not.

This post was written by a member of the DRaysBay community and does not necessarily express the views or opinions of DRaysBay staff.

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