I wanted to reply on a fanpost to a comment from SF1 in the Balfour thread. The comment reads:

We agree on Balfour and his need for a fast start

I can only hope i’m wrong, but what really concerns me is his command issues

Only ’08 saw a really good K/BB ratio in his entire career

If his command doesn’t return, those HRs will once again be with men on base and catastrophic results

I wish him and the Rays the best

by sternfan1 on Mar 25, 2010 5:31 AM PDT reply actions   0 recs

There are two points I want to address. 2008 featured a 2.22 FIP for Balfour and an elite K/BB of 3.42 for a pitcher who struck out over 12 per nine.  Why do I say its elite? Below is the 3 year top 10 relief pitchers in MLB based on K/9:

As you can see only Broxton, Papelbon, and Soriano (yay!) were able to eclipse a K/BB of 3 over a 3 year period. Strikeout pitchers are tough to put the ball in play against leading to drawn out counts. There's a pretty good discussion going on at the Book Blog on K:BB vs. K-BB. It's worth at least a glance over and through the comments.

The second issue I want to touch on is the notion that he wasn't unlucky with the multi-run home run give up. The following is a table of the number of batters Balfour faced with the bases empty, one man on, two men on, and the bases loaded.

So 83% of Balfour's home runs allowed came in a base state that comprised just 18.7% of Balfour's total batters faced. Assuming each batter has an equal chance to hit a home run regardless of the base state (this is a  bold assumption), we would have expected the average home run to amount to 1.67 runs off Balfour in 2009. The reality was that the average home run was nearly a full run higher at 2.67 runs. Walks or no walks, high BABIP or low BABIP, this distribution amounts to very bad luck.