KevinGregg

This year is a different story. Robbie Ray is going to have to go off for us to have much of a chance, and thankfully it looks like he's up for the challenge

our payroll is way more than open enough to support 30M in decent pitching depth AND a Trevor Bauer. We need to have 9 decent starters to make it through the season next year so guys like Roark will still have value. Come the playoffs next year hopefully we have Ryu and Pearson as our 1-2 and some kind of Trevor Bauer-esque signing (or trade??) as our 3rd option so dudes like Ray and Walker don't have to be relied on so heavily until/unless they actually prove themselves.

I remember Bengie molina and Gregg Zaun being good back in like 2006

Hopefully

I think that we need to acquire a bona-fide #2 or better this off-season. Robbie Ray would be a nice buy low candidate for sure in addition to a bigger splash. I am saying that at this point Robbie looks like the best option for our #2 starter this year.

Possibly, time will tell. I haven't even caught up to live yet (still in the top of the 3rd) but he looks good to me so far. Edit: in the 5th now, Take him out before the 3rd time through the order like everyone else and he is at 78 pitches 1 ER 4.1 IP. Harper smoked a middle middle fastball his 3rd time up after a walk on a questionable pitch to Cutch. Then 2 singles which score as inherited runners. This kind of sequencing luck is exactly why current ERA is bad at predicting future ERA Honestly the worst thing that could have happened would have been for Ray to pitch 7 shutout innings and me to come out way later and suggest that he's an Ace when everyone already knows. Note: I rushed out the post so it would be out before the game started (and it was still 30 minutes late..) and I spent the last 2 hours coming back to edit the original post to make it look perfect. I think it reads much better now! (apologies to those who read version 1.0) Edit 2: reposted because the board deleted this comment when I tried to edit it in mobile mode. Recommendation: never use mobile mode

this took me forever, please take a look friends: https://www.bluejaysmessageboard.com/threads/9479-Robbie-Ray-How-Atkins-acquired-an-Ace

Ever since we acquired Robbie Ray I have been thinking he looks pretty good. Like "no way we acquired this guy for Travis Bergen" good. His numbers haven't been amazing since we got him (4.38 ERA, 5.55 FIP, 4.91 xFIP) but the living room scout in me sees a ton of potential in him. Just a note to start off, however, which I didn't realize at first: his ERA as a Jay has actually been below league average which is 4.52 this year. His command isn't really that bad and his stuff is electric. I believe that this guy is different from Roark, Anderson, and Walker. My hypothesis is that he looks like a great pitcher who will substantially lower that 4.38 Blue Jays ERA moving forward. But the reality is we did acquire him for Bergen, so the industry did not value him. And clearly his numbers were terrible (7.84 ERA, 7.29 FIP, 6.47 xFIP) - he wasn't pitching well at all prior to the trade, so what gives? What am I seeing that wasn't there with Arizona? I went looking for something that has changed with Robbie since he came over to the Jays and it didn't take me long. Turns out that at the start of this season, he decided to stop throwing like David Price and start throwing like a 15 year old girl for some reason: 15 year old girl: (watch the catcher) But how can we know if he is for real? It is just three appearances so far (today's start was not included), that is too small of a sample size right? Wrong! It has been 7 years since I first learned about the wonderful concept of pitch based ERA estimators such as TIPS. This beautiful stat has just 3 inputs: o-swing%, swStr%, and foul%. It doesn't use IP as an input like FIP or xFIP (IP are obviously not independent of defense unless you get every out in the inning via strikeout). Best of all, in a sample of just a few hundred pitches you have a stat that predicts future ERA better than any of the other major players including more complex stats like SIERA. I was sure that this new idea would revolutionize pitching analysis and discussion, yet here we are 7 years later and we as baseball fans really haven't moved very far past FIP (just look at the start of my post). There was a good post here about the shortcomings of DIPS and I think the clear response should be a shift towards using better ERA estimators in our discussions. So, using TIPS I will predict Robbie Ray's future success using only the 238 pitches he has thrown so far as a Blue Jay. Spoiler: he is probably gonna be really good. Warning: Math - feel free to skip to the next dotted line for the conclusion ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Is 238 pitches really enough? In this post it says around 250 pitches is a good sample. I can't find any other references to a stabilization point, just several comments that mention it does stabilize very fast. In many blog posts regarding TIPS, its creator (our boy jFaS) would set the cutoff to 50 pitches. It would be interesting to dive into the math on when TIPS really stabilizes, but for now I will say that since jFaS said around 250 pitches is a good sample we will just trust him that 238 is close enough. Unfortunately TIPS is kind of annoying to calculate because by definition one of the components is not searchable on fangraphs: I used Statcast data rather than pitchFX data for classifying Robbie Ray's pitches and for calculating the league average foul% since I couldn't find a reliable source of pitchFX data. jFaS also did this at times and comments on this practice here, mentioning that it will result in slightly different o-swing% values because they calculate the size of the strike zone differently. So the first thing I wanted to do was make sure that I was able to replicate the original results using my method and data sources. To do this I just needed to calculate the TIPS constant for 2013, and make sure it is the same as jFaS's original value of 2.57 From the original blog post: 0.696 o-looking league average from fangraphs 0.094 SwStr% league average from fangraphs 3.87 league average era from fangraphs But how to calculate foul%? I have different search terms available on Statcast, I can't get Contacts easily but Fouls and BIP are readily searchable. So using the equation from the original blog post and a bit of algebra: therefore: CONTACTS - BIP = FOULS rearranging: FOULS + BIP = CONTACTS therefore: Foul% = Foul/Contacts substituting: Foul% = FOULS / FOULS + BIP Easy enough from here to run a Statcast search on all pitchers and plug the results into Excel to get total Balls in Play and Total Fouls for all pitchers in 2013 total fouls = 119749 total BIP = 131848 foul% = 0.475955596 This allows us to calculate the 2013 TIPS constant as 2.547086859, which I say is damn near close enough to the original value of 2.57 Moving on now, since we know the method is sound: Using the same logic I calculated the 2020 TIPS constant as 3.499557857, which is way higher than 2013 largely because of the much higher league average ERA 0.696 o-looking league average from fangraphs 0.113 SwStr% league average from fangraphs 0.500376637 foul% league average calculated from Statcast 4.52 league average era from fangraphs All that's left to do is calculate Robbie Ray's TIPS as a Blue Jay using Statcast search. use team = Blue Jays; pitchers = Robbie Ray for fouls use pitch result = foul: 37 total fouls for BIP use included stats = BIP: 36 total BIP Therefore foul% = 37/(36+37)= 0.506849315 for o-looking%, use gameday zones 11 12 13 14 and pitch result = ball, ball in dirt, called strike or hbp: 0.3850 for swinging strike% just use pitch result = swinging strike and swinging strike (blocked): 0.131221719 Final calculation: TIPS = 6.5*O-Looking% - 9.75*SwStr% - 4.8*Foul% + C = 2.5025 - 1.279411765 - 2.432876712 + 3.50 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- As a Blue Jay so far, Robbie Ray's TIPS = 2.29 In conclusion: Ray started the year off by changing his delivery and had some terrible results. He's changed it back to one that actually makes sense, the one he used when he was an Ace. Given that this is such a substantial change, we should limit ourselves to the sample of games where he has been using the new delivery in order to predict his future success. Using the best statistics we have available to analyze the sample size following the delivery change, we can predict Robbie Ray's ERA moving forward to be approximately 2.29 Atkins has most likely found our #2 Starter for the playoffs.

6 to go

5 innings left to score 7 runs, would be an all time great comeback. Go jays go

They were sitting on 90mph down the middle

That might be some kind of human rights violation

Chase Anderson questioning his life choices right now

I wonder who is worse Roark or Anderson

Just leave roark out there for 120 pitches then phantom dl him til next spring

Big 2 game series against the Yankees starts tomorrow

Bong pipe?

His baseball savant page is looking really sad as well. I'm a big believer in the xwOBA and related stats and those do not paint a pretty picture. How much longer do the jays give him? If he continues to suck then it might be prudent to seek an upgrade in the off-season. And I am the biggest Jansen fan out there.

What's FRIAS? I love the idea of TIPS and I wish we saw more analysis using it. Seems like a massive breakthrough that no one ever talks about

Aren't both of these the same person? http://www.breakingblue.ca/author/chris-carruthers/ I didn't know he works for the Jays now, was this common knowledge?

I dunno if Biggio's arm plays at 3rd

Waguspack will be out for Stripling Panik is out for Villar (maybe espinal will be out actually since he has options) SRF out for Ray

these 60 man pools are annoying. So many players to be named later

For Conine, Bergen, the ptbnl for walker and whatever we gave up for Stripling (2 ptbnl). We gave cash for Vogelbach but gor some cash back for Ray

No point in making that call yet. Ray could cut his walks in half and be the guy. Walker has a good chance. Shoemaker is the obvious choice if he is back. I think if Roark or Anderson is making that start we are in trouble. I would rather see Merriguchi than Roark or Anderson in a game 2 if Pearson and Shoe are still out