There are some interesting anomalies in the case of Scott Kazmir. How can these be interpreted?
A friend and reader of the blog asked me about his keeper list, and one name he brought up was Scott Kazmir. I took a look at Kazmir’s overall record and found something quite surprising.

Regular readers know that for the garden variety starting pitcher their hit rates and strand rates will generally regress to the norms of 30% and 70%. The hit rate measures the number of hits per balls put into play. The strand rate measures how many of the runners a pitcher puts on base get stranded.

It is easy to see the genesis of these two dicta. Once Voros McCracken established that pitchers generally have no control over the number of hits they allow (which has since been shown to be very slightly false in that pitchers have a minimum amount of control over the number of hits), one can establish that the hit rate and strand rate are essentially functions of chance.

At least that is the basic principle. But Kazmir is an interesting case. Right now he has the following line:

9-7 3.44 ERA 1.44 WHIP 34% hit rate 78% strand rate 9.6 K/9 IP 4.2 BB/9 IP.

Given this line, once can see that Kazmir is very close to an ace quality pitcher, but for his control. Once can also see that he has been unlucky in his hit rate, but lucky in his strand rate.

Or is it luck? Looking at his monthly splits this years we see the following, in terms of hit rate and strand rate:

April: 27% hit rate 76% strand rate
May: 38% 76%
June: 39% 74%
July 34% 77%
August 32% 95% (clearly luck related)

At least this year, Kazmir has shown that he will let up more hits than normal, but will strand more runners than normal. This is apparently a repeatable skill on his part. Here are his 2006 splits:

April: 34% 82%
May: 34% 83%
June: 32% 68%
July: 30% 79%
August: 30% 80%

In the last two years he has never been below the 30% benchmark except for April 2007, and has never been below the 70% strand rate benchmark with the exception of June 2006.

The answer to the hits question lies with the Tampa Defense. The Hardball Times defense metrics do not paint a pretty picture. THT has many defense metrics with which we can evaluate team defense. One is the “plus/minus” stat, which measures
how much a team or player is below average, by measuring a number of variables. A primer is here and here.

The Devil Rays are at an astounding -124, more than 80 worse than any other team. That is, their defense allowed 124 more balls than average to turn into hits. Their infield is dead last in revised zone rating by a large margin. RZR is a measure of the percentage of balls hit into a fielder’s “zone” that are turned into outs.

So what does this tell us about Kazmir? Well, more than that he plays for a bad team. He has consistently, in the face of this defensive onslaught by his own team, been able to strand a higher percentage of runners than normal. It appears that because this is a consistent pattern in his career, that it is a repeatable skill.

There are two impediments to his future ace-dom. The first is his control. Before this year, Kazmir made steady improvement in his walk rate:

2004 5.7 BB/9 IP
2005 4.8 BB/9 IP
2006 3.2 BB/9 IP
2007 4.2 BB/9 IP

His control has clearly slipped this year, but not to Dalkowskian levels. He was terrible in June, but in July and August he has gotten his control a bit under control (forgive the pun), with rates of 3.7 and 2.8.

The second factor is his team defense, which is beyond his control. But if Kazmir can sustain a bit of the improvement in his control over the past two months, he may be able to overcome his team defense and blossom into the stud Devil Rays fans and his owners hope he will be. A guy who can consistently strand more runners than the norm can be a hugely valuable pitcher; all he needs is a bit more control and a better team defense and a Cy Young is within reach.

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