Analyzing the Indians pen and pitcher usage by Eric Wedge.

The Indians are surging. They have gone 9-1 in their last ten games, pulled into a 7 game lead in the AL Central and have all but locked up the division. Fantasy players in deeper leagues are familiar with how good their relievers have been, especially Rafael Betancourt and Rafael Perez. Joe Borowski has been pretty good also. I was curious as to whether Wedge was making good use of them going into the playoffs.

By far their three best relievers have been Rafael Perez, Rafael Betancourt and Joe Borowski. There are many ways to compare and contract. I am going to use a few different metrics below. The first is Bill James’ Win Shares, as tweaked by The Hardball Times.

The results:
Rafael Betancourt 11.5 WS
Rafael Perez 6.7 WS
Joe Borowski 2.8 WS

Since each Win Share is worth approx 33% of a win, that means Borowski has only been worth 1 win, Perez 2.2 and Betancourt 3.8. A huge advantage for Betancourt.

Another metric that I find very interesting is Win Expectancy. This is a metric developed by Baseball Prospectus, and it takes the various win probabilities of each game situation and then calculates how much a pitcher has added or subtracted from these win probabilities. You can check it out on their site. It can be adjusted for lineups and measured in relation to replacement level (”WXRL”)also, so I provide both here. WXRL is a better measurement because it takes into account more factors.

The results:
Rafael Betancourt 4.495 WX 5.625 WXRL
Rafael Perez 2.04 WX 2.503 WXRL
Joe Borowski 1.051 WX 2.428 WXRL

What is interesting here is that Perez is far better than Borowski in WX, but when adjusted for lineups and measured against replacement level pitchers Borowski makes up the difference.

What is clear on these stats is that Betancourt is by far their best reliever, Perez is a close second with Borowski very close in value.

How is Wedge using them? One way to look at this is to look at Leverage. Another metric used by both Baseball Prospectus and The Hardball Times. Essentially it measures how important the situations are that a reliever has faced. The baseline is 1.00, which is the leverage at the start of the game. Leverage higher than 1.00 mean that a pitcher has been used in more critical situations.

The results:
Joe Borowski 2.04 LEV
Rafael Betancourt 1.82 LEV
Rafael Perez 1.23 LEV

This shows that Wedge has been using Borowski in the most important situations. But not by much. The difference between Borowski and Betancourt in leverage is fairly small, and he has been using Betancourt in almost as valuable situations as Borowski.

What is also interesting is that both Borowski and Betancourt are in the top 25 in baseball in Leverage (ignoring one-off relief appearances such as the Roy Oswalt and Dave Bush appearances). This is a result of playing lots of close games; The Indians are 39-30 in one and two run games, and they have the second most in the AL after Toronto.

Wedge is misusing his pen, but not by much. His overall use of these three is not optimal, but far from Torre-esque (It pains me to say that as a Yankees fan). Clearly the choice to use Borowski instead of Perez (as they are both close in value) is justifiable. He could have made Betancourt the closer; but this likely wouldn’t have made a huge difference given that Betancourt has still gotten a lot of high leverage innings. Betancourt has pitched more innings and has a higher IP/Appearance rate, so Wedge appears to be getting good use of him. Both will likely have close to 80 IP this year by seasons end.

Of course, my last stop is to look for a good Indians blog to get an inside look. I came across Let’s Go Tribe. It is a more statistically minded blog than most team blogs. The guys there ware conversant with more advanced metrics, make routine use of Win Probability Added and also list Pitching Runs Created in their game discussions. They also link to The Hardball Times, which gives them instant credibility to me since I blog on their Fantasy Focus blog.

I expected their opinion to be that Borowski has been good, but Betancourt far better. That Betancourt is the best reliever is beyond doubt, as discussed above. The guys on the blog confirmed my suspicion:

“Borowski’s been fairly good at closing games (much better than I certainly expected), but if Eric Wedge would gather up enough courage to replace him with either Rafael, I wouldn’t complain.”

That sounds just about right.

articleId=’15734′;