The Anatomy of a LOOGY
Baseball has been cursed (or blessed, you LaRussian ponce, you) with the existence of increasingly rigid bullpen roles ever since Dennis Eckersley was resurrected…about 20 years now.
In discussions of team construction, you often see guys listed according to role rather than effectiveness…Kevin Gregg was named the closer in Chicago over Carlos Marmol to much fanfare, which is funny to me because of how these discussions go. For example:
1. The last three outs are the most important of the game
2. Carlos Marmol is the better pitcher
Whatever…I digress. The point is that bullpens are stratified based on role. And after closer, and maybe setup (presumably the backup closer/8th inning guy), the most often bullpen role mention is the first lefty out of the pen, used to get a left handed hitter out who A. won’t get pinch hit for, and B. can’t hit lefties well.
Or as John Sickels called him, the lefty one out guy…LOOGY.
I defined a LOOGY, for the purposes of this exercise as:
1. Left handed (no shit)
2. Had at least 25 innings pitched
3. Their innings pitched wasn’t greater than 75% of their games pitched. This is to eliminate guys like Okijima, Jeremy Affeldt, and BJ Ryan who obviously weren’t used as LOOGY’s but might not have pitched an exact 1-1 ratio of games to innings.
This gave me 25 guys who you could say were LOOGYs last year.
Now, some teams might have cycled arms through the role last year (the Yankees come to mind here), but they were either prone to injury, or complete cannon fodder, so for the sake of argument, let’s say that if I say “NYY didn’t have a LOOGY last year” I mean they didn’t have one guy who performed in that role, not that they completely eschewed the role all together. Mmmkay?
Now, last year, your LOOGY was:
Left handed (25/25)
In the National League (19/25)
30 years old (16/25 were 30 or older)
Pitched essentially 2/3 of an inning per appearance (Actual: .70 ip/app)
Pitched in 42.7 innings last year (in other words, if you compressed their innings pitched into games, your average LOOGY pitched in the same amount of games as Joe Thurston played for the Red Sox last year)
Your LOOGY’s were (sorted by appearance):
Pedro Feliciano NYM NL
Will Ohman ATL NL
J.C. Romero PHI NL
Dennys Reyes MIN AL
Ron Villone STL NL
Scott Schoeneweis NYM NL
Wesley Wright HOU NL
Joe Beimel LAD NL
Javier Lopez BOS AL
Brian Shouse MIL NL
Trever Miller TBR AL
Jack Taschner SFG NL
Bill Bray CIN NL
Arthur Rhodes SEA/FLA NL
Jamie Walker BAL AL
Charlie Manning WSN NL
Boone Logan CHW AL
Neal Cotts CHC NL
Alex Hinshaw SFG NL
Doug Slaten ARI NL
Randy Flores STL NL
Royce Ring ATL NL
Jimmy Gobble KCR AL
Scott Eyre CHC/PHI NL
Mitch Stetter MIL NL
Now, I thought of this post when I was poking on BRef this morning and noticed two things about Javier Lopez. He only held the platoon advantage 47% of the time (AL average: 55%) and he generally wasn’t used in high leverage situations (aLI was .861).
LOOGY effectiveness against left handers isn’t of much interest to me, because these guys got their name to face lefties in high pressure situations, so I decided to take a look and see who was actually used that way (since Lopez wasn’t).
So, of the 25, I looked to see who held a platoon advantage (above league average, 55% for the AL, and 54% for the NL) AND had a aLI over 1.00. I did this to see which managers were using their lefties in a strategic manner at a time when strategy actually means something.
Our sample is 1. JC Romero had a platoon advantage 56% of the time, and an aLI of 1.538.
Now, there might be a bunch of reasons the other guys that had leverage’s over 1 (Arthur Rhodes, Randy Flores, Dennys Reyes, Pedro Feliciano, Jack Taschner, Joe Beimel, Brian Shouse, and Jamie Walker) didn’t pitch more. Maybe they had reverse split (but they were still used against lefties a lot, which would seem counter productive), or got their tits smoked by righties (which wouldn’t make sense, because they would have a platoon advantage more often). Or the platoon advantage was negated by the opposing manager calling for a PH.
I just can’t think of any reason they weren’t used more (at least that is rational to me).
Schoeneweis, and Welsey Wright were pretty close to the threshold, being just under 1, with PA’s of 54% and 58% respectively.
But Bray, Cotts, Ohman, Stetter, Villone, Eyre, Lopez, Logan, Ring, Miller, Manning, Hinshaw, Slaten, and Gobble litterally were paid money to perform a role (get lefties out at important part of the games) where:
1. Their managers refused to use them when the game was actually on the line
2. Their managers put them in a situation where they faced righties, because they couldn’t be trusted in a more important situation
3. In a low leverage situation, the opposing manager pulled a lefty hitter and pinch hit with a righty…neutralizing the defensive manager’s advantage.
What I suss out from this is that pitcher handedness is probably overrated in the bullpen, especially in controlling the platoon advantage. I’m sure there are a lot of situations where a lefty would be awesome, but they average out over the course of the year to non-important…at least when you consider the roster spot the LOOGY’s take up could be given to an extra hitter or a guy that can swipe some bags, or fly catch, or maybe pitch 80 innings or something rather than feed into a false scarcity of pitching.
Eight years after he mentioned how LOOGY’s just aren’t important (in the NBJHSA)…I got around to thinking Bill James might be right.
At an early age, I remember seeing Tony Fossas on the mound and thinking to myself “this man does not belong on the field”. I am glad to see that you have justified my beliefs with concrete analysis.
I can think of two reasons guys wouldn’t get used more;
1. Once in awhile LOOGYs (LOOGIES?) will get used in a mop up role and pitch an inning in a blowout, often against non-lefties. One inning against four righties offsets four “one and done” appearances. I would bet if you could identify LI by platoon split you’d find LOOGYs had a MUCH higher LI against LHB than RHB.
2. There are limited number of LHB you can use a LOOGY against. You can use a LOOGY against Ortiz, but a guy like Kotsay will be pinch hit for so the opportunities for a true LOOGY scenario are somewhat limited.
Good stuff though. LOOGYs are vastly overrated. The Angels have done fine for many years without one.