(*) MASTER NOTES: HRAKing Mass (UPDATED)

I have an idea.

I freely grant that me having an idea is not always a great thing. There is a photo of me in a rust-colored leisure suit, a pinkish shirt with a collar that made me look like I was being strangled from behind by an albatross, and a turquoise paisley tie. I thought that ensemble was a good idea, too.

And no, I won’t be sharing that picture. The guy who has it won’t give it back until I pay the last installment on the blackmail.

Here is my idea: To simplify the mechanics of choosing pitchers for “streaming” and for daily fantasy, I have invented a new metric: HRAK, which is short for HR per Average K. To pronounce the acronym, just imitate a good size cat expelling a hairball.

Before I get into the “how” of this idea, let me discuss the “why.”

Simply put, I have a pitching staff made up of pitchers who are surprisingly homer-prone. I knew this about some of them coming into draft. In 2013-14, Miguel González and John Lackey were Top-10 in HR/9 allowed and Phil Hughes was #24. Aníbal Sánchez has been a real surprise this year, similar to the “real surprise” you enjoy when your mechanic says you need a new transmission.

Naturally, I wish my starters weren’t always first to grab the ladle when hitters ask to pass the taters. But I have kept running them out there because of the other benefits they offered. Sanchez was Top-15 in WHIP and Top-10 in ERA in 2013-14, Gonzalez was Top-50, and Lackey and Hughes were Top-50 in WHIP.

Now, however, as the season heads for its final third, I’m in a position to win my league. And so I have to be extra judicious in choosing which pitchers to start—and, more importantly, not to start—the rest of the way.

In both daily and short-run seasonal fantasy formats, I’ve decided that the key to pitching success is balancing home-run avoidance with strikeouts.

This makes sense if you think about it. Which sets a dangerous precedent.

For a pitcher, the home run is an unqualified disaster. It adds at least a run and often more run to his ledger. And the ERA differences are huge.

I mentioned earlier that I had those three homer-prone pitchers. So I went back to 2014. I looked at my pitchers’ ERAs in games where they allowed HRs and games where they didn’t:

                   ERA
Pitcher         HR   noHR
=========================
Hughes        4.35   3.02
Lackey        5.75   1.96
MGonzalez     3.96   1.81
ALL PITCHERS  5.34   2.63

The numbers are very similar this season so far, except the overall gap is even wider, and Aníbal Sánchez has a 7.07 ERA in Homer games and a 1.93 in games without.

But I also thought strikeouts might reduce the effects of HR games. So I checked, and sure enough, that’s what happens:

              |-----------------ERA----------------|
                      HR                  No HR
Pitcher         ALL   6+K   <6K      ALL   6+K   <6K
====================================================
ALL PITCHERS   5.34  2.36  6.24     2.63  1.69  3.34

Okay, I understand that as ideas go, this is not Copernicus inventing penicillin or Earl Weaver inventing the three-run homer. Strikeouts good, homers bad won’t get the Nobel people scrambling for my number.  But be honest—would you have thought that ERA in games with HRs would be double or more the ERA in games without?

So this is an idea I think I can use—not just in daily leagues, but also in seasonal leagues now that “the season” is down to just 60 games, and every start carries a little extra weight—and that’s a topic I know quite a bit about. Ask my doctor.

And that is how I came to develop the HRAK metric. I want to have a quick way to assess whether a team is prone to whiffing and not so prone to hitting homers.

So I found out how many home runs each team has hit and how many times they have struck out, on a per-game basis, both at home and on the road. Then I calculated the ratio of how many HRs the team hit per every six strikeouts.

That’s HRAK. Simple, huh?

The leaguewide averages, in case you were wondering, are:

• 1 HR per game
• 7.6 Ks per game
• 0.8 HRAK

My thinking was to try to find teams that are well under that 0.8 mark, because that will indicate a team that hits fewer HRs, strikes out more, or, ideally, both.

Here’s what I learned:

The truism that pitchers should get better results at home is, well, true. HR/G, K/G and HRAK are all more favorable to pitchers working at home. The exception is the Mariners, who hit slightly more HR on the road and strike out slightly less than they do at home.

For home pitching starts, I want to see my pitchers up against the Padres, Braves, Pirates, Twins, Mets and Phillies. The Phils’ HRAK is actually under 0.50 on the road, and the Mets are right at half.

Teams to avoid for home pitching starts are the Mariners, as noted, the Yankees and the Giants, all right around or slightly over one HRAK.

For pitching road starts—hitters at home—I will send my guys up against all the teams under 6.0 HRAK: the Marlins, D’Backs, Indians, Giants, Cubs and Braves.

Yes, the Braves are on both lists.

And I have decided I will almost surely not pitch my guys on the road against the Orioles, Yankees and maybe the Astros. The Astros lead baseball in HRAK at their home park, but they also whiff a ton, generating a 1.12 ratio.

And finally, I will not start any pitcher at Rogers Centre in Toronto. The Blue Jays have a remarkable 1.53 HRAK, partly because they bash the heck out of the ball and partly because they cut their Ks from 8.0/game on the road to well under 6.0 at home.

Now I should close by saying that if I had Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer or an ace of that ilk, I would probably start him everywhere. The reason I thought about this in the first place is that I don’t have those kind of guys—as noted earlier, I have homer-prone, relatively low K guys like Hughes, Lackey and the bewildering Sanchez.

So get out there and start HRAKing! And don’t surprised if your cat gives you a sympathetic look.

UPDATE: Responding to the comments, I have added the Excel spreadsheet from which the HRAK results were compiled. Please keep in mind that these data are specific to the GP of each team, and will vary slightly as the various data change through the rest of the season. Fortunately, the data required—team GP, HR, SO, with home-road splits—are readily available. That spreadsheet is here.

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