(*) MASTER NOTES: Our most powerful tool

There are a million reasons to love the start of baseball season. One unheralded reason is that my favorite tool at BaseballHQ.com is an in-season tool. I'm referring to our Starting Pitcher report. (See also the 8-day view.)

Each April, I like to take a few minutes to talk about this tool, in the hopes of driving more people to use it. Consider this my annual Public Service Announcement.

The tool is based in our Pure Quality Starts methodology for evaluating starting pitcher performance. You can read the full description of PQS in our glossary if you need a refresher. The gist of it is that we give each pitcher outing a score of 0-5 based on skill factors, rather than results. Earned runs are not one of the criteria, but the scores correlate very strongly with ERA.

Compiling comprehensive PQS data for every single major league start gives us the ability to do some fun things with that data, and the SP Report is the best example. What we do in the report is take that historical data, and use it to derive a score for each future SP outing. In this way, we're taking PQS scores, which are by definition backward-looking evaluations of pitcher performance, and turning them into a forward-looking tool. It's proven to be a powerful way to answer the question: how is my pitcher going to do in his next outing?

Of course, to answer that question, you have to account for not just the quality of the pitcher himself, but also the opposition and venue. To do that, we compile the  PQS data for all other pitchers who have faced the opposing offense, and slice that data by home/road and by lefty/righty starter.

The result is that we end up with two numbers: the first is an average PQS score for the starting pitcher, split by home or road as appropriate. The second is an average PQS score for all pitchers who have faced the opposing offense, also split by home/road as well as lefty/righty starter. Then we compare the two to come up with a matchup score.

Let's look at an example: On April 10, RA Dickey faced the Astros in Toronto. For the first part of the equation, we look at Dickey himself: at home, he has an average PQS score of 3.5. For the second part of the equation, we look at the opponent: all other right-handed pitchers who have faced the Astros outside of Houston have posted an average PQS score of 3.54.

Plug those values into our formula, which basically just inverts the opposing number and compares the two, and you get:

3.5 - (5 - 3.54) = 3.5 - 1.46 = 2.04

The results fall on a -5 to +5 scale, and Dickey's 2.04 rating for that outing falls just above our "must-start" threshold of 2.0. By comparison, negative scores are must-sits, and anything in the 0.0 to 1.99 range is considered the "risk/reward zone".

Every day at BaseballHQ, we write a brief Daily Matchups column that essentially synthesizes these scores, providing the best and worst SP choices for the day, as well as the most interesting risk/reward plays.

For the first 9 days of the season, the 18 "best bet" starters performed as follows:

PQS-5: 7
PQS-4: 4
PQS-3: 4
PQS-2: 0
PQS-1: 0
PQS-0: 2
rainout: 1

That's a tiny sample size, of course, but it's consistent with longer-term analysis we've done on this approach.  The best part: since we need a decently-sized data set for this to work, for the month of April we run the report against last year's PQS database. So these results aren't even based on current-year data!

This tool is simple, and it's powerful. That's why it's my favorite tool on our site. And we're making it even better this year: we'll soon be adding a special version for two-start pitchers, and adding CSV download capability to allow for further data manipulation.

Anyone who struggles with "which pitcher should I start today, or this week" should be looking first at this report for input into that decision. And if you're playing daily games, this data is absolutely critical to making your daily pitcher choices. There is a ton of randomness in daily game play, but one aspect that is not random is picking the right starting pitchers, and this report can give you a huge leg up toward finishing in the money.

We'll probably have more to say about daily games later in the season. But for now, check out our Starting Pitching Report. It may very well become your favorite BaseballHQ tool as well.

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