Many years ago, in response to the discovery that a Topps employee was assigning the number 666 to players who knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs, I wrote the random evil player generator. Really, it’s just a way of numbering the players in a season without regard to who is actually evil.
Given the lack of action on the baseball hot stove lately, I’m reviving the Evil Player program to generate a name. First off is Jeremy Hellickson.
Hellickson is an eight season veteran pitcher. His most impressive quality is his ability to limit hits despite a rather low K rate. This spreadsheet shows how a pitcher’s strikeout rate (K per 9) predicts hit rate (H per 9) for active pitchers with at least 400 IP in their career. He’s not the most extreme pitcher in the group (that would go to Brad Ziegler), but Hellickson is predicted to allow 9.2 hits per nine and only allows 8.5.
He did start his career with the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that tended to put their scant dollars into defense. His low hit rate continued however as he moved to the Phillies and Orioles. He is not an extreme pitcher, over his career giving up fly balls and ground balls at about the same rate. He gives up a normal number of line drives, so he’s not causing poor contact more than any other pitcher. What he has done over the years is change his mix of fastballs and sliders while maintaining his change up. His success may come from not allowing hitters to develop a good pattern recognizer against him.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2ljoSUi
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