Originally published 12.6.07.  Edit to add, D-O-V's take on this move turned out to be from another planet.  We thought that we were stating the obvious, but as so often, we quickly found out that most amigos were diametrically opposed on it.  LOL.

Every time this happens 'round this town, which is most of the time, I think of Jim Bowden explaining to Gary Huckabay why he doesn't hire a sabermetrician:  "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between you guys.  You like pitchers who strike out a lot of people, walk very few, and keep the ball on the ground.  No kidding.  Us dumb-bunny scouts woulda never thought of that." 

It's not about what they did done, Jim… it's about what they will do… 

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1.  Bill James once pointed out that sabermetricians have a different, 30,000-foot, view of the forest than do field personnel.  He opined that this view is not superior taking all things into account, but that it is definitely different.

There are times you do want a close-up look at the moss on the trees.  There are times you want to be able to see a fire starting from four miles away.

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2.  James, a year or two ago, wrote a really nice article about knuckleballs throughout baseball history.

He didn't fire off a few paragraphs venting his personal bias.  He went back a hundred years and asked, "if you took these pitchers as a whole, did they do better than expected or worse than expected?"

He found that knuckleballers, submariners, spitballers, etc, did extremely well as a group, even before you adjust for the fact that these are the pitchers who are starting off with no talent. 

He believes, if I understand Bill right, that the knuckleball is the most underrated pitch in baseball, and that as baseball evolves, eventually every staff will come to have three or four knuckleballers on it. 

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3.  He opines that the reason the knuckleball is underused and underrated, is because it makes coaches feel uncomfortable and out of control.  

The pitcher will spin one, and it will get hit 425 feet, and the coach will go, "See?  You just can't trust that pitch."

The fact that a Tim Wakefield's translated HR rate may be below average is forgotten; it feels like the batter may hit one out on every pitch, even though the knuckleballer may be giving up fewer HR's than Jarrod Washburn or Felix Hernandez.

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4.  D-O-V also loves knuckleballers and submariners, for the reasons given above.

Among other things, knuckleballers run low BABIP's — because the hitters are taking pepper swings.  They also tend to have little or no platoon splits (check Dickey's LH/RH splits). 

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5.  There is no way to sabermetrically project R.A. Dickey.  How do you statistically predict whether Dickey is going to get the feel on a knuckleball?  You don't.

You can pretty well forget trying to predict Dickey through performance analysis.  You'd have to stand on the sidelines with him … or simply ask him how it's going.

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6.  That said, Dickey is 2 years old as a (knuckle) pitcher.  In a lot of ways you could consider him a 19-year-old, including in terms of the number of years he has left.  :- )

In 2006 he had a 4.2/3.1 control ratio with the knuckler; in 2007 he improved to 6.3/3.2, which is better than Wakefield lately.

Here's a cool article, just after the conversion to the knuckle, in which the Ranger catcher Barajas is excited about his development.

Dickey was named the PCL pitcher of the year, going onto an 8-2, 2.57 streak in his next 14 starts ("since rejoining the rotation in June") for a juggernaut Nashville club. 

In other words, when last seen, Dickey was trashing the PCL hotel room, so to speak.  Here are his minor league splits. 

The question on R.A. Dickey is really as simple as, "how well is he coming along with the knuckler?"  The answer, in this case is, "he's on a hot roll."

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7.  Edit to add, Dr. Naka pointed out a superb THT article that is sabermetrics at its best.

Few if any MLB teams would have had that information before THT published.

We note bemusedly, however, that the hard data doesn’t really change much on the field, in terms of whether you pick up a knuckleballer, or in terms of what his pitch selection should be. :- ) As usual, the players were pretty well following the best course of action, intuitively.

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8.  Dickey doesn't cost the Mariners much … just a 25-man roster slot that they can bail on later if they want (for a net loss of $25k).

For what it's worth, R.A. Dickey is precisely the kind of move that the mainframe would make if it were GM.

Cheers,

Dr D