Mark Hendrickson?

I'm sure a lot of you out there have noted that the Orioles seem to struggle against soft-tossing lefties; Mark Hendrickson in particular.  I can imagine that Hendrickson is an awkward pitcher to face- he's 6'9'' and can't crack 90 mph.  The thing is, major league hitters seem to disagree.  Up until today's game, Hendrickson's career totals were as follows:

  IP       H      HR    BB      SO    ERA    ERA+   WHIP

556.7  670    70    147    273    5.21     86       1.47

Against the Orioles, Hendrickson has posted the following numbers:

 IP       H      HR    BB    SO    ERA    ERA+   WHIP

87.3   95      12    19     44    4.02     111     1.31

And that was before tonight's game:

 IP       H      HR    BB    SO    ERA    WHIP

9.0      3       0      1       5     0.00     0.44

So, exactly why was Hendrickson so successful?  Let's explore a few theories.

1) He threw strikes.  In fact, 69 out of 106 of his pitches were strikes.  That's 65%.  Compare that with Tampa Bay's strike efficiency in the past two games, where the Orioles scored a combined 25 runs: 201 strikes / 345 pitches = 58%.

2) The Orioles helped him out.  Maybe you're not so convinced by what amounts to seemingly moderate difference in strike efficiency.  Intuitively, it does seem like a bit of a stretch to attribute all of Hendrickson's success to his ability to throw a strike 7% more often than the guys who gave up 12.5 runs/game directly before him.  So, let's re-visit something I wrote a month ago in The Orioles vs. The AL:

• P/PA (Pitches per plate appearance): Bal- 3.65/ AL- 3.74

Only Tampa Bay saw fewer pitches per plate appearance than the Orioles in the AL. The average AL team had 38.3 PA’s per game, the Orioles- 37.9. With some pretty easy math, it becomes apparent that opposing pitchers were able to throw about 5 less pitches per game against the Orioles than the average AL team; and 844 fewer pitches on the season.

Often times, people can see the value of taking pitches for the intrinsic value of a base on balls. Here, we see an example of a team that hurt itself by not taking pitches and allowing opposing starters to pitch deeper into games.

Coincidentally, only TB was less efficient at working deep into counts.  For a pitcher like Hendrickson, who pitches for TB, the Orioles should be his best chance to work deep into a game.  For their part, the Orioles made it as easy as possible for him to do so. 

In today's game, an Orioles batter came to the plate 31 times.  In those appearances, they averaged 3.42 P/PA.  That may not seem like it's particularly poor, but remember that the O's were 2% below average in P/PA in 2005 and were the second worst team in the league.  Tonight, they were 9% below the 2005 average.

Simply put, the O's have to allow themselves to work deeper in counts.  That will let them see better pitches, put more runners on base, and make the opposing starter work harder to retire the same amount of batters.   Somehow, Hendrickson is capitalizing on their inability to do so.  Perhaps he paints the corner well with what look like juicy pitches, I don't really know. 

3) The Orioles don't hit lefties well.  Last year, the Orioles posted a .762 OPS against righties, which was good for 6th out of 14 AL teams.  They posted a .760 OPS against lefties, which was good for 7th in the AL. 

OK, maybe this theory doesn't hold water.  But I should point out that Luis Matos posted a platoon advantage for the first time ever last year and is likely to regress against lefties this year; new Oriole Kevin Millar has a reverse platoon advantage over the past three years (hitting for .50 points higher in SLG against righties); and new Oriole Corey Patterson doesn't seem to be able to hit anybody.

4) The Orioles don't hit lefty soft-tossers well.  Providing an objective statistical base for this proved to be quite difficult.  What I ended up doing is looking at each AL rotation and picking out the left-handed starters that immediately jumped out (to me, anyway) as hard-throwers.  Below are each pitcher's ERA vs. the Orioles in the past three years, followed by their total ERA in that same timeframe.

Name- ERA vs. O's/ERA

Scott Kazmir– 3.33/4.06

Randy Johnson– 2.12/3.38

C.C. Sabathia– 2.21/3.91

Johan Santana– 3.04/2.83

Admittedly, I have created an arbitrary selection process, so feel free to  comment as to how I could better illustrate this point.  Nevertheless; if anything, this data shows that Orioles hit hard-throwers particularly poorly.  More likely, this data shows absolutlely nothing- which means that my original assertion that the Orioles consistently struggle against soft-tossing lefties is unlikely to be true.  Maybe I just think that way because of Hendrickson.

Well, that's all the theories I am going to run out there today.  In my opinion, the Orioles' struggles against Hendrickson are due in large part to theory #2, with a little help from #1.  I'm sure some of you have your own theories.