Chicago White Sox: Pitchers Should Take Blame

Anyone from Chicago who caught any given couple of innings of the series between the Chicago White Sox and the Toronto Blue Jays knows one thing for sure: Hawk Harrelson absolves the White Sox pitching staff of all blame for the losses.

There are certainly grounds for believing that the pitchers can't be held accountable for all that went wrong on the defensive side of things for the White Sox. In Friday's opener, with no one on base and two outs in the first inning, Joe Crede committed a throwing error, allowing Scott Rolen to reach base safely and the inning to continue. The Blue Jays then proceeded to score two runs, which were the difference in the 2-0 contest.

On Saturday, with the bases loaded and two outs, Octavio Dotel induced what should have been an inning-ending fielder's choice to Joe Crede. Crede, hailed by the White-Sox faithful for being a "clutch" player, botched the ball by trying to make his next move before having it in the glove. Rod Barajas scored on the play, and the bases were still loaded when Vernon Wells followed with a two-run single.

Sunday's game featured a wrong call by the umpiring crew. With runners on second and third, and nobody out, David Eckstein grounded to Orlando Cabrera, who tagged Alex Rios's leg before throwing out Eckstein. Due to the angle the second-base umpire had on the play, he thought Rios and Cabrera merely collided and that no tag was made. Replays confirmed that Cabrera tagged Rios's leg.

This was a failure on the part of the umpiring crew as a whole, for not colluding to get the call right. After a Scott Rolen lineout should have ended the inning, the Blue Jays scored three runs with two outs.

So why blame the pitchers? After all, each of these innings would have been over had the previously mentioned mistakes not happened. One interesting statistical finding is that pitchers who give up a lot of earned runs, tend to give up a lot of unearned runs as well. While defenses and umpires can open wounds, pitchers certainly can rub salt in them.

Suppose an error is made by the shortstop with two outs, allowing the inning to continue. Now the pitcher walks three-straight batters, then gives up a grand slam, then a double, then another home run.

Is it really intelligent to absolve a pitcher of his continuing responsibility to get outs, even if the inning should have ended already? At what point should these "unearned runs" start to affect our evaluations of the pitcher's performance?

Let's take a look at each of these three games, using Baseball Prospectus's Run Expectancy Matrix.

Run expectancy is a simple concept. It's the average amount of runs that baseball teams score in the rest of an inning, given a certain situation (e.g. One out, men on second and third). For example, in 2007, the run expectancy for having the bases loaded with nobody out was 2.35 runs, while it was 0.11 for having the bases empty with two out.

We will use the 2007 data here as a close approximation of our analysis here (there's little variation from year-to-year).

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