Will Chase Anderson Underperform Next Season?

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Photo Credit: Rough Tough, Real Stuff (Flickr CC)

Chase Anderson (pictured), Junior Guerra and Freddy Peralta are all on pace to far exceed their career highs for innings pitched.

Despite the fact that he missed nearly two months, 2017 was easily the best season of Chase Anderson’s major league career. He had multiple brilliant stretches, including a six-start span leading up to his oblique injury where he posted a 1.33 earned run average and averaged nearly seven innings per start, and was strong down the stretch for a Brewers team that desperately needed him.

Anderson was one of just 11 MLB pitchers to throw at least 140 innings and record an ERA under 3.00 in 2017. He struck out 10 more batters in 2017 (133) than he ever had before despite pitching 10 fewer innings than he had in either of the previous two seasons. He walked fewer than three batters per nine innings and, for the first time in his MLB career, allowed less than one home run per nine innings.

Not everyone is sold on Anderson’s breakout, however. Last week a post at Viva El Birdos, the Cardinals site on the SB Nation network, highlighted an unlikely fact: Steamer, one of baseball’s most oft-used and respected projection models, predicts Anderson will have a 4.90 ERA in 2018, over two runs worse than his mark from a year ago. His value is projected to take a correlated nosedive: FanGraphs estimated he was worth about 3.3 wins above replacement in 2017 and projects him for 1.7 in 2018.

So what happened? The answer isn’t perfectly clear. Steamer’s model is proprietary, so it’s not possible to peruse the data and see where things come apart for Anderson. It is possible, however, that a few factors came into play.

Luck Turns Around

It’s an established fact around baseball that a pitcher’s earned run average measures an array of factors, only a portion of which are actually under his control. Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is a statistic that attempts to strip away some of the luck and external factors that find their way into the data and produces an estimated ERA for pitchers based on three factors largely within their control: home runs, walks and strikeouts. Over the course of his career Anderson’s ERAs have typically been significantly better than FIP’s prediction: His career ERA is 3.87, compared to a 4.27 FIP. In 2017 the difference between the two (2.74 to 3.58) was more than three-quarters of a run. This suggests that factors outside of Anderson’s control (defense behind him, lucky bounces on balls in play, etc) have allowed him to outperform his true talent levels.

Digging deeper into Anderson’s peripheral numbers produces more of the same concern: Opposing batters hit just .265 on balls in play against Anderson in 2017, as compared to a league average around .300. In 2017 about 15% of the fly balls hit against Anderson went for home runs, but in 2018 that number dropped to less than 9%. About 80% of the runners to reach base against Anderson on base in 2017 were stranded, which was also a career high. Those trends are unlikely to continue.

93 MPH Isn’t What it Used to Be

Perhaps partially due to the long layoff during his time on the disabled list, Anderson was able to generate a significant uptick in his velocity in 2017. Data at FanGraphs suggests his average fastball was up over 93 mph last year after sitting around 91-92 in previous years. As unfathomable as this would have been a decade ago, however, 93 really isn’t that fast anymore. Anderson’s average velocity ranked just 18th among the 30 players who threw a pitch for the Brewers in 2017.

We don’t know exactly how Steamer uses the data, but we do know that the system uses pitcher fastball velocity as “a crude measure of ‘stuff,’” so it would make sense that Anderson’s low-90s fastball would count against him a bit. This would be doubly true if Steamer used his historic velocity and not just his slight 2017 uptick.

30 is the New 35

Anderson turned 30 in November. Every player ages a little differently, of course, but recent MLB numbers would suggest that by 30 many pitchers’ best days are behind them. It’s probably not time to start planning a retirement party for Anderson just yet, but his value could diminish in the years ahead as his age catches up with him.

The league splits pages at Baseball Reference sort players by age into four groups: Under 25 years old, 26-30, 31-35 and 36 and above. Over the last two seasons pitchers in the 26-30 group have started about twice as many games and thrown about twice as many innings as the next older group and they’ve been more effective in doing so, posting an ERA that’s around eight points better.

Projections are not and likely never will be a perfect science. Players and the architects of the systems that evaluate them are both human and they will always exceed or underperform our expectations in unique and interesting ways. In this case, however, one system has taken a very interesting stance on Anderson and it will be interesting to see if it’s right.