We’ve come full circle. In some twisted fashion, baseball is responsible for getting me into politics. I knew who Nate Silver was when he was trying to figure out how to project baseball players’ performance. I had been a pretty serious stathead for several years at the time when Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game — one of the best non-fiction books of the last decade period –came out. It was a period in my life where my day job (in the tech sector) didn’t maintain my interest at all, while leaving me with the feeling of having only slightly more social utility than shuffling debt on Wall Street. Michael Lewis writes wonderful prose, and the Oakland A’s front office was full of baseball geeks who were getting paid peanuts, loved their jobs. Meanwhile there was an ongoing war whose existence managed to numb me to the point where I didn’t have an opinion. And here I was feeling neither useful nor passionate about anything.

Yes, I know, these are distinctly middle class concerns, but let’s just say that the spring start of probably the least pleasant year of my life, during which my angst almost destroyed one of my closest friendships. One of the ways I managed to pull myself out of the spiral was to put my quantitative skills into something a little more practical than baseball—politics, natch—which led me to volunteer for a House race, and then to blog, and eventually meet Spencer, and then, to guest blog for him about … baseball.

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While it’s pretty clear Matt Holliday’s error is the root cause of the Cardinals’ loss Thursday night, Ryan Franklin had a number of chances to put out the fire and couldn’t. it’s worth examining the fact that St. Louis has gone the entire year with an unlit powder keg closing out games. Why do I say this? Because the performance of the Cards’ closer is built on a house of … cards. He’s a slightly below-average reliever who’s gotten incredibly lucky all year. Sabermetricians—the baseball equivalent of policy wonks—have concluded that a pitcher has at least some control over exactly three things:

• How often he strikes batters out.
• How often he walks batters.
• Whether or not a batted ball is a ground ball or a fly ball

Specifically, here’s a partial list of things a pitcher is not in control of:

• Whether or not a fly ball is hit over the fence for a home run.
• Whether or not a batted fair ball results in an out (think about it: what on Earth could Franklin have done to make sure James Loney hits a ball that Holliday can catch?)
• “Clutch” pitching—having better performance with runners on base than with the bases empty.

Now, let’s take a closer look look at Ryan Franklin’s season this year, looking at these last three factors:

• Whether or not a fly ball is hit over the fence for a home run. Between 2004 and 2008, about 12.5% of the fly balls that Franklin allowed ended up in the bleachers. If that had happened this year, he would have given up 6 gopher balls. But in 2009, he gave up a whopping two home runs on 54 fly balls, a rate of 3.7%. That’s just not something he can expect to have happen again in his lifetime. If we were to replay the season again, we’d expect Franklin to end up with a rate closer to his career average. That alone would have pushed his ERA above 3.00
• Whether or not a batted fair ball is a hit or an out. Over the whole season, the Cardinals team defensive allowed a Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) of was .299. Out of every ten times someone put the ball in play, it landed for a hit almost exactly three times. But when Franklin pitched, the opposition’s BABIP was .266. That gap is enough to rank Franklin’s BABIP 23rd out of all 282 pitchers who threw more than 60 innings this year. Next year he’s a good bet to finish in the middle of the pack.
• “Clutch” pitching. League-wide, batters had an OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging average) of .734 against NL pitchers with the bases empty, but .755—slightly worse—with runners on. For the Cardinals’ closer, those figures are .637 and .539, respectively. Franklin performed—or more accurately, Franklin appeared to perform—better in situations where he had a higher chance of giving up runs. The odds that this is due to Ryan Franklin’s super-special ability to pitch well “in the clutch” are simply very, very, low. That’s a third factor contributing to his low ERA.

All these little ways in which Franklin got lucky this season make his ERA look way better than we might expect it to be. In fact, the baseball wonks have come up with a stat called xFIP—expected Fielding-Independent Pitching—that evaluates a pitcher’s effectiveness independent of defense and luck (which is why I think it should be called xFLIP, “Fielding- and Luck- Independent Pitching”, but I don’t rule the world). FIP values are roughly comparable to ERA, though ERA tends to be just a hair lower on average. Still, if you chart Franklin’s xFIP against his actual ERA, you’ll see a huge gap opening up this year. His headline ERA number (in blue) is just way out of line compared to his peripherals (in red). Next year, the odds are overwhelming that Franklin’s ERA will return to the 3.00-3.50 range, if not higher.

In a 1-run game, I would put Jason Motte on the mound over Ryan Franklin eight days a week. But Tony LaRussa, super-genius, handed Motte the closer’s job out of spring training, publicly committed to let him learn to finish out games, then banished him to middle relief after he blew a single save. Patience, apparently, is not one of the man’s virtues.

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Chad Billingsley must be hurt, since the Dodgers scheduled Vicente friggin’ Padilla to start a postseason game. I sincerely doubt they’re happy about this development. The Cardinals counter with Joel Pineiro, who’s one of Dave Duncan’s most sucessful retread projects. Despite not striking out many guys (for Pete’s sake, his 4.4 K/9 is significantly below league average), Pinero almost never gives up a free pass and keeps the ball on the ground at an alarming rate. That’s a recipe for success in the regular season, when a pitcher is likely to face a decent number of mediocre hitters. The conventional wisdom among stat wonks is that good-hitting teams tend to beat up on guys like Pineiro, and I’m inclined to agree; the Kemp-Manny-Ethier-Loney heart of the Dodgers’ order hits a lot of line drives that will fall for singles rather than groundouts. Will that be enough to make up for having Padilla on the mount? Well, he was just below league average in the AL, but since coming to the NL he’s been a plus pitcher over seven starts, partly because L.A. hasn’t been asking him to be a staff workhorse. He’s also right handed, which will give him the platoon advantage against Ludwick, Holliday, and DeRosa (and Pujols but even with the platoon advantage that doesn’t really matter). So, what the heck, I’ll take L.A. on the road.