Being too wimpy to watch any horror movies, I decided to do the next best thing and look up Dan Haren's advanced stats on Fangraphs. I expected a disaster, knowing that his ERA was over five, so I was completely shocked to see he actually has a 3.69 xFIP! xFIP, which stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, says what your ERA should be if you strip away the quality of the defense behind you, different ballpark dimensions, and plain old luck. Just like the eye test, all advanced statistics should be taken with a bit of skepticism, so I took a deeper look to try to understand why his xFIP was so much lower than his ERA.
The first thing I noticed was that he has been very unlucky with his Left On Base Percentage. To understand LOB%, imagine an inning where the pitcher gives up a deep fly out/sac fly, two singles, and 2 K's in some order. If the inning is ordered single, single, sac fly, K K, the pitcher will give up a run. If the inning is ordered fly out, K, single, single, K, then no runs will score even though the pitcher did the same things. Dan Haren's sequencing has been biting him in the ass this year, and it's almost guaranteed that his sequencing will positively regress as he continues pitching.
He has been unlucky with the percentage of fly balls that go over the fence. If the fence is 350 ft, a 340 ft fly ball could be a fly out while a 360 ft hit is a dinger, but there is no real difference in a pitch that gets hit 340 ft or 360 ft.
He's also done a bad job selecting pitches. He has thrown both his fastball and his cutter about 40% of the time, but his fastball has actually been above league average in effectiveness while his cutter is getting absolutely rocked. If he can stop using the cutter as a main weapon and instead use it as a change of pace or out pitch he would see much better results.
Lastly, he's been getting unlucky with this balls that are hit into play. There is no difference between a pitch that gets grounded to the 1st baseman for an out and a pitch that gets grounded into a hole between 1st and 2nd baseman for a hit, but they get opposite results. To put it simply, Haren's balls have not been finding the Nationals' gloves as often as they should.
Look, I'm not going to try to sell you on the idea that Dan Haren will be a very good pitcher ever again, but it's important that we don't overreact to the results of one year. His ugly ERA this year has probably tanked his value on the free agent market, so I'd be very happy to see the Nationals bring Haren back on a cheap contract next year to be our fifth starter.
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