Is Justin Verlander an Ace?

With the Detroit Tigers out of the playoff chase (and just trying to hang on to 4th place in the Central), I've seen it bandied about that Justin Verlander is the 'ace of the staff' and deserves a fair share of the blame for the starting pitching being terrible. That as the 'ace' he's supposed to go deep in games with numerous quality starts -- something that hasn't happened much.

This has dug at me since I've never considered Justin Verlander an 'ace' in the grand scheme of things. Is he the Tigers ace? Yes. Does that mean that he's an ace in terms of the entire league? Not necessarily. If Magglio Ordonez was suddenly thrust into the leadoff spot of the batting order, that would make him the Tigers leadoff hitter, but he wouldn't be a leadoff hitter, if that makes sense.

So, I looked towards this article from Project Prospect, a site that evaluates prospects in baseball largely through a statstical lense. Brett Sullivan, who penned the article, wanted to make a clean, simple method of evaluating pitching prospects. I liked the ease of use and just how well the less statistically-savvy baseball fanatics can understand it. It's got a lot of pluses.

However, I've got somethings that I don't like. Mainly, the fact that strikeouts and groundball percentage are weighted the same. The formula he used is: (Strikeout Percentage + Groundball Percentage – Walk Percentage) where strikeout percentage is just simply strikeouts (K) divided by total batters faced (TBF). You do this with walks (BB) as well. This gives you what he dubbed a "Raw Dominance Factor" as his statistic is completed with an age-relative-to-level since he was using it to judge pitching prospects. I thought this would be a decent method to turn to to evaluate major league pitchers in my quest to see how Justin Verlander stacks up against various 'aces' in the league.

I've changed the forumla from above, just a bit. I weighted groundball percentage to 0.72 of strikeouts. Then, I headed on over to the Hardball Times website to look at their pitching statistics to get the top 100 pitchers, ranked by strikeouts, for each of the last 4½ years (2004 through 2008). Basically what I did was import that data into excel, pick out the strikeouts, walks, total batters faced and then I got each of their ground ball percentages off of the THT player pages. I used this to round out my dominance factor by using each year individually. For instance, I looked up the top 100 pitchers in terms of strikeouts in 2004 and got a dominance factor for all of those pitchers. Then I did the same for 2005, then again for 2006 and so on and so forth until I got through August 28th, 2008.

What I came up with was this:

ACE	56.52
VERY GOOD	49.56
AVERAGE	42.6
BELOW-AVERAGE	35.63
POOR	28.67

But, I've done this because I want to see how Justin Verlander stacks up against his competition. To do this, we must establish a baseline against which we can measure Verlander. My data says that since 2004 through all games played through August 27th, the average pitcher in the top 100 in strikeouts will strikeout 18.1% of batters faced, walk 7.5% of batters faced, and get a ground ball from 44.5% of batters faced.

The fomula using the average numbers would look like this:

(18.1+(44.5*0.72))-7.5 = 42.6.

Now we've established a baseline to which we can compare Justin Verlander, so let's start doing that. We'll start with this year as he's been bad this year, but how bad?

In 2008, he's striking out 18.7% of hitters, walking 9.4%, and getting 41.3% of them to hit ground balls. That leads to a Dominance Factor of just 39.04. Using our classification from earlier, that puts Verlander's 08 season firmly in between the "below-average" and "average" Dominance Factor.

What about his other 2 full seasons? Well, let's look at them:

2007: 21.1% K rate, 7.7% BB rate, 46.4% GB rate; Dominance Factor of 46.8.

2006: 16.0% K rate, 7.7% BB rate, 41.7% GB rate; Dominance Factor of 38.27.

So, he's had one barely above-average season, and two that are inbetween the below-average and average deviations. Is that the definition of 'ace'? That wouldn't exactly be what I'd write if I had to pen a proper definition. To me, that seems to be pretty average.

His Dominance Factor from 2006 through August 27th, 2008, collectively, stands at 41.61. Over that time period he is striking out 18.7% of hitters, walking 8.27% and getting ground balls at a 43.29% rate. Remember those averages we looked at earlier? The ones that said the average pitcher in this study struck out 18.1%, walked 7.5% and got ground balls from 44.5% of hitters? We could probably just call that "Justin Verlander" and be entirely accurate.

Is this method the end all, be all of analyzing pitchers? Absolutely not. It's got it's flaws but is just meant to be a relatively clean, simple formula/method that uses the three things that I look at first when evaluating a pitcher: his abilities to miss bats, not walk guys, and get ground balls -- the three things that he controls the most when on the mound.

So, is Justin Verlander an 'ace'? No. He is not. Just Verlander's production shows that he's a fireballing, rocket-armed average -- or maybe a bit below-average -- pitcher.