Blangraphs

Vance Worley has pitched well. After another great performance against the Giants he has lowered his ERA down to 2.35 for the season and picked up his 8th win.

Worley's ascent to the majors seems to have a bit of a surprise to most of us though. He as never regarded as a top prospect and not even included in the Halladay, Lee, or Oswalt talks. So why is he now so good?

The answer that seemed most obvious to me was he was probably getting somewhat lucky. I headed to Fangraphs and looked it up and indeed the two factors I always look at first to see if a pitcher has been getting some good luck indicated that Worley's awesome 2011 has been a bit lucky. His BABIP is .247, which for almost every pitcher averages out to .290 for the year, and his HR/FB ratio is 5.6%, which usually averages out to 9.5% for every pitcher. Ok so he has been lucky, but is that the only thing to say about his fantastic year? He has shown a pretty good strike out rate and a league average BB%. Fangraphs also has a great pitching tool called FIP which basically measures a pitcher on only things he can control, strike outs, walks, hit batters, and homeruns. Keeping in mind Worley's HR/FB%, his FIP is a quite good 3.28, sandwhiched between Michael Pineda and Tommy Hanson. An FIP this good assumes that he has some control over his HR/FB%, and maybe he does, but normalized his xFIP is 3.76 which is right between Alexi Ogando and Chris Volstad(!). Hopefully he has some control over his HR/FB%, it wouldn't be unprecedented. Matt Cain has a career HR/FB% of 6.7% over 1200 innings. If Worley can keep his rate somewhere around there then we can expect his FIP to stay closer to 3.3-3.4 rather than 3.8. His BB/9 and K/9 seem to be improving as the season goes on which is very encouraging, over the past 2 months his BB/9 and K/9 have both been above league average (along with his K%).

So from what he know so far, Worley is probably not as good as his ERA and win/loss totals indicate, but he has demonstrated that he can be an above average starting pitcher. For a team with the payroll restraints the Phillies now have from signing big free agents like Halladay and Lee; having an above average starting pitcher making minimum salary is quite valuable. Worley has been a real pleasure to watch so far this season and it appears he will be a quality asset to the Phils for quite some time.

Thnx ZWR