Wojciechowski: Bartolo Colon, the most extreme control pitcher in baseball
From Jason Wojciechowski at Baseball Prospectus on May 17, 2013:
Let me put this right up front, because it’s the eye-catching number: Bartolo Colon‘s percentage of batters walked through eight starts this season (i.e. through 47 1/3 innings pitched, i.e. through 189 batters faced, i.e. almost 30 percent of the way to the number of hitters he faced last year) is 1.1 percent.
I don’t expect you to know how low that is because we’re all still getting used to the idea of walk and strikeout rates being expressed as percentages of batters faced rather than raw totals or “per-nine” figures. For context, here are the walk percentage leaders for ERA qualifiers in 2013:1
- Bartolo Colon, 1.1%
- Adam Wainwright, 1.8%
- Brandon McCarthy, 2.8%
- Dan Haren, 3.0%
- Ervin Santana, 3.1%
- Kevin Correia, 3.7%
I went down to six, which is a weird thing to do, but I wanted to say this: Bartolo Colon has walked so few batters this season that his rate is less than one-third the rate of the man with sixth-best walk rate in baseball.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=20600
Originally published: May 17, 2013. Last Updated: May 17, 2013.