So 6 games into the season and the Dodgers own a league leading 5-1 record. This is the first time the Dodgers have had this good of a start since 1999, but the 1999 team finished under .500 and did not make the playoffs. So what should we really be looking at 6 games into the season? We should be looking at the fact that so far this season the Dodgers are not just a team of two lone gunslingers, Matt Kemp for batting and Kershaw for pitching. Instead the team has a pair of dynamic duo, with Matt Kemp and Andre Either for hitting, and Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley leading the pitching. Add a lights out bullpen, and things are looking bright for the 2012 Dodgers. For Either its clear that the healthy knee has made a word of difference allowing him to hit the ball with more authority, and allowing him to get around left handed pitching as he is 3 for 9 against lefties to start the season. Even with Either's lights out batting right now, I'm going to focus instead on the second half of the pitching duo, Chad Billingsley.
Entering 2009 the Dodgers thought they had the best young pitching duo in Chad Billingsley who at 24 had just finished a solid 16-10 season, and young fireballing lefty Clayton Kershaw. Since then Kershaw has developed into one of the best 5 pitchers in baseball, while Billingsley has shown no development. In 2008 Chad finished the season with a 9 SO/9 (innings), and a 3.6 BB/9. In 2009 the strikeout rate fell to a 8.2 SO/9, while the BB/9 stayed near 4 at 3.9. In 2010 the strikeout rate continued dropping to a 8.0 SO/9, and the BB/9 saw a slight decline to 3.2. In 2011 the first year Chad did not finish with a winning record, his SO/9 bottomed out at 7.3 while his BB/9 rose to an all time high at 4. This means that over the past 4 years Billingsley has seen his SO/BB drop a respectable 2.5 down to a 1.8. Now looking at these numbers you're most likely wondering what can all this mean when put together.
When drafted in 2003 there was no doubt that Chad Billingsley had great stuff, and even today people still know he has great stuff. In fact one of the things that Billingsley has stayed consistently good at is not allowing batters to get solid contact. In the last 4 years he has never been worse than 17th for slugging percentage, meaning even if he allows hits most of the hits allowed are singles. If it wasn't for walking batters as well his ERA would drop drastically. In fact there have been other successful pitchers who didn't have high strikeout totals, but instead use their ability to make hitters not square up, and lack of walks to put together a good SO/BB ratio, and have good seasons. Two great examples would be Matt Cain and Tim Hudson. Last season Cain had a SO/9 rate of 7.3, but only walked 2.6 BB/9 giving him a SO/BB ratio of 2.84 on his way to a 2.88 ERA. Hudson had a 6.6 SO/9 rate, with a 2.3 BB/9, giving him a SO/BB ratio of 2.82, with an ERA of 3.22. If Billingsley can keep his walks down, his strikeout to walk ratio will improve leading to a lower ERA and more wins. The importance of not giving up walks is evident in Clayton Kershaw's 2011 where he won a Cy Young award. During 2011 Kershaw dropped his BB/9 from 3.6 to 2.1, which in turn allowed him to go further into games and pitch more innings in 2011 than any of his previous seasons.
For 2012, the greatest improvement to Chad's pitching has been his reduced walk rate. In no other season has Billingsley had only 1 walk through 2 starts, and with that, only allowed 1 run. Looking at this there is no way Chad will continue to walk so few batters, but lets assume that over the season he can improve on his career numbers and post a 2.5 BB/9. Over a 200 inning season that means walking about 55 batters, about 30 less than 2011. Since 4 walks make a run, we'll divide the 30 runners by 4, and make about 8 runs saved over the course of a year. Chad allowed 88 earned runs in nearly 200 innings. Now subtract 8 runs from that to make 80 runs. This would drop Chad's ERA down to a very respectable 3.63.
In short Chad Billingsley has good stuff, and can be a good pitcher. For years he's been trying to be a strikeout, swing and miss type pitcher, but that's not who he is. Chad hard to square up, mis-hit type pitcher, who doesn't get hit hard, and grinds through his innings without a lot of flash. If he wants to pitch well this year, he only needs to do one thing, stop walking people. If Chad can say drop his walks down to 50 walks this year, he is gonna see a vast improvement in all his other stats, and become a true one two punch with Kershaw.
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