Sabermetrics: MSV, C.C. Sabathia, and Magnum Start Theory

Sabermetric analysis Magnum Start Theory analyzes current New York Yankees pitcher and his 2016 campaign in the Big Apple.

As some of you may remember, I brought up the concept of Magnum Start Theory (MST) a little while back. This concept may be incredibly underdeveloped at this point, however, it makes sense to begin performing studies with the intent of pitting them against each other. While there is only a handful to use, I plan on adding to the collection with New York Yankees lefty C.C. Sabathia.

With Sabathia, we all have to keep one thing in mind when analyzing him. That being the fact that while he has been a dominating pitcher for a good deal of his career, the purpose of this study will be to use his lesser years against an ace’s. After saying that, it makes sense to scrutinize Sabathia’s 2016 campaign.

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This might sound a bit peculiar after the aforementioned paragraph, but Sabathia performed at a fairly high level that season. However, a fairly high level does not equate to ace status, especially when you dissect his numbers thoroughly. Just by looking at his Magnum Start results, none of them jumped off the page.

To illustrate this better, Sabathia never recorded more than two Magnum Starts in a month. While he posted that total in both September and May of 2016, Sabathia put up a serviceable 1.38 MMA in the latter. Neither of those totals is anything close to elite, so his best months failed to come anywhere close to what he once was.

On the flip side, even though Sabathia missed a few starts in 2016, he was able to rack up a decent Quality Start Total (QST). He recorded sixteen quality starts that year, which equates to a 53.3 percent Yearly Quality Percentage (YQP). Given many top pitchers post much higher scores in this area, which is why Sabathia’s ’16 season is far from elite.

Before we wrap up, I am going to give you some more Magnum Start Value tidbits regarding Sabathia. He never tallied a MS in the MPM or MPP category, meaning that Sabathia never went eight innings allowing two runs or less in 2016. This is critical information, due to the fact that this portion of MSV shows a pitchers’ dominance deep into games. On top of that, Sabathia posted an YMT of sixteen, not to mention an YMA of 0.53, both of which are atrocious scores for the number of starts he made.

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All in all, these numbers should be interesting to compare with an ace of another team who didn’t have the best talent around him, however still scored well in regards to MSV anyways. An example could be Felix Hernandez, who has already been analyzed using this formula and pitched with a horrible Mariners team several years back. What I will use to cross-examine the two is undecided at the moment, but should be interesting once the scrutiny of each begins. Stay tuned, plenty more to come.