R.A. Dickey: Better Than You Think

On December 16^th, 2012, the Blue Jays appeared to have acquired their new ace of the pitching staff. R.A. Dickey had just won the National League Cy Young award, giving the Blue Jays a possible ace.

It is safe to say, Toronto had high expectations for R.A. Dickey. The results to date, a 3.97 earned run average in two seasons as a Blue Jay, simply have not lived up to all the hype. After expecting an ace, many Blue Jay fans have soured on R.A. Dickey. I certainly had lowered my expectations for R.A. Dickey, which can be shown by a recent comment I made on January 30^th:

"I don't know how you can say Dickey is the closest thing to an ace on this team. Both Stroman and Buehrle were quite a bit better than him last season."

I viewed R.A. Dickey as a number three starter, nothing more. Things changed for me after reading a recent article from MjwW on Marco Estrada. The article pointed out how avoiding contact is the single most important factor in striking out batters. By looking at contact rate, we can get a good indication of where a pitcher's strikeout rate should be.

After looking at the data, R.A. Dickey's strikeout percentage seemed very low considering the low contact rates he posted in 2014. I thought that maybe R.A. Dickey was always an outlier to this rule, given that he is a knuckleball pitcher, but previous seasons of data suggest this is not a regular occurrence:

Though R.A. Dickey does tend to post lower K% than his contact rate would suggest, a 3% difference is simply not the norm. By taking a 3 or 5-year simple average we would expect a gap of around 1-1.5%, much smaller than the 3% gap he posted in 2014.

After seeing this, I wondered what R.A. Dickey's numbers would look like if he had one of his regular gaps between K% and "Hypothetical K%". I used the formulaprovided by Fangraphs to estimate Dickey's Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) in 2015.

To determine Dickey's hypothetical FIP in 2015 I used the following assumptions:

1.     Dickey would post a -1.5% gap between his K% and hypothetical K%, roughly the same gap he has posted in a five year sample.

2.     Dickey would post the same Contact % from 2014 in 2015

3.     Dickey would post the same rates in BB+HBP%, HR/FB and IP/season as he has over his Blue Jays career (2013-2014).

4.     The most recent FIP constant (2014) was used

The Resulting FIP: 3.75

This number looks very number three starter like at first glance, but let's not forget that R.A. Dickey consistently outperforms his FIP. As a knuckleball pitcher, Dickey generates more weak contact and is expected to have a relatively low batting average for balls in play (BABIP). As a Blue Jay, Dickey has outperformed his FIP by 0.48, slightly lower than the 0.6 gap he posted on the Mets. If Dickey simply maintains the gap between his ERA & FIP that he has posted as a Blue Jay, we get the following result:

Runs Allowed per 9 Innings (RA/9): 3.27

For comparisons sake, Jeff Samardzija posted a 3.2 FIP in roughly 220 innings in 2015. Though he did not pitch his home games in the hitter-friendly Rogers Centre, these numbers were good for a 4.1 WAR. Among pitchers, Samardzija posted the 16^th highest WAR in all of Major League Baseball.

More Than a Number Three Starter

If R.A. Dickey can avoid contact at a similar rate in 2015, he could quickly regain his reputation as one of the better pitchers in the game. An improvement to his strike out rate can be expected, which could lower his FIP and ERA significantly. Though he probably will not challenge for the Cy Young award again, the Blue Jays have every reason to be optimistic going forward. Though a 3.27 ERA may be a bit optimistic, if the gap shrinks between his strikeout percentage and "hypothetical strikeout percentage" we could see large improvements to his overall numbers. In 2015, I expect R.A. Dickey to more than just a number three starter.