As you can see, my New Year's resolution to "write more" hasn't been going so well. It's now January 10th and this is the first post of the new year. However, I have already read one book and I did floss that one time. But hey, January is a slow month anyway. I will hopefully be posting some pictures from FanFest and I will probably have a cool little thing to announce in the near future. As for the posting goes, I'll make up for it when the season rolls around. Anyway, on to the first post of 2006!

Of course you're familiar with the old saying, "You learn something new everyday." Well, I use that saying, but I ammend it a little bit. I find myself saying, "Wow, you learn something new everyday...on USSMariner.com!"

Yeah yeah, I know I probably sound like a broken record, or a secret USSM PR Machine. But, I'm not...I just speak the truth. It's no secret that I love that Web Site, but there was one really cool thing that I learned there the other day. It was from Dave, but it was burried in the comments to the post about Pat Gillick signing Ryan Franklin. Check it out...

"The spreadsheet I’m working from doesn’t have BB/9 or K/9, but instead has batted ball percentages. These are better, anyways, because per-nine percentages have flaws that reward pitchers who face more batters in an inning.

K/9, for instance, treats double-strikeout-walk-walk-strikeout-flyball to be equally dominant to groundball-strikeout-strikeout, when the second performance is clearly superior. That’s why I prefer to use BB% and K%. If I ever quote extrapolated rates, it will be BB/G or K/G, which come from the Hardball Times site and use the BB/K percentages to adjust to average baserunner totals...."

I never thought of it like that and for such a long time, I've been using K/9 and not realizing its flaws. But, it certainly does make sense.

So, since I wasted hours of my life a few weeks ago looking at the top pitchers based on K/9, let's see how the list looks for pitchers based on K%, shall we?

Rembember, here are the top 10 qualified pitchers, in order, based on K/9: Mark Prior, Jake Peavy, Johan Santana, Brett Myers, Jason Schmidt, Pedro Martinez, John Lackey, A.J. Burnett, Scott Kazmir and Doug Davis.

Now, here are the top 10 qualified pitchers, in order, based on the percentage of batters faced that they fanned: Mark Prior, Jake Peavy, Johan Santana, Pedro Martinez, Brett Myers, Randy Johnson, Josh Beckett, A.J. Burnett, John Patterson and Chris Carpenter.

Wow, that's quite a difference! 4 guys who weren't on the top 10 K/9 list make it to the top 10 list based on K%. I'm not going to do the non-qualified guys because it's more work, I'm tired and face it...you get the point.

Next up...another stat the guys at USSM toss around: Extra Base Hit %!