Phil Birnbaum praises a Bill James’s study that appears in the 1986 Baseball Abstract for giving simple but clear evidence that Joe Altobelli, then manager of the Orioles, was wrong about early season performance of power versus finesse pitchers. Altobelli hypothesized that power pitchers did better than finesse pitchers in April. Bill showed that not to be the case, that in his study, finesse pitchers did better.

When James conducted that study in the mid 1980s, he needed to do a lot of work by hand. Today, with a few queries, we can extend the study. Here’s what I did:

• Used seasons starting in 1986 so the studies don’t overlap.
• Used Bill’s criteria of a minimum of 25 decisions. He used two other criteria for selecting pitchers, but it seems that very few from the other two would make it past the 25 decision mark, especially in the era of five man rotations.
• I considered pitchers with K per 9 IP >= 8.0 to be power pitchers, <= 6.0 to be finesse pitchers.
• For a particular W-L record, I chose the pitcher with the highest K per 9 to be the power pitcher, and the one with the lowest K per 9 to be the finesse pitcher.

Here are the 44 pairs I found:

This time, however, if you add up the April numbers (including a few regular season games in March), the power pitchers come out ahead:

Note that the difference in Won-Lost records is not all that great, but the power pitchers own a much lower ERA, something Bill didn’t study at the time.

There is one other thing to consider here. During much of Bill’s study, April was a short month as the season usually started in the second or third week of April. In other words, sample sizes were smaller in April. As double headers disappeared and more playoff games came into existence, the season almost always starts at the beginning of the month now, so sample size is a little less of an issue.

Maybe Joe Altobelli wasn’t as wrong as we thought at the time.

Update: I ran the automatic program for 1963-1985.

Bill James classified power and finesse pairs by hand, and doesn’t explain in his article what he used to distinguish one from the other. He talks about one throwing hard and the other not. I suppose we could use average speed of pitches to get a reading on that, but in my mind a power pitcher strikes out a lot of batters and a finesse pitcher does not. Using my criteria, there were 37 pairs in the time period, and while some match James’s study, many do not.