Unconventional Wisdom: Who are today's best-hitting pitchers?

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By Nate Silver, Baseball Prospectus

In the six years that I've generated PECOTA forecasts, I've never bothered to run hitting projections for pitchers. In fact I've regarded pitcher hitting as something of a nuisance; I specifically screen out any pitchers so that they won't be selected as comparable players. This isn't an aesthetic judgment by any means -- watching pitchers try (and fail) to hit is one of my favorite pastimes. But since even the pitchers who make 35 starts a year won't usually get more than 80 or 90 plate appearances, I've generally figured that it wasn't quite worth the trouble.

Still, if you aren't accounting for pitcher hitting, you're unambiguously cheating some players out of their value. For example, Micah Owings had a VORP of 16.5 last season, so his offense did more to contribute to his team's success than real-life hitters such as J.D. Drew, Ivan Rodriguez and Rafael Furcal. But how much of that performance was actual skill rather than a fluke of small sample size? Pitcher hitting suffers from the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare problem: Take enough pitchers, give them all 70 at-bats or so, and two or three of them are going to wind up hitting .320 with a couple of long balls, perhaps simply by a stroke of luck.

To address this question, I developed a regression-based system for projecting hitter performance that I'll call SPHPS (Simple Pitcher Hitting Projection System), which isn't a catchy anagram at all, but has the virtue of being a palindrome. This system is derived solely from the hitting statistics of pitchers; you don't want to include position players in the same dataset because then you'll regress toward the mean established by position players, when pitchers and position players are selected to play in the major leagues based on totally different skill sets. (The gap between pitcher and position-player hitting has grown steadily since the dawn of baseball time).

• Without going into too much more detail about SPHPS, which isn't anything terribly sophisticated, here are a couple of tips to keep in mind when you're trying to find good-hitting pitchers:

The balance of this article will be devoted to identifying the 10 best-hitting pitchers in baseball as identified by SPHPS. The specific measure we use is the number of extra runs a pitcher produces relative to a league-average hitting pitcher, as derived from a version of the Marginal Lineup Value formula and assuming that the pitcher gets 80 plate appearances in a season -- roughly the number of plate appearances a pitcher should expect if he spends the whole year in the rotation and makes 32 or 33 starts). Minor league statistics are considered (through the Davenport Translations) and park effects are accounted for. (These projections reflect performance through 2007.)