Give Brian Bannister Ten Minutes, He’ll Fix Victor Zambrano And Dewon Brazelton

Article (& even the quoted bit) ganked from Baseball Think Factory’s Newsblog, but if the internet’s about anything, it’s about sharing, so:

Bannister recalls Rick Peterson, the Mets’ pitching coach at the time, talking about pitch counts. It was simple math — "If you get ahead of a guy in an 0-2 count, his batting average goes down," Bannister says — but the message stuck.

"It got me intrigued into how different things affect my future success in this game," Bannister says. "It’s been a process, because nobody is out there using sabermetrics as a tool in player development.

"I kind of feel like I’m a pioneer in that aspect of the game. That every fifth day when I go out there, the Major Leagues is kind of my way to apply this stuff and see if it can be used in the future for developing players."

These sort of "stathlete" articles were around & about for Bannister back in ’07, when he first broke through with the Royals (and if I could find one of them, I’d link to them right here).  But as this MLB article notes, Bannister was skeptical of his success in ’07 (due to a low K/9 rate, and an abnormally low BABIP), tried to make some tweaks in ’08, got lit up, was eventually demoted, and went back to the drawing board in prep for 2009. 

Specifically, he turned to MLB’s PITCHf/x technology.  He talks (like, actual audio) about it in more depth in this interview from waaay back in July, The Hardball Times‘ Harry Pavlidis goes in depth to look at what’s changed for Bannister, and Fangraphs‘ Dave Allen adds a little garnish.  As for the actual results of Bannister’s experiment to reproduce 2007′s success in a less fluky fashion, so far so good:

• 2007: 165.0 IP, 76 R, 4.20 K/9, 2.40 BB/9, .266 BABIP
• 2009: 123.0 IP, 60 R, 5.78 K/9, 2.85 BB/9, .287 BABIP

Thank god Dayton Moore is backing up the yeoman work done by guys like Bannister & Zack Grienke with powerhouse offensive acquisitions like Yuniesky Betancourt and Willie Bloomquist.

As for the Rick Peterson sideswipe in the title, looks like Brazelton’s path did vaguely cross Bannister’s — DB was in the Royals organization from 12/4/06 to 4/27/07; Bannister was acquired from the Mets on 12/5/06.  No fixing occurred, sadly.

And here’s a link to Bannister’s Fangraphs page, if you want to get your butter straight from the churn.

[For Bannister, the secret is in the numbers | MLB.com: News]