The Senior Circuit: Truth, Beauty, Groundballs
May 12, 2010
Carson-Newman College was founded with a commitment to public service. From the school's humble beginnings as a training ground for Baptist missionaries, "Truth, Beauty, Goodness" has served not just as the school's motto, but also as a guide by which its student body sought to carry out its volunteer spirit.
It's odd, then, that for a school with a history steeped in encouraging its students to seek a higher calling, that Carson-Newman's pitchers apparently take great pleasure in driving baseballs into the ground.
Consider senior RHP Ryan Hendrickson. While his traditional numbers are plenty impressive (12 K's per nine, K/BB of almost three), it's his groundout/flyout ratio of over 3.5 that got our attention. And so we decided to run a list of the top college groundball pitchers, and then we had to double-check to make sure we didn't just run a query for the Division Two South Atlantic Conference alone. Shockingly, Hendrickson's 3.5 is only third-best among Eagle pitchers.
We're tracking about 500 schools this year, covering hundreds of draft prospects and thousands of others. Of all those guys, three of the top 15 pitchers, as ranked by groundout/flyout ratio, play for Carson-Newman:
6. Freshman RHP Ryan Fillers
13. Junior RHP D.J. Ferguson
14. Hendrickson
Now on some level, we sabermetricians are not so unlike the aspiring theologians who founded Carson-Newman, in that we often can't stop looking for grander answers to life's little mysteries. "What does it mean that a small school from east-central Tennessee might produce such groundball-inducing young men?" "Is there a way to use multiple regression to glean further knowledge?"
But on another level, we're all just fans. Every so often it's OK to just look at the data and say, "Hey, that's cool." And if somebody wants to send a scout to watch Fillers next year...well, that's cool too.