Fun With 2012′s Opening Day Starting Pitchers

Last year

, I looked at the records of 2011′s Opening Day “rookies” (pitchers making their first OD start) vs. OD veterans (those who had made an OD start in a previous season. This post will take the same look at 2012′s Opening Day starters.

Last season, there were 11 matchups between OD “rookies” and “veterans.” In those games, the veterans pitched better in 7 and their teams won 6, so they had a slight edge over the rookies. Counting all games, the 17 veterans pitched a bit better than the 13 rookies overall, though the rookies had slightly better  strikeout and walk rates.

This year, 19 OD veterans toed the rubber for their teams, while 11 rookies got the call. Because of the weird 1-game series that the Cardinals played in Miami to open the Marlins’ stadium, two of the pitchers (the Brewers’ Yovani Gallardo

and the Reds’ Johnny Cueto ) made their OD starts against a team playing in its second game.

That leaves 14 matchups between OD starters. Of those, just 1 was a matchup of Opening Day rookies: the Rangers’ Colby Lewis

vs. the White Sox’ John Danks . Another 5 matchups were between OD veterans. Here’s how they stacked up, with the winning teams underlined and the players with the better pitching lines bolded*.

* I used WPA for this, but you could also use Game Scores. The results are the same in this case.

All of these were fairly close games, but the team whose pitcher had fewer OD starts won 3 of the 4 matchups with unequal OD start totals. The one exception was Roy Halladay, who edged Erik Bedard and the Pirates 1-0. Of course, while the Rays won, Shields actually pitched a bit worse than Sabathia (though both got shelled).

There were also 8 matchups between vets and rookies, of which the veterans’ teams won 6. The veteran starters also had the higher WPA in 6 of the 8 games.

That table makes it seem like the OD veterans pitched better on the whole than the OD rookies, but that’s actually not the case when you look at the whole sample. For one thing, many of the losing rookies actually pitched very well (Lester, McCarthy, Chen, and Strasburg in particular, as well as Johnny Cueto, who isn’t on the list above). For another, the worst performances of the various Opening Days were all by veterans; Sabathia, Shields, Lincecum, Romero, Johnson, Volquez, and Yovani Gallardo all had worse WPA marks than any rookie. The worst WPA by an OD rookie was John Danks’ -0.086 against the Rangers, and Danks actually pitched pretty well, with 6 strikeouts vs. no walks, though he gave up 3 runs in 6 IP.

Overall, the rookies’ average pitching line was fantastic, though the veterans didn’t do too badly, either. Here are the averages for each group (this is per start, not per 9 innings):

The peripherals are pretty similar, though the rookies had slightly better walk and HR rates. While the OD veterans had more success in the head-to-head matchups, I think it’s fair to say that this year, the OD rookies actually pitched a bit better.