Colorado Rockies show why good pitching beats good hitting

The Colorado Rockies are arguably the best offensive team in Major League Baseball. This holds true even though the Rockies offense has gone dry over the last two weeks or so; a few weeks of struggling is too small a sample size to call their blazing hot start a fluke. They still rank first in batting average, slugging percentage, weighted on-base average and rank second in home runs and isolated power. The Rockies have also scored the third most amount of runs.

They have enjoyed MVP-caliber months from Troy Tulowitzki, who is currently leading MLB in All-Star votes, and Charlie Blackmon, while Justin Morneau has seemed to have rediscovered his power. A casual observer would automatically assume the Rockies are one of the best teams out there, with their top of the leaderboard offensive statistics and the massive amounts of runs they’ve scored. Well, that casual observer would be wrong.

The Colorado Rockies are in third place in the NL West with a 28-30 record. That casual observer is probably asking how can a team with so much offensive aptitude be two games under .500 and 9.5 games back in their division. I’ll tell you how. The Colorado Rockies have one of the worst pitching staffs in baseball. Rockies’ starters have a 4.82 ERA and a 4.70 FIP — by far the highest FIP in the majors.

The point is that good pitching is more valuable than good hitting, and the Rockies are proof of that theory. Obviously a team that can score runs and limit runs is ideal, but that’s not always the case. If a team scores six or seven runs a game, but its pitching staff is giving up just as many, what’s the point? The Rockies scored nine runs in a game against the Philadelphia Phillies in April and lost 10-9. Three days later, the Rockies scored 10 runs and lost 12-10. And just last night, they put up another eight runs on the scoreboard, but still managed to lose 16-8. Do you see what I’m getting at?

If a team is offensively challenged and has a hard time scoring runs, but has a pitching staff that can shut down an opponent on any given night, the team still has a great chance of winning games. Preventing runs is more important than scoring runs.

To further my point, I’ve made a chart of the last nine World Series champions, comparing their earned run average among starters versus their weighted on-base average. I chose wOBA because it’s one of, if not the, best offensive statistics in the sabermetrics community. wOBA measure’s a hitter’s offensive value by realizing that not all hits are created equal, as batting average suggests.

To win the World Series, a team needs to be great at pitching and at least good at hitting. It can never be amazing at one and terrible at the other. In general, unless a team has an absolutely top-tier offense, it doesn’t need to be a dynamic, run-scoring machine offense — although it does help — in order to win. They do need stellar pitching, however. The Cardinals in 2006 are the exception, as they are in almost everything. Despite not being very good in 2006, they somehow won the World Series with an 83-78 regular season record. But let’s forget about that. The Cardinals are outliers.

Of the last nine World Series champs, five have had ERAs ranked among the top ten. The four who didn’t either had extraordinary offenses, or were the St. Louis Cardinals.

As far as the Rockies go, their offense (superb) and pitching (dreadful) are complete polar opposites of each other and, as a result, they’re not a good team. And yes, playing in the thin air of Colorado boosts the offense and hurts the pitching, but their home ERA (4.46) and road ERA (4.36) are almost identical. If the Rockies want to climb back over .500 and attempt to make the playoffs, the pitching needs to improve almost immediately. Luckily for them, Franklin Morales, owner of a 6.03 ERA, was sent to the ‘pen on Tuesday and will be replaced in the starting rotation by top prospect Eddie Butler. Colorado’s offense can even regress. They don’t have to be the best hitting team to make the playoffs, but they do need to be one of the best pitching teams, and this is why the Rockies will not make the playoffs in 2014.