A Closer Look At Arroyo

July 27, 2009, at 7:03 pm

Since the Yankees seem to be on the verge of acquiring Arroyo lets take a closer look at his statistical profile.

The first stat that jumps out at people when looking at Arroyo is his 5.21 ERA. When you couple that with the fact that he plays in the NL it would at first glance seem to doom his success in the AL East. However he plays in the Great American Launching Pad, a hitters goldmine. 15% of all Arroyos fly balls are home runs (league average is closer to 11%, Arroyo has a career rate of 9%.) xFIP is a stat that is scaled like ERA, it’s fielding independent pitching with a normalized home run rate. Arroyos xFIP is 4.87.

When looking at Arroyos statistical profile one other stat jumped out at me. Arroyos Outside Contact Percentage (the percentage of times a batter makes contact with the ball when swinging at pitches thrown outside the strike zone) is 73%. That number is insanely high. To put it in perspective in his career Arroyo averages 60% and the league average is 62.4% this year.

I’m not trying to portray Arroyo as an ace but as a back of the rotation pitcher you could do much much worse.