Is Scott Linebrink salvageable?

Written by: JJ Stankevitz on 5th February 2010

Is Scott Linebrink salvageable? | read this item

If you had to restrain youself from yelling “BOOOOO!” when you read the headline to this article, you’re just like most White Sox fans out there: fed up with Scott Linebrink.

It’s not like that frustration is without justification. After all, Linebrink will make $5 million in 2010 and $5.5 million in 2011 to complete his four-year, $19 million deal that was signed after the 2007 season. And Linebrink hasn’t come close to earning that salary in his first two years on the South Side.

It hasn’t been all bad during Linebrink’s tenure on the South Side, either. For the first three months of 2008, Linebrink pitched like somebody who deserved $19 million over four years.

An injury derailed the rest of Linebrink’s 2008, as he only appeared in 14 games from July through the end of the year in which he allowed five home runs in 13.1 innings. In his previous 33 innings, Linebrink had only allowed three home runs.

Linebrink’s first half of ’09 was successful on the surface—that is, he held a 1.93 ERA heading into the All-Star break. He even held hitters to just a .696 OPS.

Granted, Linebrink didn’t pitch in a whole lot of high leverage situations before the All-Star break. In those 32 appearances before the All-Star break, Linebrink’s leverage index was 1.00—which couldn’t be more average.

He had a couple of notable struggles in high leverage situations, though, such as April 26, May 16, and June 18. And he was stranding runners at an unsustainable rate, too.

So when Linebrink’s second-half ERA ballooned to 8.49, nobody was really surprised. His walk-to-strikeout ratio imploded while allowing five home runs in just 23.1 innings, one more than he allowed in his 32.2 innings before the All-Star break.

As those runners Linebrink allowed to get on base began to score more often, Linebrink’s numbers took a major hit. His first-half success was fool’s gold—that is, his ERA and opponent OPS may have looked nice, but they weren’t the real deal.

While Linebrink’s slider and splitter rated pretty low, his fastball was the problem. For a pitch that he threw at the highest rate since his days with the Padres, it didn’t have a whole lot of success. FanGraphs rated it at -0.90 run/100 pitches, which is not going to come close to cutting it for somebody who throws his fastball over 70 percent of the time.

Behind that rating was poor command. Linebrink’s fastball location chart shows some pretty sinister command:

(image via TexasLeaguers.com)

Now compare that to his called strike location chart:

(TexasLeaguers.com)

Those charts show that Linebrink threw 320 fastballs in the second half of 2009. Of those, hitters swung at 47.5 percent while swinging and missing at just 6.9 percent. And 16.6 percent of those fastballs were put in play.

In essence, Linebrink’s lack of command came back to bite him in the second half. From the end of the All-Star break to the end of the season, one in every five at-bats Linebrink pitched ended in a single. That was a slightly higher percentage (20) than at-bats that ended in a strike out (19.17 percent).

It wasn’t just command, though—Linebrink’s control wasn’t there in ’09, either. After posting a career-best 1.75 BB/9 in 2008, Linebrink’s BB/9 rose to 3.70 in 2009, the highest it’s been since he was with the Astros back in the early 2000s.

If you’re a Linebrink optimist, you can point to his extraordinarily high BABIP of .372 in ’09. In his career, Linebrink’s BABIP is .296. That has to normalize, right? And if it does, he won’t be as bad as he was last year, right?

Well, that’s too simplistic of an explanation for Linebrink’s struggles. He allowed the highest percentage of line drives (23.7 percent) in his career since 2003. That’s no coincidence given his poor command and unwillingness to throw his splitter.

Ultimately, Linebrink’s BABIP shouldn’t be expected to stay at the level it was at in ’09, there’s no guarantee it regresses back to his career average.

Linebrink’s 2009 comes down to this: he didn’t have a feel for his slider and splitter, so he threw his fastball a lot. And his fastball was an ineffective pitch because he had poor command of it. And there haven’t been a whole lot of pitchers in baseball history who have got by when they can’t hit their spots with their fastball.

So is there a light at the end of the tunnel for Linebrink? Unfortunately, there’s nothing to indicate that there is.

It would be inaccurate to say that Linebrink built his previous success by playing half his games at Petco Park, though. In his best year of 2005 (2.76 FIP), Linebrink allowed an .826 OPS at home and a .367 OPS (no, that’s not a typo) on the road.

In fact, from 2004-2006, Linebrink never allowed a higher road OPS than home.

But in 2007, that all began to change. Linebrink’s FIP that year was 5.14, the highest of his career. And that was the year in which his home/road splits began to fit conventional wisdom: with the Padres, he allowed a .542 OPS at home and a .938 OPS on the road. With the Brewers, that split was .730/.795 between home and road.

However, Linebrink actually allowed the lowest percentage of fly balls in his career in ’07, coming in at a 37 percent rate. To date, 2007 is the only year in Linebrink’s career in which his ground ball-to-fly ball ratio was over 1.00.

The real red flag wasn’t in those GB/FB numbers, though—it was in the number of fly balls that left for home runs. Fifteen percent of fly balls Linebrink allowed that year went for home runs, which tells you that a lot of the fly balls he was giving up weren’t soft flyouts to the left fielder.

And that’s where playing half his games at Petco—at least, until he was traded to the Brewers—likely helped Linebrink’s success on the surface. His HR/9 of 1.55 that year has stayed consistent in his two years with the White Sox (1.55, 1.45).

So really, this has been a three-year slide for Linebrink. It’s not like he came to Chicago and forgot how to pitch—instead, he was struggling as early as 2007, it was just masked by a 3.71 ERA.

It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that Linebrink experiences some sort of career rebirth, but he’s going to have to find a way to improve his command and control of his three main pitches.

But there haven’t been too many pitchers who have reversed a three-year slide at age 33. Don’t expect Linebrink to buck that trend.

Topics: 5 Million, All Star, Booooo, First Three Months, Frustration, Justification, Leverage, Opponent, Ops, Pitch, Real Deal, Runners, Scott Linebrink, Second Half, Slider, Sox Fans, Strikeout, Tenure, White Sox, Whole Lot

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