Matsuzaka's Near-No-Hitter

The Weirdness of Dice-K

I'm not following the Rays-Bosox ALCS at all, but this headline caught my eye.

Matsuzaka's 2008 season must have been the most suspect, least impermeable 18-win, sub-3.00-ERA campaign in history, full of high pitch-counts and low innings-counts, as well as a league-leading 94 walks issued. His survival was predicated largely on a .164 opponents' batting average with runners in scoring position, lowest in the majors.

"When Daisuke is pitching, at some point you run out of patience," Ortiz said. "He won 18 games this year. I don't know how he does it, but he does it."

He began Friday night at his maddening, inefficient best/worst, walking the bases loaded between a pair of outs, only to extricate himself delicately. He mixed in only 12 strikes among his 27 pitches in the inning.
"I had a tough time getting going," Matsuzaka said through an interpreter.

Presumably, someone said something to him between innings -- tongue-lashings typically require no translation -- because he was a different pitcher from then on, beginning with a three-strike dismissal of Dioner Navarro to open the second. From the second through the sixth inning, Matsuzaka needed only 16, 16, 10, 10 and 10 pitches.

"He went against his norm," Floyd said. "He usually pitches backward [by throwing breaking and off-speed pitches early in the count], but he went to his fastball. We hadn't seen that from him before."

Matsuzaka still had a no-hitter entering the seventh, and more importantly a 1-0 lead, but Crawford drilled a single into right field -- at which point Larsen, whose 1956 perfect game remains the only no-hitter in postseason history, breathed a sigh of relief -- and moved to third on Floyd's single to left-center.

With double-barreled action in the Red Sox' bullpen, Manager Terry Francona not only stuck with Matsuzaka -- who wiggled out of the jam on a shallow fly ball, a strikeout and a harmless grounder to short -- but also sent him back out for the eighth having already thrown 107 pitches.

I mean, it's a great performance of sorts. He just doesn't like it when a batter gets a hit. So he refuses to throw strikes. A quick look through Fangraphs shows his BABIP is a little better than league average thank to the Bosox defense. He walks a tonne more guys than league average but it's his AVG against that shows he just doesn't allow the hitter to take good swings.
Conseqeuntly his WHIP is a hair below league average, which is amazing.

The Dice-K theory seems to be that a walk isn't as good as a hit if nobody can get a hit to drive in the run. Amazingly, it's working. I have a feeling Billy Beane's A's would have a shit of a time if they faced Dice-K in the play-offs. It wouldn't be a crapshoot when his patient hitters will be waiting for their pitch, and it never comes.