Kuroda and run support

There’s no other way to spin it: Hiroki Kuroda‘s brief tenure with the Yankees has been wildly successful. He’s got a 3.19/3.77 ERA/FIP and has handled himself more than admirably in the A.L. East after moving over from the Dodgers and the weak-hitting N.L. West. His last start, a 6.1 inning outing with four strikeouts, one walk, and one run, was pretty indicative of Kuroda in a few ways. For one, he didn’t allow many runs. The other, though, was that he didn’t get much run support.

Using the Run Support feature at the bottom of Kuroda’s gamelog page on Baseball-Reference, we see that he’s gotten 4.05 runs of support in 2012. Let’s compare that to the rest of the Yankee rotation (minus David Phelps‘s starts):

CC Sabathia: 5.80 runs of support per game
Ivan Nova: 5.29 runs of support per game (not including last night’s disaster)
Andy Pettitte: 4.56
Phil Hughes: 5.25
Freddy Garcia: 5.13

One of those things is not like the other. While Andy Pettitte’s run support was under 5 as well, it’s still better than the A.L. average runs/game mark of 4.47 (not including last night’s games). Kuroda’s is shockingly low, especially considering the Yankees’ offense. Kuroda hasn’t been wholly unlucky. Of his four no decisions on the year, he’s had two (7/6 vs. Boston and 7/13 vs. Anaheim) in which he gave up a combined 12 runs and did not get saddled with a loss. However, Kuroda’s had six games where he’s given up fewer than 4.05 runs and he’s gotten a loss or a no decision. One of these was the aforementioned start against the Mariners from Sunday. The others were his 7/29 start against Felix Doubront and the Red Sox; 6/2 against Rick Porcello and the Tigers; 5/27 vs. Tommy Milone and the A’s; 5/5 vs. Felipe Paulino and the Royals (ugh); and 4/24 vs. Yu Darvish and the Rangers. If we want to be generous, we can also include his 6/18 start against the Braves, when he allowed four runs, though I think we’d be a little too liberal there. On the flip side (that’s also a bit logical), Kuroda hasn’t had a game where he didn’t pitch his best (we’ll say 4+ runs) but the Yankee offense gave him a win anyway.

None of this is horribly consequential, but it does help confirm a suspicion that Kuroda hasn’t been getting the most support possible. Even just half a run extra and Kuroda may have more than 10 wins (which obviously isn’t bad). HIROK has been matched up with some solid pitchers: Felix Hernandez twice; David Price; C.J. Wilson; Tim Hudson twice…but there have also been games when he’s been matched up with guys like Felipe Paulino and Kyle Drabek and the Yankee offense has failed to get runs against them. There’s no way to predict run support, obviously, but considering the Yankees’ lineup, I’d expect them to start scoring a bit more for our favorite free-agent signing.

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