quality assurance

In an attempt to answer the questions raised by reader Tom yesterday, below is the inning by inning breakout of starting pitchers plunks of Craig Biggio, broken out by whether or not they had a quality start (6 or more innings, 3 or fewer earned runs). This data is not complete as inning by inning data is not (freely) available for games from the '93-'99 seasons. If this data is representative, it shows that pitchers who hit Biggio in the first 4 innings are much less likely to be in the midst of a quality start than pitchers who hit him in the 5th inning or later. At the same time, among the pitchers who hit him during a quality start, they did so most often in the 1st inning.

	Plunks
Inning	QS	not QS
1	8	19
2	2	7
3	6	11
4	3	13
5	7	11
6	2	4
7	6	2
8	3	0
9	1	0

Among those pitchers who hit Craig Biggio during a quality start, 19 plunked batters at a rate less than or equal to 0.125 plunks per inning pitched, while 45 were greater than 0.125 and less than 0.25. Only 13 pitchers threw more than 0.25 plunks per inning pitched during a quality start in which they hit Craig Biggio with a pitch. (This part of the data IS complete.)

The chart below shows the counts of quality starts vs non-quality starts broken out by plunks per inning pitched. Starters who have hit Biggio put plunked fewer than 0.25 batters per inning have gotten a quality start about half the time, but getting any higher than that appears to be a ticket for a rough outing.

PPI	Quality Start	Not a Quality Start
0-0.25	64	65
0.25-0.5	13	43
0.5-0.75	0	5
0.75-1	0	5
> 1	0	3