Brian Bannister uses smarts to succeed in majors: Royals right-hander tries to prove his doubters wrong by putting his intelligence to the test in getting batters out

Baseball Digest, August, 2008 by Joe Posnanski

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ALL OFF-SEASON, BRIAN Bannister worked the umbers. It's what he does. Sure, number crunching may seem a strange way to respond to baseball doubters. But that's Banny. He cannot blow his pitches past hitters. He calculates the ball by them.

He has always expected scouts and pitching coaches and fans to miss it. He understands how they see him-they see an unimposing pitcher. He is not left-handed like his father, Floyd. He can't throw his fastball in the high 90s, urn, like his father, Floyd. He can't just blow hitters away with his stuff, you know, yeah, like his dad, Floyd Bannister.

Well, the comparisons are inevitable, aren't they? Some sons run away from their father's fame. Some run toward it. The day in 2000 when Brian first pitched as a walk-on at Southern California, the day he gave up a preposterous home run to Bobby Crosby at Long Beach State that did not land until recently, that first day he knew that people would say that he's not Floyd Bannister.

Well, he's not. Brian knew that the baseball scouts didn't like his fastball, didn't like his secondary pitches, didn't like his size. They did like his makeup--everybody loves Banny--so they kindly called him a "potential fifth starter"--which is really the scouts' curse. They were condemning him (at best) to a life of spot starts, bus rides between Class AAA and the Show, a standing February spring-training appointment to prove himself all over again. Bannister didn't mind any of that.

"I understand," he says. "I wouldn't be impressed with me, either."

Well, Banny had his plan, too. He scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of his SAT. He graduated cum laude at USC. Bannister is, teammate Gil Meche says, the smartest guy he's ever met in baseball. Smart guys come up with plans.

So, Bannister turned to the numbers. He studied patterns and tendencies. He broke down his statistics into those crazy-looking abbreviations--BABIP, OPSa, GB/FB and so on. He experimented on the mound, pitched by numbers, counted cards like those MIT blackjack hustlers in Las Vegas.

And you know what? It all worked last year. It was his first full year; Bannister won 12 games (most for a Royals pitcher in five years) and he had a good-looking 3.87 ERA. If he had just pitched well in his last two starts ("I hit the wall," he admitted), he might have won the Rookie of the Year award. He entered the off-season thrilled, hopeful, believing that he had proved himself and that maybe he could be a key part of a Royals pitching revival in 2008.

And then ... well, that's when the math people turned on him.

And Brian Bannister never saw that one coming.

"Intelligence may have split the atom and put a man on the moon, but it can't sustain a .264 BABIP."

There's a funny word. BABIP. It is an acronym; it stands for "Batting Average against on Balls Hit In Play." But people pronounce it BABIP--rhymes with crab dip. It is the word that haunted Brian Bannister all off-season.

How to explain? There's a theory that has been batted around baseball's statistical community for a few years--a theory started by a man named Voros McCracken--that says pitchers can control only three things. They can control how many hitters they strike out. They can control how many hirers they walk. And they can control how many home runs they allow.

That's it. The theory goes that once the ball is put in play, the pitcher's control is more or less gone. At that point, it's up to the fates and the skills of the defenders. A close study of the numbers indicates that good pitchers and bad ones, on average, give up a hit roughly three out of 10 times the ball is put in play (the average BABIP is about .303).

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This concept seems absurd. Are you saying that Roger Clemens and Scott Elarton give up the same number of hits on balls in play? No. Actually, Clemens (lifetime .286 BABIP) gives up more hits on balls hit in play than Elarton (.276 BABIP). How is this possible? Well, Clemens allowed many fewer balls to get hit in play. He struck out many, many more people and walked fewer. And Elarton gave up lots and lots and lots of home runs. That's the difference.

So the theory is that if Scott Elarton's BABIP is better than Roger Clemens', then the whole thing must fluctuate because of luck. And that brings us to the point: Last year, Bannister had that .264 BABIP which was freakishly low, third lowest in all of baseball. So you can understand the problem now. The math people, many of them, think that Bannister was simply very, very lucky last year.

"There's a gorilla in the room," Bannister admits. "My BABIP was too low. So it's natural for some people to think that next year, it will go back up and people will get more hits on me and I'll have a bad year. It's natural for people to think that."

But do you think that?

"No," he says. "No, I think I can beat the system. I really do."

He spent his whole off-season thinking about how he is going to beat the system, how he is going to keep his BABIP low and keep winning games and keep his ERA low. While other pitchers work on new pitches, Bannister has been working on new strategies, new tactics to put hitters at such a disadvantage that they will not be able to scrape hits against him.