What Is "Dominance"?

The dictionary defines dominance as "the disposition of an individual to assert control in dealing with others".  I like that definition, especially in how it applies to pitching.  In pitching, for a relief pitcher to completely dominate the opposition he would have to come into a game and not allow a base runner.  In the ultimate and perfectly dominate performance, a pitcher would strikeout the side with 9 pitches.  In a lesser instance of dominance it would be to strike out the side without allowing a base runner.  And finally, the least dominating performance on the 'dominance scale" is to pitch an inning without allowing a base runner.  I don't have the resources to go through all of this years' appearances to count the number of times any of these happened, but I did go through some of the top reliever's game logs and manually counted the number of times they pitched a perfect inning and the number of times they pitched 1 inning and had 3 strike outs.  You'll find those results below.  I'm sure this data doesn't show how effective a pitcher has been, in fact, I'm sure it probably doesn't show much of anything other than the number of perfect innings thrown, but I did think it was interesting (and hopefully you do too).

In my previous posting, I wrote about Frankie Rodriguez not appearing to me to be as dominating as he once was.  Within that post I stated he has had only 17 appearances where he pitched at least one inning and retired the side in order.  Since this blog is pretty new and we don't have much traffic, I posted the K-Rod piece on an Angel's fansite I visit regularly.  I was looking for some feedback and comments on what I had written, maybe some other point of views, etc.  One of the comments I received was basically stating I was full of shit and what relevance did the 17 perfect innings have to do with how well K-Rod was pitching.  The comment also asked how many perfect innings did other closers have and how did Frankie compare.  I thought that was a very good question, so I set out to find out.  Here is what I found:

According to the above data, Joakim Soria of the Royals has been the most dominate relief pitcher so far this year, and K-Rod has been the 16th dominate.  I'm not claiming that Soria has been a better pitcher than Rodriguez based on this information, even though it'd be hard to claim otherwise based on all of the available statistics.  I was surprised to see how far down on the list Rodriguez did land.

Daily Notes:

• Maicer Izturis looks to be heading to the DL after re-injuring his thumb during Wednesday night's game.  The Angels already have Sean Rodriguez up from AAA to back-up Erick Aybar at short.  Kendry Morales will be called up to take Izturis' roster spot.
• Magic Number: 27