Link: A.J. Burnett The 2013 Winter Soldier

Many of us have said that A.J. Burnett did not deserve to go out like he did in 2013.  Bryan Grosnick of Beyond the Box Score did some more great work in looking at elite K/GB guys in his recent post.  Grosnick calls Burnett the ultimate KGB guy, or Winter Soldier which of course is a movie coming this summer.

It’s a cool post that takes a look at the league-average ground ball percentage for starters which was 44.6 percent in 2013, while the league-average for K percentage was 18.9 percent.

It’s remarkable to consider that Burnett had a 56.5 ground ball percentage, his strikeout percentage of 26.1 percent was also impressive.

My fav paragraph from Bryan’s article.

"Cool. The guy who I’ve deemed as the best at both getting strikeouts and ground balls last season … is thinking about retiring. 2013’s Winter Soldier was A.J. Burnett, who was 27% better than the league-average starter in getting ground balls, while pairing that with being about 38% better than league-average at getting punchouts. In fact, Burnett was second in baseball among qualified starters at getting groundballs, with only KGB rater No. 2 Justin Masterson placing above him on that particular leaderboard."

We can only hope that A.J. Burnett comes back this summer, if not, the movie just won’t be as good.

Here is the link to the entire article, go check it out..

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2014/1/3/5263984/starting-pitchers-strikeouts-ground-balls-winter-soldier