To Throw, or Not to Throw

With a runner on first, a pitcher’s approach to a batter changes in many ways. The most obvious is the delivery out of the stretch. More subtly, the pitcher can be distracted by the runner potentially stealing a base. To mitigate the runner’s chances of stealing a base, the pitcher has the option to throw over to first, thereby keeping the runner closer to the bag.

After a few throw overs, I often hear announcers remarking that the pitcher is “distracted” by the base runner, implying that the pitcher is compromising his effort to get the batter out. By expending his mental, and maybe also his physical, energy on the base runner, he commits less towards the batter. In this article, we attempt to demonstrate this proposed effect with a statistical analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »


Was wOBA Actually Invented Nearly 100 Years Ago?

With apologies to Michael Lewis, what if everything you thought you knew about baseball was wrong? As our collective understanding of advanced statistical analysis in baseball grows exponentially with each passing day, we are now among a generation of baseball fans that has done more critical thinking about and retained more esoteric knowledge of the game than our parents could ever have dreamed of. Anyone who has seen MLB Network’s show on the evolution of statistics would think that between Henry Chadwick’s invention of the box score and Branch Rickey’s hiring of Alan Roth as a statistician, baseball fans in the 20th century consumed baseball metrics in only the most rudimentary of ways — via the dreaded batting average, home runs and RBI triumvirate.

However, what if I told you that one of the most advanced analytical discoveries — one that sabermetricians hold near and dear to their hearts — was actually discovered before Babe Ruth ever played a game?

Read the rest of this entry »


A Cinderella Story?

Searching for and appreciating the “Cinderella” team is a pervasive feature of American sports. Our love of the Cinderella might come from some uniquely American fascination with heroes rising from nothing, or from a basic human desire to recognize and value unexpected outcomes. Whatever the cause, we pay special attention to moments (the Miracle on Ice; the 1966 Texas Western basketball squad; the 1955 Dodgers or 1969 Miracle Mets or 2004 Boston Red Sox) where teams seemingly overachieved or overcame great adversity to come out champions.

Generally, there are three ways of thinking about Cinderellas:
1. A team winning after a long period of failure.
2. An objectively untalented team winning despite their flaws.
3. A team succeeding despite having the odds stacked against them, such as a talented team overcoming objectively more talented opponents.

Read the rest of this entry »


Which Player Benefited Most from Triple-Crown Stats?

This post was born out of a conversation randomly started by Ronit Shah on Twitter. He asked me:

“Is there a more interesting player page than this one? #CoorsEffect”

The page links to Dante Bichette and I did a little research, eventually concluding that Bichette’s slash line was .360/.397/.642 at home and .268/.303/.431 away from 1993 to 1999. He also had a HR/PA of 0.06 at home versus only 0.03 away and hit 1.5 times more extra base hits at home than he did on the road.

Satchel Price decided to chime in, asking the question I asked in the title: “Has any player ever benefited more from triple crown stats? Bad defense, rarely walked, played in Coors during the steroid era.”

I was interested to see what I could find on this, so I made up an analytical tool. I downloaded all player careers for all qualified batters from Fangraphs. Then I found the average and standard deviation for home runs, runs batted in and batting average for all of these players.

Read the rest of this entry »


Plugging the Cardinals’ Shortstop Hole

It’s been nine months since the trade that brought Ryan Theriot to St. Louis, and the shortstop picture for the Cardinals is no clearer today than it was then. With their playoff hopes all but officially extinct, the prospect of another offseason spent looking for up-the-middle help looms large.

The trio of players who have garnered playing time at short for the Cards this season have been unimpressive, producing a combined 0.4 WAR in approximately a season’s worth of plate appearances. Theriot is an obvious non-tender candidate, while newly acquired Rafael Furcal will almost certainly have his $12 million option declined and become a free agent at the end of the season. This leaves the Cards with only Tyler Greene as an internal option, and the free agent market for shortstops is about as thin (the obvious exception being Jose Reyes, who the Cardinals have almost no hope of signing if they expect to keep Chris Carpenter and/or Albert Pujols). While the Cardinals will likely either give Greene a shot to hold down the job, or pick up another bargain during the free agency period, I’d like to propose that the Cardinals consider a radical alternative that could provide the team with a definitive edge: Albert Pujols.

Read the rest of this entry »


Jose Bautista’s Historic Season and the Hall of Fame

Jose Bautista is in the midst of a historic year. Jose Bautista will in all likelihood not make it into the Hall of Fame.

Much has already been said about the unique career arc of Joey Bats, with a particular focus on how ridiculous the number’s he’s putting up this season really are. Through Sunday the Blue Jays had played in 85 games. Jose Bautista has accumulated 5.8 fWAR over that time. Extrapolating that pace (and also taking into account a proportional number of missed games the rest of the way) over the course of the year would give Bautista about 11.1 fWAR.

That is a really large WAR number. In the history of baseball only 37 position players have recorded a season of 11.1 fWAR. Albert Pujols has never amassed such WAR in a single season; Hank Aaron never came close to that.

Read the rest of this entry »


Do Catchers Influence Pitcher Performance? The Story of Spanky and Sluggo

From Opening Day to April 20th, Red Sox pitchers posted a 7.14 ERA when Jarrod Saltalamacchia was behind the plate versus a 2.40 ERA when Jason Varitek started. The resulting hubbub about this split made one fact extremely clear, when comparing the influence of different catchers, sample size is really really important.

Already by June 24th, Varitek and Salty’s split has been greatly reduced, with pitchers now throwing a 3.44 ERA to the veteran captain and a 4.36 ERA to the new guy. I would bet that these numbers will continue to converge as the season drags on, but even after 182 games it’s unlikely that either catcher will have enough innings to statistically test whether one is calling a better game. This is the difficulty of assessing catcher performance: comparing catchers between teams is near impossible (because the pitching staffs are different), and comparing catchers within teams is difficult (because sample sizes are small and different pitchers use different catchers). Nevertheless, many still believe that catchers do influence pitcher performance. Where can we find the data to support this hypothesis?

Read the rest of this entry »


Do Teams Get Dragged Down by Jet Lag?

This article was originally published on WahooBlues.com.

No one likes to travel. Vacations are great and changes of scenery can be nice, but that doesn’t make the cramped bus trip or the bumpy plane ride any more pleasant. The destination may be worth it, but when was the last time you stood up after an hours-long voyage with your good mood still fully intact?

This sentiment is shared even by multimillionaires who make their livings playing a children game and are cheered by thousands of adoring fans every time they go to the office. In baseball, “getaway day” is dreaded, and while jet lag alone wouldn’t make the Indians fall to the White Sox (who’d’ve thought that would be a good example this year?), a team that just got in after a long flight is seen as being at a real, if relatively small, disadvantage at the start of a series.

Read the rest of this entry »


When Do the Standings Matter?

This post originally appeared here

Vin Scully likes to repeat a quote from a well-known former Major League manager, “Give me 50 games and I’ll know what kind of team I have.” I don’t remember who said it, or what the exact quote is, but that’s the gist of it. Just for reference, 50 games into the MLB season usually lands around the end of May. I wanted to test this out and see how quickly we know how good a team actually is, so I did what any regular baseball fan would do: I went to coolstandings.com and grabbed the record at the end of each month for every team since 1998 (expansion). Then, I looked at the end of month winning percentage and compared it to the end of season win total, using a linear regression. I also split each month up into bins of team winning percentage. Each bin contains about 65 teams.

Read the rest of this entry »


Full On Double Wildcard: What Does This Mean?

This post originally appeared here.

According to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, another wild card spot in each league will be added to MLB’s playoff system. However, Michael Weiner – head of the Player’s Association – says talks are still in negotiation, though he doesn’t seem opposed to the idea. I’m sure there is a lot of politicking taking place, something I don’t much care for. So instead, I ask the question: what is the difference in adding a second playoff team? I decided to take a look at each season since the wildcard was introduced in 1995 and find out for myself. I took the record for each playoff team since 1996 and this is what I found:

Read the rest of this entry »