The Effect of Devastating Blown Saves
It’s a pretty well documented sabremetric notion that pitching your closer when you have a three run lead in the ninth is probably wasting him. You’re likely going to win the game anyways, since the vast majority of pretty much everyone allowed to throw baseballs in the major leagues is going to be able to keep the other team from scoring three runs.
But we still see it all the time. Teams keep holding on to their closer and waiting until they have a lead in the ninth to trot him out there. One of the reasons for this is that blowing a lead in the ninth is devastating—it’ll hurt team morale more to blow a lead in the ninth than to slip behind in the seventh. And then this decrease in morale will cause for the players to play more poorly in the future, which will result in more losses.
Or will it?
We’re going to look at how teams play following games that they devastatingly lose to see if there’s any noticeable drop in performance. The “devastating blown save” stat can be defined as any game in which a team blows the lead in the ninth and then goes on to lose. Our methodology is going to look at team records in both the following game as well as the following three games to see if there’s any worsening of play. If the traditional thought is right (hey, it’s a possibility!), it will show up in the numbers. Let’s take a look.
All Games (2000-2012)
|
9+ Inning Games |
Devastating BS’s |
Devastating BS% |
Following Game W% |
Three Game W% |
|
31,405 |
1,333 |
4.24% |
.497 |
.484 |
In the following game, the team win percentage was very, very close to 50%. Over a sample size of 1,333 that’s completely insignificant. But what about the following three games, where the win percentage drops down to roughly 48.4%? Well, that’s a pretty small deviation from the 50% baseline, and is of questionable statistical significance. And wouldn’t it make sense that if the devastating blow save effect existed at all it would occur in the directly following game, and not wait until later to manifest itself? It seems safe to say that the “morale drop” of devastatingly losing is likely nonexistent—or at most incredibly small. We’re dealing with grown men after all. They can take it.
Another thing you might want to consider when looking at these numbers is that teams with lots of blown saves are probably more likely to be subpar. Not so fast. The win% of teams weighted to their amount of blown 9th innings over the years is .505. This is probably because better teams are more likely to be ahead in the first place, and so they are going to be on the bubble to blow saves more often even if they blow them a smaller percentage of the time. Just for the fun of seeing how devastation-prone your team has been over the past 13 years, however, here’s a table of individual team results.
Devastating Blown Saves By Team (2000-2012)
-
Team
Devastating Blown Saves
Next Game W%
Milwaukee
63
0.460
Chicago Cubs
60
0.4
Kansas City
57
0.315
Toronto
54
0.592
Chicago White Sox
52
0.615
Houston
51
0.372
NY Mets
50
0.56
St. Louis
48
0.625
Texas
46
0.543
Cleveland
46
0.586
Texas
46
0.543
Florida
45
0.511
Baltimore
45
0.377
Oakland
44
0.545
Seattle
44
0.5
Boston
41
0.585
Cincinnati
41
0.585
Los Angeles
40
0.425
Detroit
39
0.384
Atlanta
39
0.743
Detroit
39
0.384
San Diego
35
0.4
Anaheim
34
0.529
New York Yankees
33
0.666
Minnesota
33
0.515
Pittsburgh
32
0.468
Montreal
25
0.2
Washington
18
0.555
Miami (post-change)
8
0.375
Congratulations Pittsburgh, you’ve been the least devastated full-time team over the past 13 years! Now if there’s a more fun argument against the effects of devastating losses than that previous sentence, I want to hear it. Meanwhile the Braves have lived up to their nickname, winning in an outstanding 74.3% of games following devastating losses (it looks like we’ve finally found our algorithm for calculating grit, ladies and gentleman) while the hapless Expos rebounded in just 20% of their games. Milwaukee leads the league in single-game heartbreak, etc. etc. Just read the table. These numbers are fun. Mostly meaningless, but fun.
Back to the point: team records following devastating losses tend to hover very, very close to .500. Managers shouldn’t worry about how their teams lose games—they should worry about if their teams lose games. Because, in the end, that’s all that matters.
Raw data courtesy of Retrosheet.
Brandon Reppert is a computer "scientist" who finds talking about himself in the third-person peculiar.
Anybody who blows up conventional wisdom that thoroughly outta be shot. Next you’ll be proving that left-handed relief pitchers aren’t flaky.
Duly noted, I probably pushed that in the narrative too much.
It’s not as if we can just dismiss morale as being affectively nonexistent without inspecting the data first, though.
No, that was just right. It’s more interesting to be blown up than proven right.
I am convinced though, from talking to pitchers, that the whole ninth inning thing is deeply into their heads. That might be a different story.
Good point. While this data shows that DBSs don’t seem to have any effect on the entire team, it’d be interesting to see how the individual pitchers performed in their next appearance following a DBS.
Yeah good point, if there’s an effect on anyone it would seem most likely to show up in the closer who blew the save himself.
I’d have to re-do a lot with the way I did this study to find that out though to the point where I’d basically be doing a whole new study (I used team box score data, not player data).
Philadelphia, Arizona, and Colorado are absent from the list
Looks like there was a little glitch in my sorting algorithm that led to some duplicates. Here’s the numbers:
Philly : 46 | .586
Arizona : 41 | .439
Colorado : 45 | .400
Not that it’d make _much_difference but shouldn’t the after winning % be weighted by the overall winning % of each team. Perusing the leaders in devastating blown saves, those don’t look like teams that would be expected to win 50% of their games between 2000 and 2013.
That’s what I originally thought too, but the expected record of teams was actually .505. The presence of Detroit, San Diego, Pittsburgh, etc. in the bottom half of the table seems to have evened out some weaker teams being at the top of the table.
Also since we’re using 13 years of data, some teams were better than we think they are now (for example, the Cubs were pretty good for a while).
nicely done!
Not that I’m looking for ways to focus on that .484 over three games figure… But if some of those Devastating Blown Saves did indeed lead to extra innings losses, it could be an effect of the bullpen being overused in that one game. Probably (?) someone has already done a similar study showing how teams performed after extra innings games, even those without Devastating Blown Saves?
There’s definitely a possibility of this, and it would be exacerbated by the simple fact that the closer would have pitched in the “devastating” game, and so he would likely be less available in upcoming games.
Also in the following three games (theoretically) 66% of those games are played against different teams, while the following one game has only 33% of the games played against a different team–which could explain for some of the discrepancy.
I think comparing effects after a “devastating losses” versus effects another specific game ending would strengthen your argument. Of course there’s so many game endings to compare it may be hard to choose ( after a blown save? A normal save? Game with no saves? After a win? ( Oh wait there’s no such thing as winning streaks ) ) How about effects of the other team who won during the “devastating loss?” I’m assuming a small fraction of the next (or next 3) games were with a different team, thus would not simply be 1 – 0.497 or 1-0.484. My gut feeling though is that there would be still no significant difference.
I imagine there would be no significant difference either, or perhaps even a negative difference if there were enough games that went to extra innings and therefore taxed bullpens more. In my initial look-up I haven’t been able to find any studies that give data-driven analysis on on the effect of long extra-inning games, so who knows. I’ll do a deeper search before deciding if this is something I should take on myself.
Just ran the numbers, and here’s how the winners of devastating blown games fared:
Following one game: .495
Following three games: .494
Because our expected record is roughly .495, we can conclude that winning a ‘devastating blown save’ game gains no real advantage.
Really cool! Thanks for responding to my comments.