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From: david@fisher.UUCP (David Rubin)
Newsgroups: net.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Lineup dependency
Message-ID: <769@fisher.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 01:07:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: fisher.769
Posted: Thu Oct  3 01:07:07 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Oct-85 05:37:33 EDT
References: <453@philabs.UUCP> <694@mmintl.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Princeton University.Mathematics
Lines: 21

Frank Adams has kept the issues clear.  I'd like to comment on one of
his contributions:

> On the other hand, batters definitely DO hit better with men on base.
> The book put out by the Elias Sports Bureau (it has their name in the
> title) has statistics on this for the entire major leagues last year.
> As I remember (the book is not here) the effect was about 20 points in
> terms of batting average.  So clearly there is an advantage to batting
> after a player who gets on base a lot.  Although the statistics for it
> are not available, it seems likely that this is enhanced when batting
> after good base stealers.

What this says is that if a player played on a team that had a runner
on every time he hit, he could expect to hit 20 points better than if
he never had a runner on.  Applying this to my rough guess that the
best teams have runners on about half the time, and the worst about a
quarter of the time, the advantage to be gained is no more than
20*(.5-.25) = 5 BA points.  Exactly what I mean when I suggest that
the difference is not something we ought to lose sleep over...

						David Rubin