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From: dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin)
Newsgroups: net.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Re: lineup dependency (again!)
Message-ID: <466@philabs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 15:00:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: philabs.466
Posted: Thu Oct  3 15:00:20 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Oct-85 15:47:46 EDT
References: <455@philabs.UUCP> <696@mmintl.UUCP> <458@philabs.UUCP> <707@mmintl.UUCP>
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Organization: Philips Labs, Briarcliff Manor, NY
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Frank Adams writes:

> In article <458@philabs.UUCP> dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin) writes:
> >> >How about a stat such as "how many runs you
> >> >contribute to", measured by runs you score, drive in, or help advance
> >> >the runners,
> 
> One question.  Suppose the lead off batter singles and steals seconds.
> The next two batters make outs.  The cleanup hitter walks.  The number
> five hitter singles, bringing in the runner from second.  Finally, the
> number six hitter strikes out.  Shouldn't the cleanup hitter get credit
> for "contributing" to the run?  If he had made an out, it wouldn't have
> scored.

But it's an awfully small contribution. It's more of a non-negative
act, not a positive one, so I can't see really giving him a positive stat.
But you are right in general - evaluating individual contributions and
separating them from team scoring is difficult.

>>> In particular, if I know a player's on base and slugging averages, I don't
>>> much care what his batting average is. In fact, it is better if the batting
>>> average is lower, with the same on base and slugging averages.
>>
>>Well, I think that is lineup dependent! Specifically, a cleanup hitter should
>>get a lot of hits - his OBA is not terribly important.
> 
> Yes, but if you fix the OBA and SA, and decrease the BA, he gets more extra
> base hits.  This is likely to mean more RBI, not fewer.
> 
Maybe. In some situations, yes, but sometimes, no. We are actually talking
about different things, though. I was making the statement that I'd
prefer to see a cleanup hitter have a higher BA at the expense of his OBA.

> >He's supposed to
> >be driving in runs. A perfect example of this is Jason Thompson. His OBA
> >is among the best in the league, but his BA is low. I would much rather
> >see a higher BA, even at the cost of a lower OBA. He just doesn't drive
> >in runners. So who cares if we walks that much (he was leading the NL the
> >last time I saw the numbers) - that just passes the RBI duty along to #5,
> >and the Pirates haven't had a good #5 in a long time (George Hendrick??).
> 
> If your number five hitter can't drive in runs, don't blame it on the
> cleanup hitter.  And do you really want a higher BA with the same SA?
> Also, I don't have the statistics handy, but I believe Thompson scores
> a fair number of runs.  It doesn't matter whether they are scored the
> way they are "supposed" to be.
> 
There's more to the Jason Thompson story than this, though. He is guilty
of failing to drive in runs in many situations where he has the opportunity.
He strikes out or pops up when the runners are in scoring position, and
gets his hits when the bases are empty. I am saying that he doesn't make
up for this annual lack of production by getting walks (he has a great
batting eye). He may have the great batting eye, and not swing at many
bad pitches, but he doesn't do too well with the good ones. The walks
may be crucial for 1 or 2 or 3 hitters, but you like to see your 4-5-6
hitters driving in the runs. He doesn't do this too often, certainly
not in correlation with his OBA+SA.

> >It's true that they complement each other well. But they are both terribly
> >inadequate to begin with, so who cares?
> 
> This is where we disagree.  I would say "reasonable but not ideal", not
> "terribly inadequate".
> 
> By the way, an interesting statistic from the Elias book: looking at all
> teams in the majors, the most runs per inning and the greatest chance of
> scoring in an inning occurs when the number 3 hitter leads off the inning.
> This suggests that the "traditional" batting order may not be the best
> after all.
> 
But if you move the 1 and 2 hitters to 7 and 8, say, and improve the
runs scored in the innings in which 3 leads off, you may lose runs in
the innings in which 1 or 2 lead off. The net may be worse than originally.
You have to be VERY careful of this kind of stat. For instance, I
remember reading the obvious stat that more runs score with 1 or 2 outs than
with no outs (obvious when you think about it). This shouldn't be
interpreted as meaning that, for example, a batter should intentionally
strike out with the bases loaded and no outs, to improve his team's
odds of scoring!

This is just another example of the dangers of trying to separate stats
from their context. Just because a stat can be computed (in this case,
the odds of scoring when a particular batting position leads off the inning)
and just because it has a correlation with team scoring, doesn't mean 
that it corresponds to anything in the real world.

Interpretation is everything with statistics. Unfortunately (or
fortunately, depending on your philosophical inclination) interpretation
is a subjective art. A person without any real baseball knowledge
might reasonably infer that the batter in the above situation should
intentionally strike out. It requires knowledge of the real world to
see why this stat occurred, and to understand the situation.

A similar case leaps to mind. Several years ago, someone published an
analysis of football in Sports Illustrated. I think his name might
have been Goode, or something. Anyway, he showed that the single stat
with the highest correlation to winning was the number of rushing
attempts per game. Thus, he concluded, the running game was the most
important aspect of football, and furthermore, it wasn't so much the
yardage gained, as the number of attempts that mattered. But given a
little knowledge about the real world of football, another interpretation
is easily possible: teams that already have a game wrapped up tend to 
run the clock out by running the football. They don't care at this
point about yardage, first downs, etc. This inflates the rushing
attempts, and could account for the high correlation with winning,
since teams who are losing won't resort to this strategy. But this
says nothing about how the winning teams got so far ahead. They might
not have done it with a strict running game. They might have mixed
things up a lot. So, the analyst should have recomputed his data,
ignoring what happened after a team had already built a good lead.
This may have led to different results.

Now, this is strongly reminiscent of attempts to come up with one stat, 
say OBA+SA, and correlate it with team runs (even though the correlation 
has not been mathematically shown yet.) This example also shows why I
insist on depending upon expert advice, rather than our own
interpretation of the stats. The baseball experts know much more
than we do, and can possibly give completely different interpretations
to the numbers. I am not a baseball expert, since I have never played
or coached professionally. Neither is anyone else on this net, to my
knowledge.