PITCHING AND DEFENSE I wonder if you have looked at whether there is evidence that pitchers can “control” extra-base hits. By this, I mean, are there pitchers off whom batters generally do not hit the ball as hard or hit the ball on the ground? If there is no correlation between a pitcher and “giving…
Intro Voros McCracken’s article here on the BP website has generated a tremendous amount of attention, including at least two columns by Rob Neyer on his ESPN.com gig. Voros’s research, as presented in the article, contains the remarkable result that “major-league pitchers don’t appear to have the ability to prevent hits on balls in play.”…
I decided to break down this year’s Hall of Fame candidates by VORP. A full description is available at http://www.stathead.com, but the measure is essentially the number of runs contributed by a player beyond what a replacement level player at the same position would contribute in equal playing time, adjusted for park and league. Note…
Back in April–you remember April, don’t you?–you couldn’t click your mouse without reading about how baseball had simply become slow-pitch softball with warmer, more expensive beer. Scoring was up, ERAs were up, home runs were up and interns were being run ragged chasing the latest, greatest freak stat to prove that the game had gone…
Just read your "Doctoring the Numbers" piece on the sucking Rockies. It would be good to see how non-Rockies teams fare on road trips. Perhaps fatigue, stinky underwear, the cumulative effects of restaurant food or some other aspect that builds over a road trip makes all teams hit significantly worse later in a road trip….
Theories on how altitude makes Coors Field such a great hitters’ park abound, as do theories as to why Rockies’ hitters seem to do so poorly on the road. The theory we like is that their hitters simply suck, but not everyone sees it that way. Colorado third baseman Jeff Cirillo had this to say…
Two years ago, when we first introduced Pitcher Abuse Points, pitch counts were still shrouded in a veil of mystery. They were available, mind you, but they were squirreled away at the bottom of box scores, and rarely ventured from their hiding place to appear in game summaries or in televised accounts of the game….
There’s a commonly held belief in sabermetric circles that catchers reach their offensive peak later that players at other positions. Presumably, the physical strain of playing catcher inhibits their development as hitters. The emergence of Darren Daulton at age 30 is typical of this phenomenon. However, to the best of my knowledge, there has not…
If this page is too wide for you to view easily, you can download a copy of the file in PDF format here. You need Adobe Acrobat, a free PDF viewer, to use this file. You can check Adobe’s web site for more information. An analytic model of per-inning scoring distributions for studying in-game strategies *…
Since the original appearance of " Field General or Backstop?" in last year’s Baseball Prospectus, we’re received a great deal of praise and compliments on the article, for which we’re grateful. We’ve also received some thoughtful criticism that is worth responding to (there’s also been some not so thoughtful criticism, but that’s what the Delete…
What do we know about catching?
Special thanks to Retrosheet Injuries to pitchers are not a new phenomenon. They date as far back as the rule change that allowed pitchers to throw overhand, and so do the attempts to restrict the workload of pitchers to a safe level. When Old Hoss Radbourne reminisced about winning 60 games (now reported as 59)…
As teams close in on the 100-game mark, enough pitches have been thrown and enough starts have been made that we can begin to draw significant conclusions from the Pitcher Abuse Points data. But before we get to that, here’s a demonstration of how PAP differs from looking at average pitch count totals: 1- 91-…
Now, more than any time in baseball history, games are won and lost in the bullpen. As such, more attention has focused on the importance of a good bullpen as oen significant difference between a playoff team and an underachieving also-ran. Whether it’s explaining the Mariners’ inability to contend despite fielding two of the 50…
The most important thing Bill James did for baseball, in my opinion, was to question the assumptions that were prevalent in the game and determined how it was played. His statistical methods were tools, and only tools, developed to help test the validity of those assumptions. Some analysts–myself included–have occasionally forgotten that point, and treated…