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Are Managers Optimizing Their Best Relievers?
January 2, 2003 - Ted Arrowsmith
Tango Tiger:
Great work as always. A few points:
The goals of pitching staff management are: (1) have your best pitchers pitch the most innings (2) have your best pitchers pitch the highest leverage innings and (3) reduce the size of your staff so you'll have more room for bench players (4) use your pitchers in advantageous matchups (lefty-righty, curveball, flyball pitchers at Pac Bell etc.). In modern baseball the desire for #4 has over taken #3 to a point that those of us who grew up listening to Earl Weaver's team hit pinch-hit homers find alarming. Attempts to maximize leverage for your best players should only be made until they hurt your efforts to minimize innings and roster spots used by bad pitchers.
OPS: Begone!
May 20, 2003 - Ted Arrowsmith
From Moneyball, I got the feeling that the OBP*3 stuff had as much to do with the value of taking pitches and the effect this has on opposing pitchers. Is there any data regarding this? It would, I imagine, involve some serious programming to look to look at the effect of high and low pitch-per-plate-appearance guys who change teams.
Great work Tango!
OPS: Begone!
May 20, 2003 - Ted Arrowsmith
Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but if there's an interaction between OBP and slugging due to the value (if it really exists) of taking pitches, then it would not show up at the team level.
Let me use an impossibly extreme example to illustrate my point: a player is so good at taking and fouling off pitches that he averages 20 pitches per plate appearance. This allows his teammates to face pitchers who or more fatigued or, better yet, bad pitchers from the bullpen. The value of this player's ability to see 20 pitches per PA would not be primarily his OBP but the better OBP and SLG of his teammates when he's playing. The relationship between OBP and SLG at a team level would not change.
This is what I thought DePodesta was suggesting: that a player with a high OBP helps his team more than a high SLG guy becasue of this effect of taking pitches. Studying this effect (if it exists), especially since in reality the differences are just a couple pitches per PA, would be difficult from a computer programming perspective: do the other A's, all other things being equal (there's the rub), hit better with Hatteberg in the lineup than without him.
OPS: Begone!
May 20, 2003 - Ted Arrowsmith
Thanks for the analysis Tango.
There is a sense in which OBP may be 3 times more valuable then SLG that directly applies to the A's. An increase in runs scored through raising SLG may be about 3 times more expensive (in terms of salary or the quality of player needed in a trade) then the same increase in runs caused by OBP. Thus, it might make sense for the A's to focus on OBP.
SABR 301 - Talent Distributions (June 5, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 11:50 a.m.,
June 6, 2003
(#20) -
Ted Arrowsmith
The fact that Tango is developing here that the median player does not produce a mean performance is quite important. This fact causes a casual (i.e., non-statistical) observer to fall into error.
As Walt notes, many biological/human characteristics are normally distributed: height, outgoingness, anxiety, openness to new ideas or experiences. Thus, for many characteristics the mean, modal, and median are the same. That is, in most things we evaluate informally the "typical" person and the "average" person are the same.
But, as Tango's graphs show, this is not true of baseball players. If you take a typical ball player -- one that people describe as "average" in everyday usage-- you will not get a league average performance from that player. I suspect that this is a major cause of overvaluing players. Derek Bell seems like a typical outfielder so our usual decision making processes tell us that he should provide league average performance. But our common sense lets us down and we're left with Operation Shutdown.
As is frequently observed, many pennants are lost for lack of a couple league average performances. You can't put a typical third baseman at third and get average performance.
DIPS year-to-year correlations, 1972-1992 (August 5, 2003)
Posted 4:30 p.m.,
August 5, 2003
(#11) -
Ted Arrowsmith
While this is not what I would have expected, doesn't it make sense that the changes in batters, defense, park, weather, and luck from year-to-year matter more for turning hits into doubles than balls-in-play into outs. In particular, it seems possible that defensive skill of corner outfielders might make a big difference in xbhBIP and that corner outfield defense would vary alot year-to-year.
Good stuff Tango.