You know something? I apologize for letting my tone above get excessive for Cafe Society, though it was directed at no one individual.
I’ll open up a Pit thread, so the cool, calm discussion of our National Pastime may proceed undisturbed. If you like, anyone in this thread can join me there.
That’s fine. I had already decided to take a very buddhist approach and just nod in agreement, regardless. It’s not that big a deal to me.
No stick it out here please. This has been a great exchange. The pit would probably degenerate into something far less educational and enjoyable.
I crunched some number to test out Jeter’s Postseason vs. regular. He has one of the largest sample sizes. The only place the stats show he is a little more clutch in the post season is in the fact his HR/AB goes up in October. In all other categories he is about the same or slightly lower. Despite this I know he is one of the batters I want starting the 8th or 9th inning if the Yankees are down. Irrational, yes by Saberstandards, but quite normal by old school seat of the pants baseball fan watching.
BTW: Player I do not want up for the opposing team is Ortiz.
A player who does break the statistical rules is Mariano Rivera. No Closer has a larger post-season statistical collection to use and yet he is significantly better in the postseason than the regular season. Check the numbers out. He is arguably the best regular season closer of all time and at least top 5 without argument and yet he is significantly better in October.
Jim
I will, but even before I look at Mariano’s post-season’s numbers, I have to ask: you do realize that offensive numbers are down during the post-season, aren’t you?
I thought that was a symptom of better pitching not some magical October force that makes hitters hit worse? 
The teams that make the post season in theory have better than average pitching and the 5th starter and 6th bullpen guys generally do not pitch much.
I very much believe this is the reason for lower offensive numbers.
My preferred stat site: Mariano Rivera Stats, Height, Weight, Position, Rookie Status & More | Baseball-Reference.com
The 0.81 ERA really sticks out in 72 games and 111.7 innings. 87K:15BB for a 5.8 ratio.
Lifetime he has a 2.33 ERA and 728K:215BB for a 3.39 ratio.
Jim
Of course they are, the hitters are facing Rivera more often in the playoffs.
It’s called “colder weather.” Someone, possibly Bill James, ran a study of runs scored per game in various moths, and there was a very strong correlation (in all ballparks, in all climate zones) in April and September, Runs Scored were down, they were higher in May, even higher in June, still higher in July and August.
But also in post-season play, you’re not facing any 5th starters, and you’re only facing the long relief bozos when the game is utterly blown out. Otherwise you’re facing the other team’s No.s 1,2, and 3 starters and their set up guy and their closer ,all of whom are pretty uniformly top notch on playoff teams. The offense, OTOH, really can’t improve very much, so naturally the offense is going to decline for both reasons.
I don’t mean to pile on, but I really don’t believe you’ve actually read anything by Bill James and the like. You’re describing something I’ve quite honestly never heard of before in my entire life. What nutbar out there claims he can predict exactly what will happen in every game?
Actually, sabermnetrics are remarkable good at predicting things that can be predicted. Sabermetrics is why we now know that pitchers with really low strikeout rates will collapse no matter how good they look at the time; when Jeff Ballard went 18-8 in 1989, every stathead in the world said “He’s a stiff; he’ll get blown away within a couple of years,” and they were right. Don’t go adding Chien-Meng Wang to your fantasy team just yet, by the way; he looks great now but he is not going to last without developing a strikeout pitch. And trade Mark Buerhle if you have him and can get something good for him.
Heck, that would be a neat exercise. Take five guys with unusually low strikeout rates for their level of success, and take five guys with high K rates with about the same level of success; say, one team of Roy Halladay, Chien-Ming Wang, Jon Garland, Mark Buehrle and Kris Benson, and another team of Mike Mussina, Jeremy Bonderman, John Lackey, Ted Lilly and Gil Meche. I would happily bet you that in three years, Team 1 will have declined substantially as a group, and Team 2 will be doing much better than Team 1.
That’s how sabermetrics works. I can’t guarantee Roy Halladay or Mark Buerhle will be worse in 2008. I can tell you, however, that if you spend your time acquiring pitchers with great ERAs and W-L records who only struck out 4.2 men every nine innings, your pitching staff is going to be a shambles. A low-K pitcher is a bad, bad, bad bet. There have been almost NO pitchers in major league history with low K rates who had sustained major league success; I can name a few, I guess, but very few. But such pitchers CAN have big years, like Jeff Ballard or Allan Anderson - the sabermetrician will just tell you not to be fooled.
If you apply science and logic you can certainly make better educated guesses about the future than if you just go with “I like this guy because he’s handsome.”
To pile on higher, this strawman argument goes like this: "Wang pitched a 2-hitter the other night, smartypants–ha, ha, ha, " as if the smartypants position was that no low-strikeout guy is capable of pitching a good game. We never (ever) predict specific outcomes, but as RickJay says, give us a large enough body of players and games and we will make general statements that you believe to be dead-wrong and we’ll be right an astonishing (to you) amount of the time.
I love James’ idea that a low proportion of strikeouts to wins over a season is an excellent predictor of disaster. The key, as RickJay says, is sample size. Any given pitcher who wins a lot of games while striking out few batters may well not have a bad future ahead of him, but if you look at a group of such pitchers with a composite .600 W/L pct, their group W/L pct in future years is going to be well below .500. That’s not useful information? That doesn’t tell you that your team should rejoice if it’s traded off one of these guys and gotten a high-strikeout/low wins guy in exchange? nothing is guaranteed, but knowledge is always a virtue.
And, one quick interjection: whjile Bill James and his colleagues get a lot of attention when their work challenges the conventional wisdom )and James seems to take special pleasure in shattering long-held beliefs), he does not ALWAYS challenge it.
Sometimes his research and calculations prove that, well whaddya know, the old-timers were RIGHT, even if their beliefs seemed like superstitious nonsense.
That’s why I say we’re interested in discovering the truth–if superstitious nonsense actually works, we’re for it. It’s just fascinating how often long-held beliefs are provably false.
I am going to post a commonly held belief and I would like in particular to see pseudotriton ruber ruber, **astorian ** & RickJay’s response to it.
Another question, someone brought up Wang’s name in reference to low strikeout pitchers not having long term success.
I thought Sabermetrics acknowledged that if a pitcher’s overall ratio of (Ground Ball + Ks) vs Fly ball Outs was at least 2 to 1 that the pitcher was likely to be successful. Is this not supports find stats?
Jim
I don’t know if I’ve seen studies that support or undermine either assertation. Why would the AL team acquiring an NL pitcher be significant, as opposed to an NL team, or just any MLB team generally acquiring a .500 pitcher?
The Wang stuff is interesting to me because you can always find some excitable Yankee fan willing to bet you with even odds that Wang will win 200 games. (Placing the bet is easy, though finding the Yankee fan in 10 years not so easy.)
Because the AL is a harder league to pitch in. I think that the rule of thumb is to add 0.5 to a pitcher’s ERA when he moves from the NL to the AL.
Is it? I think that’s an illusion that every sentient creature is aware of by now. The only thing that’s harder about pitching in the AL is that you probably have to throw some extra pitches because you lack that one at-bat per nine (the pitcher) where you could have afforded, sometimes, to challenge the batter with fastballs over the plate. Other than one small advantage, the AL is neither harder nor easier to pitch in, because you still have the same number of wins and losses to be allocated. If you give up an extra half-run per game because of the DH, you’re getting that half-run back from your own offense.
Forgot to mention this:
Of course, that doesn’t always work out…
In this case, though, I’d bet that if you computed the standard deviations of Burnett’s strikeouts, grounds balls and WHIP, you’d see them out of line with those of top pitchers. It’s not so much a failure of statistics to account for Burnett’s numbers as much as it is a failure of the saberheads to consider all of the relevent statistical information.
I’ve notice NL pitchers without good Strikeout capabilities have a much harder time adjusting to the tougher AL lineups they have to oppose. That is the reason I ask as a lot of good young NL pitchers without great records and little ability to generate strikeouts, fail in the AL.
I would never bet on any 2nd year pitcher that he would win 200 games. Not even Gooden, Guidry or Cone won 200. Betting on even betting on Scott Kazmir would be a dumb bet.
BTE: I just checked Wang on sportsline: is GO/AO ratio is 2.96 despite only 95Ks in 272.1 innings.
Only 17 homers and only 71 BBs largely balance the low Ks. The Strikeout per IP stat is too simple which you probably know. Wang might be an excellent pitcher over the long haul as the other stats support that he might be a good pitcher. Of course I still would not take your bet for 200 wins as he is already 26, has some arm problems and as I pointed out no young pitcher is a good bet for 200 wins. Even Andy Pettitte might fail to make 200 and just 3 years ago it looked like it was in the bag.
I would not even bet on more established pitchers like Zito, Hudson or Mulder.
Jim
On Preview: Rysto I was not even thinking of Burnett, but he falls more under the quote I used later.
There you go again.
Please note, Rysto, what you’re doing here:
you’re citing What Exit?'s summary of some unnamed sabermetric study (which may or may not exist, or may exist in some more thoroughly articulated form than summarized) and then
you’re claiming gleefully that it’s another “failure of the saberheads to consider all of the relevent statistical information.”
First you need to cite the study that made the claims. Then you can sarcastically and sneeringly pick it apart. You seem very eager to proceed to stage 2. This is a classic strawman fallacy.
I’ve never heard that belief before and I don’t understand it. Well, I’d understand why it makes sense right now, because the National League is an inferior league to the American League. AL teams ran up over a .600 winning percentage against NL teams in interleague play this year, and this is over something like 160, 170 games. The AL has dominated the NL in interleague player for some time now. A .500 pitcher in the NL would be a .430 pitcher in the AL. But that dominance won’t last forever so it’s not a rule that will make sense in, say, five years.
As prr points out, the DH rule’s irrelevant. It makes no impact on your winning percentage. It impacts your ERA, but it impacts everyone else’s ERA too.
This is generally believed to be true but I think in recent years, the GF/FB ratio is being supplanted by the McCracken Theory (no I’m not making that name up) that says that pitchers don’t affect anything except strikeouts, walks, and homers. Over the long haul every pitcher will surrender about the same number of singles, doubles and triples as a percentage of the number of balls they allow to be hit into play (not counting homers.)
GF/FB ratios might indicate a pitcher’s propensity for giving up homers, and you might want to pay particuarl attention if a pitcher is moving from, say, a park where fly balls got to die, like Safeco Field, to a homer heaven like Wrigley.
But irrespective of GF/FB ratio, pitchers who don’t strike anoyne out do not last. There hasn’t been a pitcher with long term success who was way below average in strikeouts, that I can remember, since Dan Quisenberry. (And in fairness, Quiz had a short career, pitching fewer innings in his career than a starter will pitch in 5 seasons; Roy Halladay’s only 29 and has already pitched more than Quiz did.)
Wang IS very good at keeping the ball down, as evidenced by his only giving up 8 homers, and he doesn’t walk a lot of guys, but he’s still getting lucky on balls hit into play.
Now, I cannot say I am certain Wang is doomed. Maybe he will be the one pitcher in a generation who is successful for more than a few years without getting strikeouts. He could still develop a strikeout pitch; Jimmy Key had a really low ratio of strikeouts in his first full season, which was worrisome, but struck out a lot more guys starting the next year. For all I know Wang might punch out 160 guys next year. But if he doesn’t start striking guys out, he’s better than even odds to be out of the major leagues by 2011.
Tommy John is the classic exception to the rule, and he managed to depress both BBs and HRs over the course of his career. But there will always be a couple of low K/BB/HR guys around–still and all, the vast majority of people who fail to strike out batters at or above the league average don’t have long MLB careers, and those who do tend to last significantly longer. As RickJay says, if you keep trading me the pitchers with above league K rates for pitchers below league K rates, eventuially I’ll have a good staff and you’ll have a lot of guys who’ve long since retired. Sure, a trade will go your way once in a while, but not often enough to keep you in the league.