Statistics Prove What We Already Know, Assuming We’ve Been Listening (Baseball Edition)
Baseball is a game of statistics. As discussed in an earlier post, I subscribe to the theory that the game of baseball can be broken down by a statistical analysis in order to determine a player’s value more than any other sport. Well why not take that analysis a step further and apply it to decision-making in baseball? Questions like, “Should a player steal a base?” or “Where should our best hitter bat in the lineup?” can all be answered using something called game simulations.
Each individual situation or game has little meaning in the scheme of things, but over the course of a season or more, a decision to be more conservative on the basepaths or to bat A-Rod 9th instead of 4th may (or may not) have serious consequences.
I won’t bore you with my uneducated rantings on the subject, however. Let me direct you to a New York Times article on the subject. Using high-tech computers and advanced algorithms that take into account anything from OPS to wind speed, nerds ran millions of simulations of games and here are some of the things they discovered.
On Batting Order:
Luke Kraemer of Imagine Sports, which owns Diamond Mind, programmed the simulator to force the 2008 Yankees to bat their best hitter and cleanup man, Alex Rodriguez, ninth — to see how scoring was affected. Mr. Kraemer got the run total not for just one season, which can fluctuate as much as 80 runs in each direction from simple randomness, but for 100 seasons — more than 16,000 Yankees games in all.
The result? The Yankees scored 747 runs per season, 40 fewer than their real-life 787. (Diamond Mind was so accurate that 100 seasons with A-Rod batting fourth averaged 789, almost dead-on.) Most research suggests that those 40 runs would mean only about four fewer victories, for a strategy no manager would ever consider; so the difference with Rodriguez batting third or fifth would be insignificant, and nowhere near worth the forests of trees that would give their lives to the ensuing sports-page debate.
On Intentional Walks:
The intentional walk. This frequently used defensive strategy avoids dangerous hitters and can set up a double play, but it also awards a free base, and even the best hitters usually make an out. So is it smart in the long run? Diamond Mind found that it was not, though the difference was only about five runs per team per season.
On Stolen Bases
The stolen base. Advancing from first to second puts the runner in scoring position, but he — and the rest of your hitters — will have a hard time scoring if he gets thrown out. Mr. Kraemer looked at a recent team that ran wild (the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays) and one that barely stole at all (the 2005 Oakland A’s) and switched their mind-sets to see what happened. The A’s scored 20 runs fewer, which probably says more about their players’ inability to run in the first place. But when the speedy Rays stole sparingly, they increased their scoring by 47 runs per season — suggesting that perhaps the Rays were running too often in real life.
On Sacrifice Bunts:
The sacrifice bunt. Is it worth making an out intentionally to move a runner from first to second? Forcing a team that hated that maneuver (the 2005 Boston Red Sox) to do it a lot cost them 19 runs per season. But making a bunting team (the 2008 New York Mets) avoid it also cost them — by 15 runs on average — suggesting that the Mets’ managers, Willie Randolph and Jerry Manuel, used it quite intelligently.
This is not the first study to say a lot of these things, but there are some interesting ideas here. The fact that batting order does not matter is extremely counter-intuitive. Also it surprises me to hear that sacrifice bunts can be beneficial, even though it is sacrificing an out (almost always bad to sacrifice one of those, you only get 27 in a game). What was no surprise was that stealing hurts a team more than it helps. That is something that anyone who has studied the game of baseball has figured out (unless they refuse to see what all the evidence proves).
The problem with all these numbers is that they are meant to be applied to the course of an entire season, not just one game. There are certain isolated, individual circumstances where an intentional walk may make sense or batting someone in a different spot in the order may change their approach at the plate. Statistics cannot completely take into account the pressure of “clutch” situations. In the long run, however, if a manager applies these concepts (like not stealing) for a whole season, his team is almost guaranteed to score more runs, and thus win more games.
h/t: Rod Beck’s Mullet
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