Baseball IQ Weekly Recap: Last Day of the Season Edition
The season ends today. That was quick! I’ll keep these updates coming in their current form through the end of the playoffs. I’m going to slow down publishing during the offseason, but should still have some larger analysis/research pieces coming out, though at a lower cadence since those take more time to code up and write about.
On the topic of baseball research, I’ll be sharing my previously-promised study of batter streakiness in the next couple days. I think I’ll share an explainer about park factors after that. If there are any other sabermetric topics you’d be interested in hearing about, let me know and I might be able to include it in my offseason programming.
As a reminder, if you’ve been enjoying these updates, please consider sharing this newsletter!
On to the weekly recap.
News from Around The League
The Most Surprising Teams of this Short MLB Season (FiveThirtyEight)
MLB’s coverage of the playoff picture and scenarios heading into the final day of play. A lot can still change today, especially in the NL. (MLB)
A man is facing $40k in damages after breaking into the Brewers’ stadium, commandeering a tractor, and trying to write his name on the field (SBNation)
League Leaders
Season-to-date, sorted by xwOBA. Don’t recognize some of these statistics? Check out this glossary.
Top 1% of Batters for Select Stats
Season-to-date Statcast metric leaders (top 1% of the league)
Longest Hits This Week (in Ft.)
Ronald Acuna, 495.0 (video)
Fernando Tatis, 458.0 (video)
Anderson Tejeda, 451.0 (video)
Jared Walsh, 450.0 (video)
Miguel Cabrera, 450.0 (video)
Hardest Hits This Week (in MPH)
Pete Alonso, 118.4 (video)
Giancarlo Stanton, 117.3 (video)
Vladimir Guerrero, 116.1 (video)
Vladimir Guerrero, 115.5 (video)
Anthony Rizzo, 114.5 (video)
Best Games This Week (By Total xwOBA)
Bobby Dalbec, BOS vs. NYA 2020-09-20 (box score)
Danny Jansen, TOR vs. NYA 2020-09-23 (box score)
Marcell Ozuna, ATL vs. MIA 2020-09-22 (box score)
Michael Chavis, BOS vs. NYA 2020-09-20 (box score)
Willson Contreras, CHA vs. CHN 2020-09-25 (box score)
This chart uses xWOBA to account for good or bad luck based on fielding and other factors.
Great Tweets
Book Club
This week I read chapter 3 from The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin. This chapter focuses on the question of one-on-one face-offs between a given batter and pitcher. It often appears that one batter or pitcher dominates another. Pedro’s infamous “call the Yankees my daddies” press conference comes to mind as an example of players and the media believing that one player (or a group of players, in his case) can perform meaningfully above expectation against another. So, is this a thing? Are there matchups where a pitcher “owns” a batter or vice versa? The Book studies this similarly to how it studied hot streaks. The authors’ approach was this:
Find batter + pitcher face-offs where the pairs faced each other in at least 17 plate appearances in the 1999-2001 seasons, and at least 9 times in 2002 (there are 300 of these pairings)
Limit these confrontations to only the ones where one player dominated the other in the “before” dataset (1999-2001)
Measure the dominant player’s performance in the “after” (2002) dataset relative to the league average
Unsurprisingly, the dominant players in these matchups basically revert to an average level of performance in the “after” dataset. This suggests that most of what we’re seeing when one player seems to “own” another is random variation, rather than something that’s predictive of future dominance.
The table above shows how these batters and pitchers did after having “owned” their opponent. The results are A: almost identical to each other, and B: pretty average.
The Book also discusses other laws of batter + pitcher matchups. The platoon advantage, for example, where batters perform better against opposite-handed pitchers, is real and fairly large, representing roughly a 40-point swing in wOBA between the right- and left-handed effects combined. There also exists a platoon advantage in terms of the kind of contact a batter or pitcher typically produces. Ground ball pitchers are disproportionately effective against ground ball batters, and the same goes for fly ball pitchers dominating fly ball batters. This platoon effect is less useful, though, because most batters and pitchers are pretty neutral in terms of their fly ball vs. ground ball tendencies.
In conclusion, if you want to know how a particular batter will fare against a particular pitcher, you should probably assume they’ll perform at their average level of performance, rather than how they’ve matched up against this pitcher in the recent past. Small adjustments for factors such as batter and pitcher handedness or ground ball tendencies, though, can be applied.
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