from Amazon
Monday, March 01, 2010
Consistency is better than inconsistency?
“The more consistent a team is in scoring runs, game to game, the better the team’s winning percentage for the total number of runs scored,” Whisnant said. “My study shows that runs alone don’t tell the whole story,” he said. “Consistency is another factor. You want to score runs, and you want to be consistent.”
I showed this several years ago when I first introduced the Tango Distribution (last two links). If you run that program with two teams each scoring 4 runs per game, one with a control value of .8667 and another with .6667, you get these runs per inning distribution:
Runs R1 R2
0 0.722 0.771
1 0.174 0.118
2 0.065 0.057
3 0.024 0.028
4 0.009 0.014
5 0.003 0.007
6 0.001 0.003
7 0.001 0.002
8 0.000 0.001
9 0.000 0.000
10 0.000 0.000
The first team is more small-ball, and the second-team is more hit-and-miss. In both cases, they score 4 runs per game. The winning percentage was .523 for the small-ball team. Basically, each of their runs is worth more, because fewer of those runs occur in blowouts. The net effect here is a huge FOUR wins, simply by refocusing the type of team, while keeping the same overall talent.
However, elsewhere, the professor says that more SLG is better, given that both teams have the same runs scored. That doesn’t sound right. The first team above would have a high OBP and low SLG. The second team would have a low OBP and high SLG. That’s how the second team can get to be hit-and-miss. So, I agree with him that the more (in-game) consistent your team is in run scoring, the more they will win. But, I disagree that having a higher SLG is the reason.