THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Making Sense of Win Expectancy and Stolen Bases

Rob McQuown has a good understanding of how to use the win expectancy table.  I wouldn’t go as low as “ to about .250-.260.” when you get to that part, maybe down to .270 as a guess.  And in THE BOOK, I do show how the breakeven point can be anywhere from 60% to 90% depending on the inning and score, so the adherence to the “average” breakeven point obviously should not be listened to.  The important takeaways from the articles are:
1 - Understand the context, don’t assume average
2 - You should be able to use some educated guesses to tweak the numbers to fit a particular context