THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Bannister: the greatest saberist spokesperson ever

I love this guy.  He says the exact same things we do, but he says it while wearing a uniform.  Because of that, the media shuts up and listens to him.  I mean, just read his gems:

“It’s like flipping a coin. Everyone knows that you got a 50-50 chance of heads or tails. But maybe during the course of a baseball season, you flip it and it comes up heads seven or eight times. But over a million times, it’s going to come back to about a 50-50 ratio.”
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“In terms of baseball, even the best teams need some luck. You have to have skill but you have to have luck, too.”
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“This year is really the first time in my career it’s gone the other way. In 2007 I was lucky, 2008 I didn’t pitch that well, 2009 I pitched well and this year, I haven’t pitched great, but luck has been against me, too.”
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“The reality is it’s a performance-based game,” he said. “It’s a business. So if you’re not performing well, it doesn’t matter why.”
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“If it’s a mechanical thing, there would be something way out of whack with my peripherals, like my strikeouts would be way down or walks way up,” Bannister said. “I typically strike out about 5.5 guys a game and my walks are around three. I’m still right around there.”
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“We’re in a stretch where I probably have flipped heads nine times in a row,” Bannister said. “I’m just saying if you get in a stretch like this and you start changing a lot of things, you can really get out of whack.
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This year, the home-run thing has been frustrating but there is nothing that has changed with me. My career average says I’m right at a No. 4 starter.

“My goal is to pitch at a No. 3 starter level. Sometimes you get to No. 2. Sometimes you drop down to No. 4 or No. 5, and after that you’re in the minors.

“But I won five games in a row earlier this year and I was the same guy. Really.”

G-dd-mn beautiful.

Bannister has a career rate of 10% HR per FB, pretty much the league average.  In 2010, he’s at 14.5%.  With 150 FB, that puts him at 2 SD away.  Given that we cherry-picked him, and given that we expect someone to be at 2 SD, there’s nothing there.  Not unless you also tell me the HR he gives up are going farther as well.

And maybe they are.  Last year, he had 8 HR go for at least 410 feet.  This year, he already has 10.  In order to figure out how significant that is, we need to see what it means to other pitchers.  This may be the kind of indicator that can tell us if allowing long HR means something, similar to Bannister’s point here:

“A guy that worked at JP Morgan was doing a project on sports and the stock market and games in general, and what had more influence, skill or luck,” Bannister said. “He had this huge timeline. The most skill was chess where luck had the least influence. Then it was running, golf and tennis, and then you get to baseball right in the middle.

Is giving up long HR something basic, something that is mostly the domain of bad pitchers?  Greg has the data there ready to be downloaded.  You guys tell me.

What you CANNOT do is look at average HR distance.  Please, don’t do that.  Please.  We’ve talked about this.