THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Good point, Tom. I updated my post over at THT Live (I’m still getting used to the formatting there so hopefully I can make the numbers look neater), and I put this:

“UPDATE: The great Tom Tango, over at his The Book Blog, wrote that I should include all the data when doing something like this. I agree, and I assume he meant to include all the Yankees, so I’ll include the rest of the starters/players with enough service time for the numbers to mean anything, and update the list to include the player’s career FB%, which is right after last year’s mark.”

I assumed this is what you had meant, and if not let me know. If I included the GB and LD rates without the table the whole thing would go to hell.

Updated it further for neatness/adding some more data.

Great stuff.  That’s an average of around +4% more FB per BIP at a team level, which must be enormous.

I would guess, total guess, that 99% of all players with at least say 400 BIP would be +/-5% year-to-year.  I’ll further guess that all teams would be +/-2%.  So, when I see a team level change of 4%, that definitely seems to imply something.

If it’s a question of players responding to the perceived expectation of the park, it would be interesting to see if this change happened at a particular moment.  Remember, FB/BIP is a very telling stat that quickly shows real changes in talent.

Great work!