THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tom,
If I’m reading this correctly, someone in the media argued that Ruth did not strikeout a lot thus prompting you to write this piece. I’m just curious as to who. Thanks, fine research.

Just curious, but why SO per out rather than per PA? And is there an article that inspired this post?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19985048/page/2/

Go to the emd.

Willingness to strikeout is part of the “strategy” of hitting (i.e., trading increased strikeouts for increased home runs), presumably.  So the fact that Babe Ruth struck out twice as much as the league average is as much a function of the rest of the league’s hitters’ “strategies” as it is Babe’s.

I don’t know how you would separate the batters’ strategies from the pitchers’ strategy of trying to strike out people.

So it’s a fair point that it’s not true that Babe hit a lot of home runs without striking out much, but I don’t think that you could make many conclusions from the calculation you do here.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2007/11/07/a-my-name-is-alice-moniker-madness.aspx

“If the preference for people, places and things that share one of your initials is conscious, then it shouldn’t work if the thing you’re choosing is basically undesirable. Strikeouts are undesirable. Yet based on data from 1913 through 2006, for the 6,397 players with at least 100 plate appearances, “batters whose names began with K struck out at a higher rate (in 18.8% of their plate appearances) than the remaining batters (17.2%),” the researchers find. The reason, they suggest, is that players whose first or last name starts with K like their initial so much that “even Karl ‘Koley’ Kolseth would find a strikeout aversive, but he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and therefore he might avoid striking out less enthusiastically.” Granted, 18.8% vs. 17.2% is not a huge difference, but it was statistically significant—that is, not likely to be due to chance.”

Hmm, I must’ve deleted a couple lines by accident. I’m wondering, from the name study, what exactly does it mean to be statistically significant? Is the implication really that chance alone can’t explain the higher strikeout rate?

It means that there’s less than a 5% chance that this is a random occurrence.  Given that there’s 26 letters in the alphabet, I’d expect some letter to be the outlier at that level.

I would like to see the distribution for all letters.  K might not even top the list.

Also, are there more non-US born “K”?  Maybe it’s all the German and Polish hackers that bias the results

And, TangoTiger is definitely based on my name (Tom).  I don’t doubt the causality on that front.  “K”?  Hard to believe.

David Gassko has already shown us that K is not the most popular strikeout letter:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/ridiculous-science

Now, Phil Birnbaum explains why there was even a gap to begin with:
http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/k-study-for-real_26.html

The letter K occurs more often in names in the last 40 years, a period of time where Ks are much higher than earlier.  Once you account for the bias in the non-random distribution of names by era, you get no difference.