THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

2011 KBO(Korea Baseball Organization):
8 teams, each team plays 133 games per season

K/PA 17.4%
BB/PA 10.8%
BABIP 0.314
league avg ERA 4.14
HR/9 0.73
(where BB=BB-IBB+HBP, PA=AB+SF+BB-IBB+HBP)

Can you show RA9, rather than ERA.  We *really* don’t want to remove (subjectively-qualified) errors from understand the actual run environment.

At least for the LatAm Winter Leagues, these rate stats are highly dependent on the import players—most of whom come from the United States.

You would have to separate the LatAm from the non-LatAm players.

Tango/2:

RA9 in 2011 was 4.51.

The league has 30 years of history. While K/PA has increased gradually over the years, BB/PA has been fairly stable, around 10%.

My bad, RA9 in 2011 was 4.58.
4.51 is average RA9 of 30 seasons.

Italy 2008:
4.12 ERA, 4.96 RA, .309 BABIP, .101 ISO, 17.3% K%, 10.3% BB%
2009:
3.94 ERA, 4.88 RA, .303 BABIP, .103 ISO, 18.3% K%, 10.6% BB%
2010:
3.85 ERA, 4.73 RA, .307 BABIP, .084 ISO (!), 18.2% K%, 10.9% BB%
2011:
4.02 ERA, 5.00 RA, .302 BABIP, .096 ISO, 17.3% K%, 10.3% BB%

Yeah, and it’s a 42-game schedule.

Nippon Pro Baseball 2011 (144 games):
.247 BA, .306 OBP, 3.93 R/9, 6.7% BB, 18.2% K, .293 BABIP, .097 ISO, .65 HR/9, .281 wOBA

NPB offense was way down in 2011 due to new ball regulations.

One problem with this exercise is that within a league with a given talent level, batters and pitchers will find an equilibrium that is fairly the same for all. You can’t truly detect the talent levels of the batters and pitchers until you put each into a different league and observe the changes.

In 1984 I was the statistician for the World Friendship games, 16-18 year olds from 12 countries in Europe, Asia and North and South America. I observed at least three distinct styles of play.

The North American model was used by the US, Canada, Australia & Holland, and is what we’re used to seeing in MLB as far as power, stealing, bunts and pitcher’s control.

The Asian model (China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan) was the ‘small ball’ or ‘dead ball’ style of say 1900-1915. Make contact, bunt, steal, not stressing power. Because hitters were disciplined not to swing at pitches out of the zone, pitchers are forced to learn control. Within their league, batters probably walk 8-10% of the time, same as here.

Tbe Latin American model (Panama, Colombia, Dominican, Puerto Rico) was grip it and rip it. They were not walking off the island. As hitters were not disciplined, pitchers had no need to learn control. Again, within their own league, I expect there was a fairly normal walk rate.

But, take players from one model and drop them into another - Panama’s pitchers walked 16 Taiwanese batters. Against their own hitters, they never needed to learn control.

That’s a good point Brian. What I’m wondering then is, if you somehow had all the advanced data available for every league that you do for MLB, what statistics could you use to compare leagues? I would guess swinging strike rate might be a good measure of plate discipline.

As long as the talent level of the batters and pitchers in a league are about equal, the mean rate stats for the league will not change very much. However, the spread (variance) of the individual stats will decrease as the talent level increases.

In the Cuban league, there are 16 teams, 450 to 500 players, for a population of 10 million, about the same as Pennsylvania. There are a few players in Cuba who are of MLB quality (Jose Abreu is probably the best current hitter). But with that deep of a league with such a small talent pool, there are many players in the league who are junior college level. So the best betters can put up .450 BAs in 90 games, while there’s a lot of guys with .220 BAs. The spread is quite large. Pick out the 100 best players, and the spread in talent will be smaller, from player 1 to 100, than from 1 to 500.

A related way to spot lack of talent depth is to look for extremely high batters and pitchers performances at the same time. The best batters are padding their stats against second tier pitching, and the same for the pitchers against second tier batters. Keep only the elite players, and the performances of the best players will get closer to the league mean (less player to player variance).