THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wasn’t the moral of the Chipper story that Fangraphs’ F-Strike% wasn’t actually measuring what Sciambi (and probably others) thought it was?  It’s “percentage of PAs that start 0-1 or with the first pitch in play”, not “percentage of first pitches thrown in the strike zone”.

There were two morals.  Even if the correct data was at hand, that still doesn’t tell you that it applies to Chipper specifically.

It’s quite likely that Chipper’s found himself close to the optimal strategy, for his skills, through years of trial and error.

But with enough of the right data, I still think I can teach him a thing or two.

I have found that for most major league players, at least those that are trying , it takes a lot of effort for me to find something that they are doing “wrong”. 

I have felt for a while now that the most effective thing in helping a player based on PITCHf/x or similar data would be to sit down with him and/or his coach and tell him what I’ve seen and then get feedback so I can go back and look at the data again.  Because as much time as I may have spent analyzing his performance, the player and his coaches have spent a lot more time thinking about it already than I have.

Right, the least you can do for a hitter or pitcher is to describe what his approach is based on the data.  The best you can do is to point out something specific that might be inconsistent with the rest of his approach.

But the key is that it’s based on HIS approach.  That’s your starting point.

I really like your comment here Tango.

There’s a huge difference between improving someone’s approach and suggesting that they adopt yours because it’s better. Chance are you’ll be much more successful (and productive) with the former.

Sure, we can assume that all/most MLB hitters have optimized their approaches, given their specific skills and deficiencies. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ‘better’ approaches and worse ones, overall. In fact, it gives us no useful information, and is circular reasoning.

It’s better to be productively wrong than unproductively right.