THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This reminds me of Rickey Henderson complainin’ in 1981 (his 2nd full season) that the umpires were calling a lot of balls as strikes against him.

Phil says the following:

If veteran pitchers tend to throw down the middle, instead of trying to paint the corners, that would reduce their number of false balls (since their strikes are more obvious). I suppose you could check that out by controlling for pitch location.

This is actually backward of how it works in practice.

Veteran pitchers tend to pitch on the outside edge more (probably because they’ve lost something off their fastball).  If my catcher target theory of the strike zone is correct, then the catchers of the veteran pitchers are setting the target on the outside edge more often, and the umps give them this pitch because they hit their target.

You can’t really say the umps favor any particular group unless you control for where the catcher target is or control for a reasonable proxy thereof (pitch type/location can be a reasonable proxy).

This is also presumably why good pitchers see more benefit--they’re better at hitting their catcher’s target.

I uploaded the file as PDF in the main entry.

The PDF file is fantastic! The data is so well displayed in those colored tables (by experience), so everything is easy to understand at a glance, but also able to dive deeper.

I generally think “heat map” charts are not that helpful, but here I like it. I like how they only used three colors (that aren’t red-yellow-green); often, parsing out all the colors and what they mean is too hard at a glance.

I agree with your general sentiment with heat maps Matt.

For example, here’s the saber grand-daddy of them all:

http://www.tangotiger.net/halejon/allcounts.html

Compare the 0-2 and 3-0 counts.
1. I like the limited number of colors.
2. However, what does it really mean?  You see little red in the 0-2, and you see it at the edges, and at 3-0 you see alot down the middle.

But, what does it mean overall?  Well, the run values are shown numerically at -.09 runs for one, and +.20 for the other.  That gap, 0.29 runs, is the difference between a walk and a regular PA.

So, that’s how much a difference there is in that heat map.  But, you wouldn’t appreciate the magnitude if you just saw the heat map.

There’s no sense of degree… only of direction.