THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Because batting average is down 5 points this year, I don’t think you would reduce Chipper’s estimate by 5 points.  That assumes that there is a 100% chance that the reduction in league BA this year affects Chipper as it does anyone else.  That is certainly not true.  There may be a 50% chance that Chipper’s true BA this year would be 5 points lower than last year, and a 20% chance that it is lower this year because other players besides Chipper are off the juice, and a 20% chance that there are more older (and below average) players in baseball this year, etc.  So if you are including Chipper’s prior history and the league’s prior history, you don’t just adjust everything down to league levels for this year, at least not for Chipper, who has been in the league for 13 seasons, when BA’s were higher (which suggests that the reduction this year may not apply to him).  Obviously not a big deal though.

I would put it at 95%, if not 99%.  I’ll be doing the WOWY at the end of the year to see, just as I did with my HR article.

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Btw, pitchers were also juiced (and were caught at the same rate).  I find it implausible that if all the juicers were reduced, that it would be disproportionate toward hitters.

#50, yeah .245 looks low, but then again, this is a sorted list, and the ones who faced the highest BA opponents were only in the .256 range.  I thought that league average BA was .256 or so?  Remember also that these numbers for “pitcher BA” (batters opponents) include pitcher hitting, I assume.

Anyway, Tango, I have never bought the notion that pitcher juicing cancels out (or even significantly reduces) batter juicing.  Never.  I have always thought that batter juicing is WAY more impactful than pitcher juicing.  I have no evidence to support that notion, but it just makes logical sense to me.

I think that pitchers juiced mostly in order to recover from injury.  I am not sure that that significantly increases average pitcher talent.  I also think that many, many more batters juiced than pitchers, even though lots of pitchers got caught (I am not sure why there would be a disparity between percentage of use and percentage of being caught).  I also think that lots of pitchers juiced because they thought it might help their performance, but it either does not or does not help it as much as it does for batters.

Look at it this way.  If you knew that there were something that makes everyone much stronger, do you think that that something would increase pitcher performance nearly as much as hitter performance?  I don’t.  Making someone stronger clearly helps hitters.  That is why most hitters work out in the gym voraciously in order to build their muscles.  Making pitchers stronger has a marginal effect on pitching performance at best.  That is why many pitchers do NOT work out voraciously in the gym, or if they do, it is not so much to build muscle mass, i.e. strength.  Batters are by and large “jacked and cut.” Pitchers are not.

I think we can all agree that pure strength helps batters a lot more than it helps pitchers, everything else being equal.  So if we agree (and I don’t know that we do) that PED’s are mostly for building pure strength, then they will affect a batter’s performance much more than pitcher performance.

Anyway, that is the way I look at it.  Heck, in the old days, pitchers were forbidden to work out in the gym.  Now, at least, they have training regimens for pitchers that are specifically designed to make sure that they don’t gain too much muscle mass and lose flexibility in the process.

I think it is debatable whether PED’s help pitchers at all other than perhaps with endurance and healing from injury.  I don’t think it is debatable whether PED’s significantly help batters in terms of overall performance (hitting the ball farther and harder).  Plus, it is possible that pitchers took mostly HGH and whatever might help them to recover from injury, whereas batters took more of the anabolic steroids-type PED’s, like the ones that body builders take.

There has been a lot of anecdotel evidence of pitchers on steroids increasing their velocity.

Eric Gagne is a good example.  Of course it’s hard to tell if his velocity jump was more due to moving to the bullpen or using PED’s.

Has anyone looked at Mitchell’s pitchers and compared it to pitch f/x fastball velocity?

I generally agree with MGL’s point.  But I do think relief pitchers may be a partial exception.  It seems like there have been a number of relievers who lost 4-5 MPH rather suddenly over the past few years (Gagne included).  Also, if PEDs allow good relievers to throw very hard and then recover more quickly, that presumably means hitters have more PAs against hard throwers. 

Still, given that only 1/3 of PAs come against relievers, I find it believable that the net effect of reducing PED use would be reduced offensive production, rather than a wash.

MGL:  do you have a theory as to why the impact appears to be greater in the AL?

I’m actually against every single one of MGL’s points!

If adding 1 MPH can cause a change in ERA of 0.25 runs (or whatever), I can far more believe that than a hitter getting stronger necessarily helping his power.  It seems to me that if you have, whatever, 100 (?) players in the majors and minors caught using PED and half are pitchers, that is a pretty strong sample to assert that we’re equally split here.

Anyway, I’m not going to belabor the point, other than to say put a “not” in front of almost each of mgl’s sentences for me!

I am “not” real confident in my assertions, and I think we are all opining and speculating.  Tango, you can’t disagree with ALL of my statements!

I think that the power and offensive shortage in the AL this year is a combination of age (there are more older players in the AL, and the average age is a little higher), the NL just happened to have gotten better offensively relative to the AL this year (the relative balance between the two leagues fluctuates as players come and go, from injuries, etc.), and I think that more players were juicing in the AL for whatever reason, maybe because of the DH, or because Canseco was mainly in the AL, or just by chance alone.  I don’t know. 

I think that someone should compile a list of players (batters and pitchers) who are known or suspected (for whatever reasons) juicers and we can go from there.  Hopefully the list of suspected players is not unduly influences by their stats.

Tango:
I’m not convinced that 50% of users have been pitchers, but it’s of course hard to know.  But even if that’s true, 50% of players may not equal 50% of PAs.  A LOT of the pitchers are relievers. Other than Clemens, who are the prominent starting pitchers?  I think if we put together a list of likely PED users, we’d find the hitters account for far more PAs.

Mitchell players:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/mitchell-report-players.shtml

Eyeballing it, looks about 50/50.  Your point about PAs stands.