THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Here is an example or a manifestation of how everyone thinks that pitching win games and especially post-season series:

It is the bottom of the 7th in tonight’s MIL/PHI game and the announcers just said:

“The story tonight is the Philadelphia pitching.”

Let’s see.  The score is 5-2.  The Brewers have batted in 7 innings.  They are supposed to score against Myers and relievers around 4.5 runs per 9.  In 7, that is 3.5.  So they scored 1.5 runs less than what they were supposed to.

The Phillies scored 5 runs in 6 innings.  They were supposed to score around 3.7 per 9 versus Sabathia and his relievers.  That is 2.27 expected runs for 6 innings.  They scored 2.73 runs more than they were expected to.

So how is that,"Pitching is the story of the game?”

If it’s true that postseason games are lower-scoring than regular season games, then I can see how the skill of their closer could have a little more weight than in regular season games.  If you tell me the Red Sox-Rangers are going to have a 5-2 game, I’ll guess the Red Sox are 60% favorites.  If you tell me those two teams will have a 3-2 game, I’ll bump it up a bit in favor of the Sox, because I think they could hold a 3-2 lead better than the Rangers, due to the strength of Papelbon.  But I can’t even imagine how negligible this difference might be.

Last I checked, since 1969, the average playoff team scores 5 runs and allows 4 runs in the regular season.  In the playoffs, it’s 4 and 4.

So, when we see Derek Jeter have the same hitting stats in regular and post, this is mightly impressive.

The same applies in the NHL by the way.

Well sure, you have teams with some of the best pitching (as well as the best offense), then you have only the top 3 or 4 starters pitching, then you have the best of the bullpens, and closers pitching as much as possible.  Plus lots of lefty/righty jockeying. If you hit as well in the post-season as in the regular season, you are indeed doing one heck of a job.

Agree with the post.  Nate Silver’s use of his “secret sauce” has always made me cringe.

Even if the main idea behind secret sauce were sound, since when is one season’s worth of WXRL an effective way to measure closer effectiveness? And since when is FRAR a desirable way to measure defense? The idea that WXRL and postseason success have a surprisingly high correlation is like saying that having a last name beginning with M has a high correlation. It’s total applesauce.

Perhaps Baseball Prospectus would be kind enough to debate their point here, presuming this blog is not too small potatoes for them.

That would be great (#7).  I am open to hearing why their position might be valid.  If they just say, “Well, that is the way the regression came out,” I am not convinced.

As I always say, almost everything is a Bayesian problem more or less.  That is why the “why’s” are important.  They serve as a proxy for the a prior probability.

For example, let’s say that a regression came up with a very significant correlation between, as Phil says, teams that start with the letter “L” and playoff success, we would know that that was likely a Type I error because going in (the a priori p), the probability of team names correlating with post-season success is near zero.

Whenever you deal with sample data, you always have the possibility of Type I and II errors, no matter how large the sample.  To reduce the chance of you accepting them, asking “why” is often an important component of the analysis.

Not to mention that there is always the chance that there is a mistake in the methodology or computations.

So, as I said, I am open to a discussion of the merits of their conclusions, but I am more than skeptical.  There are only so many ways to win (or to have a certain chance of winning) a baseball game and it all boils down to your offense and defense (and base running).  Sure there are subtle differences between post-season and reg season, and there are always leverages to be exploited in any game, but it still all boils down to offense, defense, and base running.

I especially don’t like the idea of defense being more “important” than offense, other than the fact that they are not quite equivalent, pound for pound.  But, for example, the idea that “good pitching beats good hitting” in the post-season but not in the regular season is kind of preposterous, IMO, and certainly unlikely.  And finding a strong positive relationship in a regression equation is not going to convince me.

But I would certainly love to hear the “explanation.”

As I always say, no matter how strong your opinion is on something, it really isn’t worth a whole lot until and unless you hear both sides of the story from some kind of experts.

"Last I checked, since 1969, the average playoff team scores 5 runs and allows 4 runs in the regular season.  In the playoffs, it’s 4 and 4.”

So, what does this imply? Does this imply that good pitching stays fairly consistent regardless of the opponent, whereas good hitting varies more according to the opponent?

I always thought of this as sort of a “playoff paradox”. Hitters generate their regular season stats playing a combination of good pitchers and bad pitchers. If they only faced good pitchers, their stats would most likely be worse than in the regular season.

Likewise, pitchers generate their regular season stats playing a combination of good hitters and bad hitters. If they only faced good hitters, their stats would most likely be worse than int he regular season.

So, when you get to the playoffs, most match-ups are good hitters versus good pitchers. Yet, it’s impossible for both pitchers and hitters to post worse statistics, seeing as how baseball is a zero-sum game, and any good thing that the offense does is a bad thing for the pitcher, and vice versa. Thus, one effect has to dominate. Either the good pitching has to shut down the good hitting, or the inverse must be true. You can’t have both pitchers and hitters being worse in the playoffs than in the regular season.

Suppose you have a league of 4.5 runs per game, where the good team have pitching giving up 4 runs per game and the hitting gets 5 runs per game.

In the playoffs, only the really good pitchers pitch.  They allow say 3.5 runs per game in the regular season.  Only the good hitters bat, and they score say 5.2 runs per game.  That dynamic would show that we should expect 4.0 runs per game.

That is, there’s been a shift in the talent base of who is actually performing in the playoffs.

I can’t say that I’ve looked at this for MLB, but I have for the NHL, and the most significant factor in playoff performance is (pythagorean) winning percentage.  Strength-of-schedule, deadline deals and injuries play a role.  But goal scoring and goal prevention are the most significant factors - and I didn’t find an advantage for high-scoring vs strong-defense teams.

BP suscribers can read Nate Silver’s secret sauce article from 2006 here:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5541

Or, apparently, even if you don’t subscribe.

Here is the crux of the article:

With the pennant races settling down more quickly than we might like, it’s not too early to start thinking about which teams might have the pole position in the post-season derby. As Dayn Perry and I found in Baseball Between the Numbers, regular season success is no guarantee of playoff performance. Rather, there are three particular characteristics of teams that win more than their share of post-season games. These characteristics are as follows:

More remarkably, all three of these characteristics relate to run prevention, rather than run scoring. That does not mean that offense is of no importance in the playoffs. But there is a lot of noise in the postseason record, and offense did not produce enough signal to emerge through it. The reasons are too complicated to get into here, but have to do with what happens when good offenses face good pitching. Pitching does have some tendency to dominate these match-ups, whether they occur in the regular season or in the playoffs. Because “plus pitching” versus “plus hitting” duels occur more frequently in the post-season, we tend to notice the effects more then.

This of course:

But there is a lot of noise in the postseason record, and offense did not produce enough signal to emerge through it.

means that the samples were too small.  It makes NO sense to say that offense is not significantly correlated with winning in any game or series, be it reg season, post-season, or spring training.  How do you not score a lot of runs and not increase your chances of winning?  Remember that these correlations assume that everything else is held constant.  In other words, even if there were lots of teams in the post-season who had good offense but they also happened to have had bad pitching and defense to go along with it, it should not have made a difference as the regressions would have adjusted/accounted for that.

The reasons are too complicated to get into here, but have to do with what happens when good offenses face good pitching. Pitching does have some tendency to dominate these match-ups, whether they occur in the regular season or in the playoffs.

If that is the case, then yes, it might be that good pitching is more important in the post than in the reg.

It should be easy to check if it is true, and if it is, to what degree.  Tango did NOT find that to be true, as far as I can recall.  I think it is in The Book.  Maybe he can explain.

If you just look at the offense and pitching of teams in the post-season, as measured by their offense and pitching in the reg season, then of course you will conclude that somehow good pitching beats good hitting.  I would hope that is not what BP did.

Let’s say that all your post-season teams score 5 runs and allow 4 runs in the reg season in a league that scores 4.5 rpg.  IOW, all post-season teams are a half run better on offense and pitching.

You would expect that in the post-season, teams will score and allow 4.5 rpg.  But, in reality, they will score and allow 4 or 4.2 rpg.  You might conclude that pitching was more important, that the good pitching somehow depresses the good hitting more than a half run a game.  But you would be wrong.

What is happening, of course, is that teams that score 5 rpg during the reg season will score around 5 rpg in the post-season if they faced average pitching.  But teams that allow 4 rpg in the reg season will have much better pitching in the post-season regardless of the opposition.  Why?  Because they only use their 4 best starters and the better starters get more starts than the worse ones.  And the starters throw fewer innings per game.  And they only use their best relievers and the closer pitches a lot more, percentage-wise.  Basically a team that has a 4.0 rpg pitching staff in the reg season has a 3.5 or 3.6 rpg pitching staff in the post-season.

So the correct way to figure how many runs should score in the post-season is to look at the personnel and the playing time in the post-season and to see what their “true numbers” are.

So instead of 5/4 teams going into the post season, you really have 5/3.5 teams going into the post season and thus in the post season only 4 rpg are scored.

That is the reason why fewer runs are scored in the post-season, BTW (besides the colder weather).  You have better starting pitching, you have more judicious use of the bullpen (the best relievers and lots of righty/lefty matchups), and perhaps a little more small ball.

Other than that, I really don’t think there is any “good pitching beats good hitting” going on. We don’t see that in the reg season when we look at good pitchers against good batters.  Why should we see it the post-season?

I hope that BP did not run their regressions by using reg season numbers and then regressing those on post-season success.  That would be a poor methodology and would yield incorrect results.

Let’s see, Rivera throws 5% of the Yankee innings in the regular season, throws 10% in the post-season, makes up a significant portion of all relief innings in the post-season of ALL pitchers in the last 10 years, has a performance in the post-season that is many standard deviations from anyone else, and what should we expect from a regression analysis that does not isolate Rivera?  Well, duh, that post-season closer performance highly correlates with winning more than it does in the regular season?

And, if you DID include Rivera as a parameter in the regression, what should we find?  I would bet that the non-Rivera closers would have much less significance to the correlation once you do that.

I have the BBTN book, I read that chapter when it came out, but I have not re-read it.  Maybe I should.  But, this simply looks like a correlation/causation issue.

I say again, that conclusions drawn from sample data without “explanations” are next to worthless.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t just manufacture random drugs and then do double blind tests and if the tests come up positive (with statistically significant results) for their drugs they claim that they work!

They develop drugs for certain conditions and diseases based on scientific evidence and principles and lots of research and development that suggest that they might work. They also usually (not always) have an idea as to why they work. Then they do the tests.

Otherwise we would have lots of useless drugs on the market that just happened to have had positive results in these tests due to Type I errors.  (Maybe that happens sometimes, I don’t know.)

All I ask is that BP or someone explain to me (to us) why the “usual things” that make one team better and win more often in a regular season game (score more runs or allow fewer runs) are not the same in a post-season game?

I suspect that BP made a mistake in their research. Tango’s thing could be one of those mistakes.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t just manufacture random drugs and then do double blind tests and if the tests come up positive (with statistically significant results) for their drugs they claim that they work!

Not to distract, but this is not entirely the case—see Viagra as the most prominent example. There are instances where they’re testing for A and discover B, which they didn’t think of at all, and B ends up being the prescribed use.

More to the topic, it’s interesting to look just at this post-season and see how it worked out.

2008 Secret Sauce

Philly, at 12, beat Los Angeles (19), Milwuakee (12) and then Tampa (6). LA beat Chicago (3). Tampa (6) beat Boston (1) and the White Sox (5). Boston (1) beat the Angels (2).

Secret Sauce didn’t have a good time of it.