THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

2) Back-of-the-envelope calculations. OPS works great for that. As a quickie, OPS is fine. For fine-grained calculations, it’s useless.

8) There’s nothing wrong with his suggestion at all. The point of all this is entertainment; the current situation entertains. I’m not sure fans would like a pick-the-rule situation any better. Neither of the above is what I would pick, but suum cuique.

10) Here, I’m of the position he’s right and you’re wrong. The problem with interleague play is that your team is not competing with other teams for a playoff spot. If my team is in competition for a playoff spot (snickers aside, please), I want to see it play games against teams also competing for the spot.

Truthfully, I’m not sure how fans view this, as a group. Interleague play has higher attendance, but that might be an illusion. Those games are played during the summer, when attendance is higher for all games; day-of-the-week may also affect this, if these games happen more often on weekends. I know that IL games attendance dropped off after the first few years, the novelty being gone, then MLB started rotating the opposing division, giving us the long-desired matchup of Yankees-Padres. Someone needs to do a very detailed study of game-by-game attendance so we know these things.

“Tradition” is what lets the NHL, the NFL and the NBA keep up IL play. I don’t see how any slinging of the term helps the discussion. The point is to maximize revenue, which we can tie to maximizing fan enjoyment, represented by attendance.

Relievers) The problem with how things were was that things were not predictable. If you were to use your relief ace earlier in a consistent and predictable way, then the reliever can condition himself accordingly.

I endorse Charles’ post.  I like the DH set-up as-is, and I abhor interleague for reasons similar to the ones he states. 

“Other sports” is a non-starter to me—it’s not as though I like the way other sports handle it.  (The NFL comes somewhat close, with teams in each division having predominantly similar schedules, but even then it’s not exact.  In the current arrangement, teams in MLB divisions aren’t guaranteed similar schedules, which I find problematic.)

"If a reliever conditions himself to come in during the 9th inning between 9:30 and 10:00, who am I to tell him that he should come in during the 7th or 8th inning at 8:45?  So, I don’t know that it’s a given that it should happen, even if logically, it should happen, and, historically, it has happened.  It requires a paradigm shift back to the way things were.  It’s a tough sell. “

I think the issue is more that for your ace reliever to enter the game in the 7th inning of a two run game with runners on 2nd and 3rd and one out, he needs to have been warming up when the leverage was much lower.  Pitchers can’t just be throwing in the bullpen for 3 innings every game waiting for the leverage to heat up.

If pitchers were allowed to warm up on the mound for as long as they wanted after a pitching change, I think you’d see ace relievers coming in before the 9th a lot more.

JB: I’m aware of the warmup issue.  Goose Gossage was able to pitch in the 8th inning, no problem. Bruce Sutter too.  LOTS of aces.

http://www.tangotiger.net/bullpenuse.html

I’m not saying anything new.  I’m saying things that are old, old things that worked.

"If a reliever conditions himself to come in during the 9th inning between 9:30 and 10:00”

And the reliever conditioned himself so well he adjusts for time zones?

I don’t think so on this logic.

"If pitchers were allowed to warm up on the mound for as long as they wanted after a pitching change, I think you’d see ace relievers coming in before the 9th a lot more.”

Just fake an injury to the pitcher on the mound whenever you want to bring in your ace!

DQ,

The pitcher doesn’t have to physically be conditioned to pitch in the 9th down to the hour for this to matter. A baseball game uses it’s own unit of time and a relief ace may have his own set of habits that he does based on the inning to mentally prepare himself for a potential outing.

In addition to preparations, the ability to know when you’re going to be called upon would presumably reduce stress in the reliever and perhaps make him more effective (or hell maybe it makes him softer, everyone’s an individual right?).

I think it’s best to remember the parenthetical comment. When you try to force players into standardized molds, you miss out on some of their innate ability. Maybe Mo just needs to fire 3 warm up pitches and he’s ready to go anytime while Broxton is stressed when he doesn’t know exactly how he’s going to be used. But maybe stress actually makes Broxton a better pitcher.

Who the hell knows what to do…

I’m struggling to understand the objection to Belief #18. Hitting a LHP is somewhat different from hitting a RHP, even if platoon splits to-date are a poor reflection of that skill. I mean, I assume the point here is that the Phillies, for example, would be better off sitting Howard against LHP, or at least moving him down in the lineup. There’s no disagreement with that, is there?

The objection to #18 is that we are NOT better off thinking it as two different skills.  All you have to do is apply a generic adjustment, and you are 90% of the way there.

@2: Right. That the NFL does something doesn’t mean squat for MLB. Personally, if there were a significant attendance boost even after looking hard, I’d change my tune; if it’s the same as any other non-divisional foe, I’d go against, to keep travel costs down.

So many times, we project whether or not we like something better to it being “better” in a cost/benefit analysis. So much of the DH debate boils down to the Clark Griswold school of fun: “I’m gonna have fun, and you’re gonna have fun! We’re gonna have so much f***ing fun that we’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ out of our a**h***s!” Imposing your idea of fun on someone else isn’t fun.

My point about the other sports is this: if you start with a clean slate, how would you handle the inter-conference games.

If you are suggesting that you like the NFL method (25% inter-conference games) but prefer 0% for MLB, then I want to hear that reason.

Start with a blank slate, and give me the preferred inter-conference split for the 4 major sports.

If I were starting from scratch and could do it however I wanted:

MLB: Two leagues, no inter-league play, no divisions, even the schedules as much as possible within each league, and the two pennant winners go to the World Series.  I like the World Series, so I’d keep that, but other than that, I’d want to take advantage of the long schedule to let each league play out to one champion, with each team playing several games both home and away against all the teams they are competing against to win the pennant.  If I weren’t tied to the Series, I’d be fine with just getting rid of the leagues, but with the Series, I like the confrontation between the best each set of teams has to offer, rather than just being the top two teams who already competed against each other all season and already had one come out ahead of the other.

NFL: Two conferences, no divisions, no inter-conference play, play each team in the conference once (EPL style, but no home-and-home since there aren’t enough games), top however many teams go to the playoffs.  You’d probably have to add 2 teams to keep 16 games (17 teams per conference, play each of the other 16 once).  I’d keep the conferences at least because there aren’t enough games to play everyone in the league, and for some of the same reasons as I’d keep the leagues in MLB (set up the confrontation for the Super Bowl), though I think that is a less compelling reason with the short season (which is also why I’d keep the playoffs).

NBA:  I think you’d have to have inter-conference play because the league markets so heavily on being driven by superstars.  If you tell half the teams they never host LeBron, and the other half they never host Kobe, I don’t think it will work.  I think I’d just not have conferences and seed the top however many teams into a tennis-style bracket for the playoffs (top two seeded teams can’t meet until the finals, can’t meet 3-4 until semis, etc)

NHL:  Maybe something similar to the NBA plan.  Probably that or the MLB plan.  I don’t know which I prefer for hockey.

Having done this, it seems like I prefer that if you have separate leagues/conferences, then keep them separate entities, and if you are going to mix them, to not bother to even have them.  For some sports I see reason to have them, but otherwise just do away with them.

Kincaid: fantastic, well-reasoned.  Better than what I was hoping for.  You started with the premise, and then figured out a solution to match your objectives.  Perfect.  (Unlike many others who start with the solution, and then try to fit the reasoning to it; i.e., politics.)

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Great thought about the NBA/superstar driven.  It is very much a one- or two-player team, and it’s a tough sell to say you are going to see your team play against Kobe and the Lakers 5 times and Wade 0 times, rather than make it 4-1 or 3-2.  It’s not like Kobe goes 0 for 4 twice, and then he has that one great game.  In basketball, you get to see the great players at least play good almost every game.

So, yes, inter-conference game is needed there.  Whether you do two inter-conference games per team and 2-3 intra-conference, or one inter and four intra can be debated.  It can even be switched every two years.

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NFL: agreed, with the limited number of games, and the selling point being the teams, not the players, keeping it as two separate leagues should be sellable.

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MLB: could go either way.

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NHL: they’ve tinkered with their schedules ALOT.  No one wants 8 games intra-division.  6 is max.  They also are halfway between NBA and NFL in terms of teams / players.  Probably best as a 4 conference league, with 2-3 inter-conference games, and 6 intra-conference games.  Regional rivalries are imporant, but you can’t overdo them.