THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Theriot is not slow, but shouldn’t Beltre have at least looked Descalso back to 2nd?

Beltre made a similar decision in the 4th on a Molina grounder with Berkman on 3rd.  I thought he could have gone home there too.

Jon Jay didn’t advance from 2nd on the play ... how does the win probability for the Cards change with a runner on 2nd and 2 outs?

I think Beltre would have been able to make the play at home, but does knowing Jay stay at second make the decision to go for the sure out a little more defensible?

@Steve C

Descalso was on 3rd and Jay was on 2nd. Jay did stay on 2nd after the play, but I think it was more Jay being cautious (which is correct) more than Beltre looking him back to second.

Tango, is there much difference in the WP if the runner is on 2nd then if the runner is on 3rd like you had listed.

Thanks, for some reason I thought he got to third.  Remaining at 2B, and the chance of Rangers losing goes down to .145.

Breakeven point now has to be 90% for Beltre to make the play at home.

If you have to be 90% sure about something, you pretty much have to think it’s a gimme in order to second guess the guy.  I mean, 90% is not a hard-and-fast number.  It’s really 80%-100% sure.

Beltre is also a fantastic fielder.  On any gray-area play, I will always defer to Beltre, and Rolen and the like.

I looked into the platoon splits for Pujols and Berkman and over the past 3 years. Their wOBA vs RHP is near enough to be no difference (.408 for Pujols and .419 for Berkman weighted by PA-IBB since I believe Fangraphs wOBA takes out IBB). So Pujol’s wOBA was actually 97% of Berkman’s.

However, though Berkman is a switch hitter he still has a large platoon split. Over the past 3 years his wOBA against lefties is .302.

If you were to intentionally walk Pujols and bring in a lefty to face Berkman you’d be going from .408 to .302. In that case, Pujols is 135% of Berkman.

But of course they didn’t bring in a lefty against Berkman (did they have any left?)

My general rule of thumb is that I allow an allowance of 20 wOBA points for something the manager might know and that I wouldn’t.  So, if you have two guys that would otherwise be .400 wOBA players, but your “gut instinct” says differently, I’ll let you change it to .420 for one guy and .380 for the other guy, and not challenge you on it.

For the potentially last at bat of the World Series, I’ll even double that to 40 wOBA points.

So, if Wash thought that Pujols was .440 and Berkman was .360 (Pujols is 122% of Berkman), I’ll let it slide here.

Why would it make sense to put the winning run on 1st base when up by 1? Doesn’t make sense to me. You should pitch to that batter because allowing him on 1st gives you a chance to lose on a 2B.

"My general rule of thumb is that I allow an allowance of 20 wOBA points for something the manager might know and that I wouldn’t.”

Tango, that amazes me.  We have thread after thread about how atrocious managers are at making in-game decisions, processing information, etc., and yet you still give them 20 wOBA points of deference?

I realize that much of their disconnect is in processing information rather than gleaning or knowing that information, but still!

More importantly, when Washington (who is clueless when it comes to processing information) IBB’s Pujols to pitch to Berkman, do you REALLY think that he knows something that we don’t?  Are you really going to give him 20 points of deference is THAT situation?  It is NOT like he likes the pitching matchup as he is going to IBB Pujols with ANY pitcher on the mound!

Jay not going to third should not play much of a role in the equation.  The question is, “What are the chances that Jay goes to third?” That is what Beltre has to “consider.” Perhaps that number was 50% on that play.

Regardless of the numbers, Beltre was going to first no matter what because that is what is always done in that situation and that is what the manager would expect (he would get excoriated if he went home)…

MGL:

If you remember when I ran my clutch project, asking fans to select a hitter they trust to come in the clutch while I selected the better overall hitter, the fans selected hitters that were about 20 wOBA points worse than my hitters.

But in the season that followed those guys only hit 10 points worse in clutch situations.

So, I’m going to grant that if the fans have a decent idea of who might be able to come through in the clutch, maybe the manager knows more.

20 points is also the handedness platoon advantage.

Therefore, I simply allow a 20 point deference, just so that I can acknowledge SOME level of uncertainty, even if it’s “too much”, but at the same time, it allows me to put some limit so that the manager can play a hunch all the time, like batting Neifi Perez for Barry Bonds or something.

As long as I can tell the manager that he can know something, I can also tell him that he can’t know everything.

20 wOBA points seems like a fair compromise to get my point across.

I use the same idea with people who argue I can’t plot a pitch from a TV feed.  You have to at least acknowledge that I can tell the difference between a pitch low and away from high and in, using all the visual clues (catcher setup, glove catching, batter swinging, etc).  Once you agree to SOMETHING reasonable, then we’re just trying to negotiate limits.  So, from one diagonal corner to the other, that’s about 2.5 feet.  Therefore, we can at least agree that I can tell the difference between pitches that are 2.5 feet apart 95% of the time.  How about 2 feet?  1.5 feet?  1 foot?  6 inches?  3?  1?  We can discuss and come to some sort of compromise.

If we can’t agree to something at its most basic (that humans respond to conditions differently, and some humans can determine better than others how others respond), that is clutch exists, then we’re not getting anywhere.  So, we acknowledge a reasonable point of view, and then we come up with boundaries.