THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Forgive the question, but what exactly does that last column signify?

I was wondering the same thing so I checked out the article for the answer:

“The last column shows how pitchers did relative to their seasonal averages in game score, so pitchers are, in effect, compared to themselves. All pitchers are a little worse than average in the postseason because they are facing top offenses.”

From the article: “The last column shows how pitchers did relative to their seasonal averages in game score, so pitchers are, in effect, compared to themselves.”

I’m not quite sure where Tim McClelland is tonight, but it’s apparently not at 3rd base.  That’s 3 clearly blown calls in the span of 2 innings.  Wow.  This is bad umping, and it’s so bad that its becoming its own story, which is a shame.

I wonder if the pitchers on 3-days rest were pulled a little sooner than the ones on 4 or more days rest?  Could that explain why a pitcher could simultaneously be worse on 3-days rest, but have stats that are similar when he is on 4-days rest (because the manager is more likely to pull him before he gets to the 4th time around the batting order)?

KY, sure, that could be.  No doubt that if you take a subset of games where pitchers are pulled early, but not because they were pitching badly, they should have better stats (because, as you say, they are facing fewer guys the 3rd and 4th times through the order).

You would have to adjust for that if you wanted to fairly analyze pitchers who pitched on 3 days rest.  In any case, you have all kinds of selective sampling and sample size problems when just looking at the post-season.

What if you are a manager and you really have no idea whether a certain pitcher of yours can throw on 3 says rest, like Lee and Manuel.  No idea whatsoever.  And what if you look at the stats of all pitchers in the post-season who did pitch in 3 days rest and you saw that it was just fine?

But what if the other managers knew which of their pitchers could do that and which couldn’t (and you didn’t)?  And what if most pitchers CAN’T pitch effectively on 3 days rest?  You would be making a big mistake assuming that your pitcher in question could do that (just because of the stats) when in fact most pitchers can’t.

KY: great point!