THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Awesome. That’s how he became known as the best hitter who ever lived. So cool.

I can’t help but think about just how perfect a pitcher would have to be to hit the corners & get him out. After all, the guy drew over 2000 BB’s, showing that he had great plate awareness. A pitcher would have to be great to get Teddy out.

Or lucky.

We have half his games, so you can see them here:
http://www.bbref.com/pi/shareit/7M3AP

He had a 156/229/188 line against Jack Harshman.  Who?  Exactly the point.

I’m gonna take these quotes with a grain of salt.

It’s one scenario when “Ol TSW” gets to refer to himself as getting lucky and the like. Let a Boston reporter tell him that “You got really lucky when you hit .406” and “Teddy ballgame” would have likely went on one of his rampages where he tells the media they’d “Give their left nut to have a year like TSW” or how he’s the best hitter ever.

Sure, TW6 acknowledges that there’s osme luck in the game ... but I’d like to see his reaction iuf someone else attributed some of his accomplishments to luck (or gives luck a little too much credit).

Also, by saying “if a pitcher could spot a low and away fastball every time”, we’re essentially saying something like “if a pitcher could throw a 130mph fastball every time”.

You don’t just have to spot the fastball low and away, you have to do so while throwing it 85+ mph and changing speeds. Even bad hitters will eventually tree off on a 70mph fastball located low and away every time.

He certainly studied hitting to a more detailed extent than any other batsman of his day. But I might advance the argument that Williams was more of a physicist than a SABRmetrician. Of all of his noteworthy undertakings (as hitter, pilot, fly-fisherman ...), “Washington Senators manager” doesn’t quite make the list. How closely did he hew to the precepts of, say, The Book whilst at the Nats’ helm? That to me would be the primary question in the Williams-as-SABRmetrician discussion. Hitting is more physics than SABRmetrics.

Hitting is more physics than SABRmetrics.

Who says the two have to be separate fields when it comes to baseball?  In my mind, physics applied to baseball is sabermetrics.  If it isn’t, I’ll have to turn in my sabermetrician card. 

Obviously, baseball, sabermetrics, and physics have large areas where they don’t overlap, but I can’t think of an area where baseball and physics overlap that isn’t truly sabermetrics (using the Bill James definition).

http://www.sportsbabel.net/tedwilliams_grid.png

Also July 8, 1967 Sports Illustrated in their vault

Shows what Ted thought his batting average was in each location in the strike zone.

aahh I don’t believe in luck and neither do the stats. It’s common for even the best hitters to have some relatively unknown pitchers they just can’t hit.

#4:  Is that the Bob Short who hired TSW as manager of the Senators?

I love the “hitting is more physics than SABRmetrics” line.  But it is less physics than talent.  I know that from first-hand experience.

Some people are so lucky they don’t get hit by a ball flying off of a power drill

In Williams’ later writing, he was very enthusiastic about the use of OBA and SLG as the primary indicators for hitters.  See the linked article from Baseball Digest:

“Power is it...what impresses me is guys who (1) power the ball and who (2) get on base the most times.  If a batter gets 200 hits and draws 30 base on balls, it’s not as good as having 160 hits with 100 walks.”

....

Williams has spent years studying baseball’s finest hitters.  Using his own aforementioned criteria, heavily weighted towards power and on-base percentage, Ted has ranked “my best 20 all-time hitters”.

Now of course Williams was an elderly man when this came out, so it’s impossible to say how much of it was his and how much of it was his ghostwriter’s.  It’s not hard for me to believe that someone with his hitting philosophy and otherworldly walk rate would subscribe to OBA and SLG--if I were him, I’d have felt vindicated by sabermetrics, to the extent I needed vindication.

I came to same conclusion independently. I remember the comment being made that it was too bad that Bannister was such a mediocre pitcher. He would have more credibility if he was better. Teddy Ballgame is that guy - fantastic talent and a fantastic baseball mind. I’m sure he would have been all over the advanced stats if they had been available to him.

The question (which is probably unaswerable) is how good would he have been if he was a rockhead? I’d guess, still a HOFer, but maybe not one of the best ever. Likewise, I feel that Bannister has the talent of a AAA starter, but is able to make the back of a MLB rotation by virtue of his intellect.

Ted’s hitting philosophy was “Get a good pitch to hit”.

Sounds obvious and simplistic, but can anyone come up with a better description, in a short sentence? Look at all the implications:

1) Don’t swing at balls. OOZ pitches aren’t good pitches to hit in general. And even if a few are decent given your type of contact swing, you have to balance that uncertainty in the result against the gain in the count if you take the pitch.
2) Don’t swing at pitcher’s strikes that you can’t hit hard, especially with fewer than 2 strikes in the count ( 3-2 counts may or may not be an exception). Taking these strikes appears to lower your run expectancy according to the tables, but those published expectancies are based on all strikes, not just pitcher’s strikes. Take it and hope to get a better pitch to hit. You’ll get it more often than not, and if you don’t, tip your hat to the pitcher.
3) But if you get a fat type pitch earlier in the count, don’t hesitate to put the whammy on it. Don’t be up there taking hitter’s strikes trying to draw a walk. Getting behind in the count on good pitches to hit is not productive.  Let the pitchers know that there are no free strikes on your at-bats.
4) Notice his choice of the word “get”. He could have instead said “wait for a good pitch to hit”. But he realized that PA management is an active, not a passive, skill. There are more than a few batters who, IMO, are ‘too’ patient, and are not optimizing their batting eyes.

I really wish that we had the OSwing, ZSwing, 1st pitch swing, etc., data for Teddy Ballgame.

I am going to speculate that had all the present-day sabrmetric data been available to Williams, he would mostly have ignored it.  He already had a well thought out approach to hitting (see Dave Smyth’s very clear discussion in #12).  And he had a very good understanding of the biomechanics of swinging a bat.  And finally, he had a good knowledge of his opponent on the mound.  For Ted, that would have been enough.  The sabrmetric data would merely confirm for him what he already knew.

Referring to Tango’s link, I love that Ted hit well off Jim Bunning.  Take that, Senator!

In reality, Ted and Bunning were more similar than not, politically speaking.  But that’s a whole other story.

Ted endorsed some of the early sabermetric writing.  From “The Ted Williams’ Hit List”: “Of those stastics related solely to hitting, I give special credence to one used by Thorn and Palmer, known as production.  Production (PRO.) is determined by adding on base percentage (OBP) and slugging average (SLG.).  On base percentage is a stat developed by Roth and Rickey in the early ‘50s.”

“This single statistic most closely reflects my thinking on what makes up a superior hitter.”