from Amazon
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The A’s never swing on 3-0?
That seems to be what the data is showing here. It is of course a silly thing to “never” do something, as that’ll get exploited in short order. You’d hope anyway. I’m not sure the last time that Mike Piazza has swung at a 3-0 count. Must be back in the 90s. But, pitchers were scared of him the whole time. Anyway, the A’s “pass through” performance once they reached a 3-0 count shows that they are as good or better than the league average. It seems that, for now, no one’s been calling the A’s on their “bluff”.
Do you PITCHf/x-ers want more work? Look at hitters who almost always swing (break them up into power hitters and not). Where in the strike zone do the pitchers pitch to them? Now, look at hitters who swing ALOT on 3-0 (again, break them up into power hitters and not). Where in the strike zone do pitchers pitch to them? (Compare that to some neutral count, like 0-0 or 1-1.) Are the pitchers smart enough to realize that the 3-0 always-take hitters are in fact always taking and therefore are pitching them more down the middle?
Of course, a player is not a robot, and will start to adapt if pitchers throw too much down the middle. So, what we have to do is identify the hitters as of today, let the world know about it. And let’s see who starts to adapt in 2008.
THIS is what baseball is all about. Thank you PITCHf/x.
I love this kind of stuff. My guess is that pitchers and hitters are almost always suboptimal in their game theory strategies, for two reasons: One, they don’t have the pertinent data handy. They can only guess from memory )and scouting reports) who likes to swing and who doesn’t. And I don’t think that the pitching coach or other team personnel goes over EVERYTHING with a pitcher in the pre-game conference or whatever they do or call it. Two, even if they did know exactly what the batter does, they would NOT know exactly what their response should be. For example, if they identified a batter who NEVER swung at 3-0 pitches, the correct response is to throw a batting practice fastball right down the middle - but only for one or two times. After that the batter will get wise and destroy the next one.
Anyway, no one should EVER do anything all the time unless the optimal strategy is to do something all the time no matter how the opponent responds. In this case, it would only be correct to take 3-0 ALL the time, if that were correct against a batting practice fastball down the middle. That might be the case for the weakest of hitters (maybe) but certainly not for anyone with a little power and a little strike zone judgment…