from Amazon
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
The good side of sac bunting
Black Hawk weighs in on bunting for the Angels, and looks at each sac bunt, one at a time.
Without adjusting for the quality of the batter, the successful sacrifices by the Angels cost the team a whopping .224 wins. That’s nothing; that’s two runs a season. If I adjust for the quality of the batter, that goes up from -.224 to -.094. Once I account for the handedness of the pitcher, which is as far as I went, that went up to -.080.
That’s based on 29 (or 31) bunts. If you treat everyone as “average”, then the sac bunt costs .008 wins per attempt. (The equivalent of -.09 random runs.) However, by looking at the identitiy of the batter and handedness of the pitcher, the value of the sac bunt was -.003 wins per attempt, or the equivalent of -.03 random runs. There are also other factors to consider, some of which deal with game theory. All-in-all, it’s likely that the Angels bunting was a wash.
An excellent look at how to start with a basic WE chart, and adjust it to fit the context.
I have a follow-up piece today (if you click on my name, I believe), as the B-R PI now displays attempted sacrifices. The conclusion is relatively unchanged, though there was one particularly costly bunt call that wipes out a lot of the good calls.