from Amazon
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The New Speed Scores
By Tangotiger, 01:51 PM
Pizza Cutter gives us his speed scores.
I also used speed scores in The Book, though I didn’t lay out the exact process. It is fairly similar to what Pizza did. One thing he did was look at pickoff throws, which is cool. He had an earlier article on the subject, and I’ll repeat it here: he figures it as pickoff throws per “time on base”, where “time on base” is simply “1”, regardless if he goes through 1 or 3 batters at the plate. This doesn’t make any sense. What you really want is pickoff throws per plate throws. But, if that’s not easy to come by, use 3.75*batters faced (or use the simple pitch count estimator).
Regardless, it’s fantastic stuff.
Actually, the way that I can write syntax with the program I use, I could get throws to first per pitch with relative ease. The reason that I went with throws per time on first is because subsequent throws didn’t seem to have any extra effect.