THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This is an amazing article, and would be amazing if written today…

I had never heard of Hugh Fullerton before, but with Wikipedia’s help, I now know that he was one of the founders of the BWAA. Ironic, isn’t it?

Pretty cool!

I agree that the bar was set so high in 1910, that I can’t believe we’re barely above it in today’s computer age.  And in some respects, much below it.

I absolutely love the above image, that shows where the 2B was playing for every single play to which he was trying for.  We can see that his starting position differs by about +/-10 feet or so.  That could be affected by the handedness of the batter, the base/out situation, or even the specific batter, or the expectation as to what/where the pitcher is throwing.  Simply and purely fantastic stuff.  Throw in a stopwatch, and who the heck needs fancy software?  That article is a call for “get your noses out of the spreadsheet, your a$$ out of the basement, and watch and track baseball, without gas coming out of your mouth”.

And, the chart in that image shows that they tracked his movement for every single play, regardless if he was involved in it.  You guys may remember some outfit is doing such a thing for soccer players, tracking how much they travel.

This article is extracted from the book Touching Second, which Fullerton co-authored with Johnny Evers in 1910. The whole book is accessible on Google Books, and a reprint was published by McFarland in 2004.

Fullerton was also instrumental in breaking open the Black Sox scandal.

Well, that is fantastic news.  Here it is:
http://books.google.com/books?id=4jINAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=touching+second

They let you download it as PDF, or text.

Copyright I believe ends 75 years after publication (or is it 75 years after death of author?).  Anyway, that’s probably the reason they can deliver the entirety of the book.

Great find…

Tango, where are you downloading it from?  I’ve followed your link, but don’t see anywhere to get the book from.

This article makes me so giddy. I guess it also breaks my misconception about early baseball writing. Maybe I just need to look harder for writing like this.

Aaron, have you checked out the early Spalding baseball guides at the Library of Congress:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/spalding/titleS.html

Click on the link for one of the titles, then click on the picture of the cover. Then you can turn the pages ("next image") or enter a page number.

An extremely interesting article.  As an historian I frequently find that we underestimate the sophisticated thinking of those in the past.  While technology and information storage and retrieval systems evolve at a rapid pace the human mind evolves very slowly. 

Tango#2 - While tracking fielder’s is an interesting curiousity, I think this article reinforces my position that knowing a fielder’s position on the field is of no practical value to our understanding of fielding ability.  A fielder is responsible for using all the information available to him to position himself to his best advantage to minimize the the chance of the batter getting a hit.  We can never know what information that he used to cause him to play where he did, so the only criteria that we can use to judge whether he was successful is the total value of the hit balls on his side of the field.  Properly constructed, whole field fielding metrics should be just as accurate a measure of fielding ability as the most detailed zone map over a multiyear period.

CF/5: it appears at the top right.  It says “Download”.  Perhaps you need to sign in to your google account first?

This is great stuff. Thanks so much for posting this.

I don’t know if you guys are familar with F.C. Lane who wrote for Baseball magazine in the teens - the magazine is searchable at the la84foundation.org - a couple of his articles are:

http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/BBM/1916/bbm165j.pdf

http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/BBM/1919/bbm226k.pdf

John J Ward also wrote some good stuff:

http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/BBM/1913/bbm114l.pdf

Another gentleman, A.C. Hendrick also wrote some some articles:

http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/BBM/1917/bbm195ab.pdf

Fullerton’s method for tracking the ground covered by an infielder (Eddie Collins, in his example) is strikingly akin to what was propounded as the optimal approach for such study in the Force and Distance (FAD) method reported on in the 1998 BBBA.

It isn’t really surprising to discover that all of us have simply been “reinventing the wheel,” but what still seems astonishing is that these ideas went so subterranean for so long.

Note, though, that Fullerton is claiming that infielders get to 95% of all ground balls. This seems highly unlikely, given what was reported on in FAD and given the data available on GB/FB/LD hitting (at, for example, baseball-reference.com), where the batting average on GB for MLB in 2007 is .245--meaning that 75.5% of the GBs were converted into outs.

I got the feeling that he was talking about either “fielding percentage”, or that his “zone of responsibility” was very narrow and all the “groove” balls were automatic hits.

Peter Jensen #8 - I’m somewhat inclined to agree that the fielder deserves some blame/credit for where he positions himself, but there are two things that view ignores:

1. The manager/coach may be responsible for the positioning, not the fielder.

2. The fielder is part of an entire defense. A fielder’s job isn’t to make the most possible plays himself, it’s to help his team win. So, there are situations where a fielder’s positioning may reduce his chance to make a play, but still be beneficial to the team, such as:

-2B/SS is out of position because a runner is stealing second base
-1B is slightly out of position because he was holding on the runner
-infield is playing shallow because there’s a man on 3rd and the run is considered particularly critical
- the extreme shift used against Bonds/Ortiz (this is the clearest case - if the SS is standing where the 2B usually does and he fails to make the play, most systems will penalize the 2B)
- less extreme shift - if the entire outfield shifts in one direction it may increase the odds of the outfield as a whole making a play, but reduce the odds of an individual outfielder making a play
- bottom 9th, man on 3rd, 1 out - outfielders play shallow because a deep fly wins the game even if it’s caught
- outfielders play extra deep in a “no doubles defense”

Those are just off the top of my head.

Dackle, #7- thanks for the tip