THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I love Vlad.

That guy is cool as ice.  I love it that he is such a free swinger, and yet one of the best hitters in the league.  A good ole f-ck y-- to the talking heads who think they know everything.  Vlad is Vlad because of the way he swings.  It will be interesting to see how he adapts his swing as his bat speed will diminish in his old age.  One of the greatest Expos of all time.

He can show a lot of patience when he needs to.  Sometimes he’ll just come up and hack at the first pitch no matter where it is, but if he thinks the pitcher is trying to take advantage of his free-swinging ways, he flips a switch and becomes patient Vlad, and he’ll take pitches 1/2 an inch off the plate, yet he’s almost never called out on strikes - he’s one of the best at telling a ball from a strike.

He’ll go into patient Vlad mode just often enough to keep the pitchers honest, so he can bash them all over the ballpark as free-swinging Vlad.

According to the Fangraphs logs, he was called out swinging ONCE this year.

(He had 9 dropped third strikes.  Can’t tell from those if he took any of them.  Would be kinda hard for a catcher to drop a called third strike though.)

Another way to think of his performance is to figure out the LI for each event.  For the typical player, all events occur with an LI of around 1.00.  How did Vlad do?

1.23 HR
1.17 HBP
1.14 2B or 3B
1.03 1B
0.97 BB
0.93 nonK out
0.83 K

See the pattern here?  He hits HR when the game is more important and doesn’t strikeout.

That’s what WPA does… it counts each of his HR as 1.23 homeruns, because that’s the impact they had.

"Vlad is Vlad because of the way he swings.”

This is either tautological, or unsubstantiated - depending on how you read it.

If he stopped swinging at pitches around his eyeballs, is there any evidence that suggests he’d become worse at hitting true strikes?  Is there any evidence that suggests the walks he’d get as a more patient hitter would be worse for his batting line because they’d be replacing so many doubles and home runs?

I feel like this is kind of like me saying Manny is Manny, and if he actually ran out ground balls, he wouldn’t be the amazing hitter he is.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  Manny and Vlad are great hitters/ballplayers, with some flaws.  I can only think they’d be better if they eliminated those flaws, barring evidence to the contrary.

Regarding the better performance in the clutch… is this a mental thing?  My question is - why can’t he take his big spot approach in the blowouts as well?  Sure the impact of the improvement in his results will be very small, but it’s something.  Are we to believe that players only have a finite amount of focus, and that Vlad is conserving that focus for the times that matter?  Or should I believe that he’s lazy and just doesn’t feel like giving his best in blowouts?

I don’t mean to rag on one of your favorite players, I enjoy watching him too, but these are questions I’ve had for a while and wonder if you know of any research into answering them.  We’ve seen that Glavine changes his pitching approach depending on the situation, and that this change in approach tends to bring results that are better than expected.  I’m not sure how that relates to this, because it’s not that he’s pitching “better” with men on… just differently.  Maybe that’s what’s going on with Vlad as well?

It’s possible that pitchers are like little girls around Vlad, and they buckle more than he does.  The most accurate answer is that this is a small sample, and almost completely meaningless if I went back several years.

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“Manny and Vlad are great hitters/ballplayers, with some flaws.  I can only think they’d be better if they eliminated those flaws, barring evidence to the contrary. “

The best evidence to the contrary is that Vlad and Manny are already two of the best hitters in baseball.  My best guess is that if you have players that are already at the farthest tail of a distribution after doing what they’ve been doing all their lives, that any drastic change would be for the worse (i.e., move toward the mean).

It would seem too inconceivable to me to suggest that Vlad, a fantastic hitter already, is actually approaching the game in a suboptimal fashion, and could possibly be at an even more right-tail part of the distribution.

If this was the young Billy Beane however, then any change in approach would probably be for the best.

Very interesting.  It reminds me of a constant argument I got in with friends last year about whether Antonella was a “good” singer or not.  Being one of the lousiest singers of the top 25 in that contest is a HUGE accomplishment, in my opinion, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she was empirically in the top 99.99th percentile of the population 18-29 at singing.

Still, I guess my intuition differs.  On a normal curve, I don’t think there’s too much difference between Manny and Darin Erstad, when you look at the entire population of the world.  Likewise, in 2003-2005, could you really point out a huge difference between JJ Putz and Mike Timlin?  Putz might have been the 200th best in the world at throwing a baseball, and had significant experience at that level.  And he was clearly playing suboptimally, by not throwing a splitter.  All of a sudden, he learns the splitter and jumps into the upper echelon of pitchers - I’d say maybe a top-5 closer.

I guess an example of this for hitters would be someone like Reyes.  Rickey Henderson tells him he’d be better at his job if he took a few more pitches.  Sure enough, one of the best baseball players on the planet gets a lot better because of a change in approach.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever know how good some of these guys can be, because I don’t think the Angels hitting coach has the guts to tell Vlad to stop swinging at garbage, and stay on his case until that happens.  I don’t think Francona has the guts to get on Manny’s case when he doesn’t run out those grounders, and turns triples into doubles, and doubles into singles.  It makes sense that Vlad shouldn’t want to change his approach - he’s nearly as successful as one can possibly be.  But the difference between him, Manny (and even guys like Ted Williams and Wade Boggs), versus someone like Bonds, is that Bonds - in my opinion - was never satisfied.  That’s why we saw him at the best he could possibly be.  I can’t imagine criticizing Bonds’ swing, or plate approach - there were no glaring oddities, and it seemed perfect.  And furthermore, I believe if there was anything he thought he could possibly change for the better, he’d have tried it.

So you’re telling me that if Vlad swings at strike three, he still reaches first base 90% of the time??

Phil: ?  Explain please.

Comment #4.  He was called out on a swinging third strike once, but reached on dropped third strikes (presumably also swinging) 9 times.

So 9 out of those 10 swinging third strikes, he reached first base.

Did I screw up?

Just checked fangraph. I think tango meant Vlad struck out looking only once this year.

http://www.fangraphs.com/statsp.aspx?playerid=778&position=OFDH&season=

That’s amazing…

I didn’t explain myself well.  9 of his strikeouts were on dropped third strikes.  I’m not sure if he actually reached base, or if he was tagged out.  I’ll have to check tomorrow.

OK, sorry.  Still, if 9 out of his 10 swinging third strikes were dropped, that’s something.