from Amazon
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Throwing Over to First
PizzaCutter takes a look at throwing over to first. The league leaders in runners who had the most pitches thrown their way is a who’s who of fast runners. A couple of nits:
Next, I identified how many events were “duplicates.” This would be a case where a runner singles to start the inning, but the next three hitters strike out without him leaving first base. This way, he gets credit for only one time on first, rather than three.
I would argue the opposite. In fact, why not make it the ratio of pitches thrown to runner to pitches thrown to batter. If that’s too long to do, I’d stick to pitches thrown to runner per batter faced.
There was a significant association such that a runner was more likely to run if there had been a throw to first. (More likely: a pitcher threw to first when it was occupied by a runner who was more likely to run.) Runners only tried in 8.5% of the instances in which a throw had been made to first, but 21.8% of the time when the pitcher had thrown over. So throwing over certainly isn’t a deterrent from running.
Obviously, we have a sampling issue. The question is if each runner is affected by the pickoff throws. When you aggregate, you should have the same players, with the same weights, in both groups. We don’t have that here, as the fast runners are way overweighted in the pickoff group than the slow runners, relative to the nonpickoff group. You could probably just split the players by career triples per doubles to get a quick speed score, and then make your universe the top 20 or 30 runners. Then, from that pool of players, see how they do when a pickoff throw is made or not, and if multiple pickoff throws are made.
Nonetheless, fantastic research, and we need more roll-up-the-sleeve work like this.
Tango, I actually calculated that ratio a few different ways. I didn’t do throws to first / pitches, but I did do the list by plate appearances in which the runner was on first. Same basic list, order’s a little different (Freel, Roberts, Upton, Logan, Duffy, Pierre, Reyes, Soriano, Granderson, Amezaga) I didn’t report it because it was late and I needed to get to bed.
As for the sampling issue, you’re absolutely correct. It’s an issue I plan to address in part II (or III, depending how far I can go with this.)
But, thanks for the link.