THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Feel free to post whatever you like here, whether about the book, or baseball, or this blog.

Tom & Mitchel,

Glad to see you guys starting something like this.  I’m looking forward to reading it in the near future.  I loved the book!

-Mike

Great to see you guys starting a blog on your site. Look forward to reading your musings.

Looking forward to seeing lots of good discussion here (especially given the decline of Primer).

One topic I’d like to see you address is your findings that pitchers perform better on 4 days rest than 3, and that moving to a 4-man rotation would lead to an increase in RA.  Others who have studied this issue—such as Woolner in BBTN—have reached the opposite conclusion.  Any thoughts on why your data is different? (One thing I noticed is that you’re working with more recent data, so perhaps 10 or 20 years ago the story was different?)

My own view is that even if Woolner were right that pitchers have done just as well on 3 days rest, you still couldn’t generalize that to recommend a 4-man rotation.  It seems very likely that the pitchers who have been allowed to go on 3 days rest are those most likely to be able to handle it, plus some who only went 2-3 IP in their previous start.  (It would be interesting to see results for your 3-day sample divided between those who had pitched 6+ innings in their prior start, vs. <6.)

I think the idea that someone has been “conditioned” to pitch every 4 days instead of every 5 could be explored.

After all, we know that pitchers perform much better in a relief role, perhaps because they’ve been conditioned, and can prepare, as such.

I think the next step is to go through the Retro years (1960 - 2005) and then look for this conditioning aspect, for both the starter and relief role.  There’s certainly been enough change that we should be able to get more insight into this.