THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Awesome!  Now, you’re the Red Sox, and you have every pitch your guys have ever thrown on video and tagged and ready to examine.  Have an intern go through all the hitter’s counts from those games, and see if Varitek is calling for the Fastball, or if Daisuke is shaking him off until he gets the 1.  That’ll tell you who you need to have a talk with.

On a side note, I’ve found Remy to be a pretty insightful broadcaster in the past, but now I’m a little nervous.  Joe Morgan “sounds like” he knows his stuff, when he clearly doesn’t.  I hope I’m not fooled by Remy in the same way half of America is fooled by Morgan.

Well, Dice-K is a very successful pitcher and appears to be very smart.  So somehow being so predictable in hitters’ counts is not hurting him that much.  Or maybe he would be even more successful if he was not so predictable. I don’t know. For one thing, we would want to know the league average for percent of fastballs in the same counts that Dice-K had.  If that is 90%, then the difference between him and the rest of the league may not even be statistically significant.

Also, Dice-K is walking a crap load of batters this year.  Throwing so many fastballs in hitters counts makes that even harder to believe.  On the other hand, one of two things could be going on (or both).  One, he is walking so many batters that he just can’t bring himself to walking even more.  Two, hitters are not swinging much in hitters counts because he is walking so many batters this year.  Of course, if he is indeed throwing almost nothing but fastballs in hitters counts, they should be swinging a lot.  After, all if you can’t swing in a hitters count when you know you are getting a fastball, when ARE you going to swing.  Interesting and perplexing.

Even if you know the FB is coming, you still don’t know the location.  However, in this case, since it’s a hitter’s count, the hitter will sit for something he can hit.  If he is walking lots, he must be still pitching at the edges even in a hitter’s count, and his fastball is not hitting the edges.

I’d like to see a “heat zone” chart for him by count…

Thanks for the link. =)

Regarding the location of these pitches, I have an as-yet unreleased graph that will plot how close each pitch was to the edge of the strikezone.

I didn’t include these in my post because I figured identifying fastballs was enough. The proportion of people in America who understand “Counts LWTS X Distance from Center of Normalized Strikezone” as graph axes is something like 7 people. =)

http://brooksbaseball.net/pfx/countLInib.php?xml=http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2008/month_07/day_28/gid_2008_07_28_anamlb_bosmlb_1//pbp/pitchers/493137.xml&innings=yyyyyyyyy&sp_type=1&s_type=2

The black line here is the black edge of a very fake strikezone that is essentially a circle inscribed the middle of the zone, since the umps are fairly inconsistent with the corners. (By inscribed, I mean like the circle-in-a-square on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscribed).

I realize they’re not heat plots, but they’re pretty good for looking at the location of a lot of pitches. There’s also the similar “distance from last pitch” plot (the doubling up thing that’s gotten a lot of discussion here)-

http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfx/countLIpdist.php?xml=http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2008/month_07/day_28/gid_2008_07_28_anamlb_bosmlb_1//pbp/pitchers/493137.xml&innings=yyyyyyyyy&sp_type=1&s_type=2

But yeah, I don’t know really what to do with those little tools yet, so…

Regarding the “game theory” of DiceK pitching - many (probably most) pitchers throw fastballs in these counts - that’s why they’re called hitters counts! Hitters also look fastball, and dramatically reduce the area at which they’ll swing at the ball. It certainly doesn’t *seem* like optimal behavior, but then, it’s pretty hard to judge that. One thing we do know, though: he’s not some magical wizard who throws 7 different pitches in all counts. He’s a fastball / cut fastball / slurve pitcher, basically, that throws a very small handful of changeups a game. I just wish the broadcast media would, some day, start to understand this, but it’s probably unlikely to happen.