THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This reminds me of JoePo’s piece on batting average (click my name for the link).

Blogger: I have come up with a new statistic. It involves balls put in play. I call it batting average.
Establishment: Great! How’s it work?
B: See, what we’ll do is, we’ll take the number of hits that the batter has and divide it by the number of at-bats that he has in order to determine how often he gets a hit.
E: That sounds like on-base percentage. What’s the difference?
B: Well, it’s all in what you call “at-bats” For one thing, we don’t count walks.
E: What do you mean you don’t count walks?
B: They don’t count. We take plate appearances and subtract walks. They never happened.
E: How can a walk never happen?
B: It just doesn’t.

I think we are pretty much stuck with “wins” and “losses”, though maybe its not too late to change “saves”.

If I could go back and change the stats, I would still keep “wins” and “losses”, but not tie them to the starting pitcher/ reliever on the mound when the team moves ahead.  The player judged by the official scorer to be the most responsible for the team winning would get the win.  The player judged by the official scorer to be the most responsible for the team losing would get the loss.  These would usually, but not always, be the starting pitchers.  There would be alot of controversy in these calls, but over the course of a player’s career the good and bad calls should even out, just as good luck and hard luck seasons in terms of wins tend to even out over the course of a pitcher’s career.

There could be alot of information gleaned by the number of wins amassed by a position player over his career.  This would not involve any calculation or statistical massaging, just the official scorer watching the game and making a judgement call, though over time there would be conventions on how to do this.

A starting pitcher still would not get the win in a 0-1 loss by his team.  He might not get the loss, which could be assigned to the #4 hitter in the team’s lineup.  A starting pitcher would not necessarily get the win after a 10-8 outing.  Some no decisions might be converted into wins or losses by this method.

It would be nice if people were clearer about whether these awards are for effectiveness or for excellence.

In the first case, whether the team has won alot of games and made the playoffs is actually pretty relevant to the award.  Not in the second.

The Cy Young is for the most outstanding pitcher.

Seems clear to me…

Well, if we’re going by the literal word, Cliff Lee (ridiculous K/BB ratio) would be at the top of my Cy Young contenders list.  But the award would end up going, for the 15th straight year, to Tim Wakefield, for getting paid millions of dollars to throw a baseball 65 mph, and being reasonably successful at it.  Tell me that doesn’t stand out, I dare you!

We know they’ve changed it once before, so here’s to hoping they change the wording again, to just say “best” pitcher.

And agree on Weaver; he’s been remarkably underrated for years now.  I’m sure some of it is related to his brother (and how he was overrated, in my opinion) and some of it is related to his “stuff”, which visually to me doesn’t seem that amazing.  But he absolutely gets the job done, better than almost anyone this year.

Ed #1--

Sounds a bit like assigning a win to the player on the winning team who has the highest WPA for that game, and similarly assigning a loss to the losing team’s lowest player by WPA.

I think I’ve seen the term “WPA wins and losses”.

If we’re going to be pedantic, “best pitcher” doesn’t work either.  Josh Johnson can be the “best pitcher”, but not actually have the best performance… he might have had a down year.

You want to say “best performance by a pitcher”, just like the movie awards have it.  Gene Hackman may be the best actor, but he may not have had the best performance in 2010.

I think the quoted material in the original post actually mischaracterizes the argument.

Many people who favor using wins believe that some pitchers are “winners.” They think this is a skill. These same people, presumably, would argue that if you traded CC and Felix, CC would still have a lot more wins because he’s better at winning games.

In other words, these people don’t believe they’re relying on a stat that doesn’t very accurately represent talent (or performance). They think wins are actually telling them which pitcher is the best “winner.”

If, hypothetically, there was a stat that did that - that actually reliably determined which pitcher was best at winning - I’d be okay with using it in these arguments. Of course, if that stat does exist, I don’t know what it is (but I do know it’s not Wins).

Ahhh, I like that a lot, yes.  Didn’t know the movie awards did that, but I think that’s a clever wording.

JD, the term I’ve seen used is “pitch to the score”.  And there may be some pitchers who can do this.

But if you can measure this, you should be able to take a pitcher with 20 wins, and distribute some of them away to his team’s offense.  Maybe even give a few to the rest of his team’s defense, some to noise, some to pitching the score, and some to his pitching ability.

CC Sabathia isn’t getting the Cy Young this year anyway.  Its really between Price and Hernandez, which is a different argument.

I really like the idea of the highest WPA and lowest WPA for all players in a game determining who gets the “Win” and “Loss,” just from a neatness standpoint. If someone could rig up some code to get this data for the last [however long we’ve had WPA] years, that would be really amazing.

5 or 10 years ago there would be exactly a zero chance of Felix winning the award.  This year, there is a 1% chance. I’ll give anyone 5-1 odds if they think he has a better chance than that (5-1).

"CC Sabathia isn’t getting the Cy Young this year anyway.”

Perfect test of my theory.

How much will you wager that he won’t win, and what kind of odds will you give (since you can’t lose)?

Since I say something similar about Felix (although rather than a zero percent chance I am giving him a 1% chance), how about we just wager $100 (or more if you like), Felix versus CC, and anyone else is a push?

We need to get some official scorer to give all the ND’s a team wins to a reliever who doesn’t pitch.  That guy would probably lead the league in wins, I wonder where he’d finish in the CYA balloting.