THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

One of the local softball leagues I play in does this.  As a fielder, it’s great.  As a fan (who am I kidding, we have no fans), it’s probably great too.  But from a hitting perspective, it’s miserable to not get a second strike of leeway.  One bad call by the ump and all of a sudden, you’re quite literally swinging at everything.  Of course, MLB umps are much better, but still.

What about a 3-3 system instead of 4-3 or 3-2?  Run scoring probably goes up, guys like Sonnanstine probably get better while guys like Oliver Perez get worse… I’d say a ball is far more boring than a strike anyways.

Here is the “hitting by count” thread from a few years ago:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/hitting_by_count/

If you had to start at one of those “through” counts, which would you choose?  The “through 1-1” is the one that most closely matches the 0-0 in terms of BA, OBP, SLG (and hence runs scored).  wOBA of .314 compared to the .332 for 0-0.  If you wanted more offense, then the count you’d want to start with is either 1-0 (favors slugging) or 2-1 (favors walking). Both of these have the same wOBA.

That is, you’d want a 3-ball, 3-strike count, or a 2-ball, 2-strike count.

One thing that would work against “smart” hitters is that they would see fewer pitches. At 1-1 a hitter has already seen two pitches. For certain hitters this is a key part of their approach.

It might change the dynamic where aggressive hitters do better relative to patient hitters.

Yeah, we’ve had that rule (1-1 starting count) in place in our softball league for the past 5 or 6 years.  It helps out with the pace of the game and we are now more likely to play our full 7 inning games (we have a time limit).

It’s definitely much harder on the hitter.  I don’t see the worry about bad umpiring calls on balls and strikes.  It’s hard to miss a balls/strikes call in slow-pitch softball.  The ball hits the plate or the mat and it’s a strike.
What this does is it allows the pitcher to throw a difficult pitch to hit on the first pitch of the at-bat, not having to worry about falling too far behind in the count.

I would think at the MLB level, we would see more complete games as mentioned above, but we would probably see more starting pitchers pacing themselves a little less.  Knowing they could easily get to the 8th or 9th inning, they may throw harder and exert more energy per pitch (like closers do), thusly not being able to throw as many pitches, putting us back in more of an equilibrium of what we have today.

vr, Xei

I looked at a potential 3 ball, 3 strike count and I can’t say I would be a fan.  The walk rate nearly doubles to over 15%.  For me that’s too much of shift towards the most boring play in baseball.  I want to see the ball in action!

Also, here’s the link to the original article....
http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2009/07/two_strikes_you.php

hah, yeah ive had the same experiences as others with slow pitch softball and starting 1-1 counts.  i dont think it makes it tough on the batter tho.  i mean its slow pitch.  if you have trouble hitting the ball then it wont matter what the count starts at.

a different rule i would make is if you are a guy who considers himself any good at all and you willfully take a picth to get a walk then you should beaten about the shins until you start crying.  also if you care more about the number of runs you score than beers you consume.  or maybe i have just been playing in the wrong leagues.

Darn it, I did it again.  I’ll update the main entry.

We had it in an intra-mural baseball (fast-pitch) tourney in college (Pitt-Johnstown). It seemed to increase strikeouts, but that might have been just me, as I whiffed 67 batters in 25 innings.

For softball I love the one pitch rule.  Strike your out, Foul your out. Ball take your base.  You get a ton of innings in, make the pitcher throw strikes and the batters hit.  The only draw back is that OF have to jog alot more since the innings are faster.

Is the game broken? Do we really need to change the rules? The fact that games can be too long is mostly because of the time they take between half innings for TV commercials. Eliminate that and games will move right along. Back when they started the MLB television network several months ago, they showed the Larson perfect game from the 1950’s. It moved right along because there weren’t those interminable breaks between half innings.

Now, of course, the rejoinder will be that you can’t eliminate those commercials because they subsidize the games on TV. Fine, but then stop complaining that the games are too long. It’s not the fault of the way the game is played.

Chuck: are you suggesting that we can’t even ponder a what-if scenario?

Sky 14, does that 15% number take into account that pitchers would pitch differently (throwing more strikes)?  That would probably cut the difference in half (say to 11.5% BB)

I’m in favor of the 3 and 3 rule, with the added feature of having 2-strike fouls count as strike three. This would help cancel out some of the scoring increase of the 3 ball BB. Further, it would limit each PA to 5 pitches, with the 5th and decisive pitch providing added drama.

Dave, why would the pitcher pitch different whether they start at 1-0, or work themselves up to 1-0?

In either case, they are now at a 3-balls, 3-strikes to go count.

slightly off-topic, but our biggest problem in softball (co-ed) is finding people who can actually throw strikes.  I can’t imagine the number of walks if it there were 1 ball/strike ABs.  It’s not like there would be more strikeouts because if it’s close, people will swing.  But often the pitchers are not remotely close - this is super slow pitch as well.

This is all suspiciously Canadian… I mean look at Canadian football with only three downs leading to less straight up the middle running plays I suppose.

Obviously, MLB would never change, but maybe there could be a new professional league that’s more action oriented and takes all the tedious play out of baseball. 2-3 counts, ball for throwing to any base, batter can run to first on a wild pitch, bringing in a new pitcher mid-inning adds a ball to the count, deeper outfields for more triples and inside-the-park homeruns etc.

Anything else?

Tango, I understand what you’re saying, but don’t you think there would be a different general mindset among pitchers with the 3/3 rule on every PA, as opposed to them starting some % of their PAs at 1-0, with the rest at 0-0? I do. At the very least, even if the pitchers didn’t/couldn’t change their approach (not likely), there would probably be a greater selection of pitchers with better control. And that would be fine with me. I think it’s boring to watch pitchers throwing a 95 mph pitch that’s a foot out of the strike zone. (The only thing worse that that is watching Alfonso Soriano swing at that pitch)

Dave, it might change.  I think if pitchers are taught to think of the first pitch as “1-0 count” from the outset, then it wouldn’t change.

Batters however might think of it as the first pitch they see, so they might still take at the same rate.

I’d love to see this tried in A ball.

On the slightly off topic theme of taking rules from slow pitch softball and applying them to major league baseball for kicks and giggles.  How about adding a 10th fielder to the defense.

It would be interesting to see where most teams would station a 10th defender.  I would imagine in the infield with a ground ball pitcher.  And perhaps in the infield or shallow pull field in some other cases.

Could you imagine what some of the 10 defender shifts against the likes of David Ortiz would look like?

vr, Xei

#15 - I think going in to the league you would have to know the strike rule which maybe the team wouldn’t enter.  The tourney I played with the rule was great.  It was close to an 9 inning games in an hour.

Question of others on softball—Here in Tucson instead of banning bat (which they did for a while), they moved to a super “soft"-ball.  You might get a 1 HR a game in the first inning when the ball is somewhat harder, but none after that.  It is nice in that puts the ball in play.  Is this ball common across the country?

Interesting… where to put the 10th fielder?  Of all non-HR, the run value of a non-out is practically identical on a GB as it is on a FB.  So, this means that the GB and FB are fairly balanced.

What’s missing is the line drive.  So, I would have to put the “rover” in short-outfield, in the gap between the CF and the corner OF.  Probably lets the rest of the outfielders play 5-10 feet back.

The Seattle Mariners drafted Ryan Anderson in the 1997 June draft.  He was 6’10” so was immediately dubbed “The Little Unit,” because Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson was already with the M’s.  Anyway, Anderson played at Divine Child High School in the Catholic High School League in Michigan.  In this league, they used the 3 balls and 2 strikes rule.

As a senior in high school, Anderson started and completed 7 games, threw 3 no hitters, and 51 1/3 innings.  Of the 154 outs he got that year, 133 were strikeouts (he also walked 33 and gave up just 7 hits).

The league website, with their rules:

http://www.archdioceseofdetroit.org/CHSL/Boys+Sports+10650/Baseball+10710/Boys+Baseball+-+Regulations.htm

In the mid-1870s, Henry Chadwick believed it was inevitable that baseball would have 10 players and 10 innings.  He envisioned that the 10th player would be a shortstop on the right side of the infield (you have to keep in mind that the baseman positioned themselves very close to their respective bases at this time).

In the present position of the game there is but one “short-stop”, and he stands to the left of the infield between the second and third base positions. Ultimately, however, a “right-short” will be introduced, which will make the field one of ten men instead of nine, as now.

Though there would be less pitches per game, I’m not sure if the action would really increase. If hitting would regress to the 1980s, probably from less green-light/hitters counts (1-0 and 2-0) and more strikeouts, it would seem the game would be determined less by hits and more by walks/strikeouts. I don’t really count walks/strikeouts as action unless there’s a runner in scoring position, for example.

There would also be fewer bunt attempts, resulting in fewer “dazzling” defensive plays or errors.

I also would wager there would be fewer stolen base attempts, in part because a lower count reduces the time a runner can learn a pitcher’s move, and because baserunners would be even more valuable in a low run-scoring environment.

Speaking of starting PAs at 1-1 it has been tried in the minors sometime ago if I recall correctly. About 10 years back.
No conlusions followed, though.

Also, the current 4-3 proportion rhymes very well with the fact that you have to run FOUR bases to score before THREE outs are recorded.

OK, back to the topic at hand.

Went over all the comments both here and at the linked article’s site, and almost everyone considers the change in the rules only as means to SHORTEN the game (cut down on meaningless action, to be precise).

But, IMHO, what the game really needs in not shrinking, but expanding!

And starting at-bats at 1-1 is just a way to pack more meaningful action into the same timeframe.

What exactly I’m talking about? One of the issues in a baseball game is that a batter simply doesn’t have enough at-bats to put his stamp on the game. Spend a whole day for the sake of going up to bat only 4 or 5 times and then dwell for hours if you go 0-for-4 instead of 1-for-4?

4 or 5 PAs just not enough, even from baseball training point of view.

In other words, we’d like to give batters more at-bats, but keep the game’s length the same. That’s where 1-1 rule change comes into play.

Another thing that makes pro baseball game a mostly meaningless proposition - a dice roll - in terms of determining what team was really the better of the two today is the THREE OUT - CHANGE rule.

This rule seems to be specially designed to further neutralize one team’s advantage over the other.

What I can think of is playing each inning until FIVE men are put out, and maybe seven innings in total.

Again, the 1-1 change makes it possible for a pitcher to endure a much longer inning as the number of pitches per batter goes down.

And speaking of fielders, imagine, just imagine, if REMOVE one defender from the field.

Hitters then will try to go to open areas (not just swing as hard as they can most of the time and then just pray for a basehit) and pitchers will have their hands full unlike now.

The contest then will be decided much more by skill rather than blind luck as it is of now.

BTW, baseball already have three times as much filders per square feet as cricket.

Alright, for whatever it’s worth, it’s all for now.

Sergei from Moscow

PS disclaimer: Most of the ideas above have a lot to do with watching cricket on top of my previous work in baseball.

Sergei is correct that the 3-out rule limits the skill and allows more luck.

However, is there too much luck in baseball?  Do we want skill to win out all the time?

Baseball is like hockey in terms of the amount of luck that wins games.  Basketball is FAR MORE about skill.  Indeed, if the NBA cut the game down to 20 minutes, then the ratio of skill/luck would be close to what MLB and NHL has.

So, I submit that people do NOT want skill to win out any more than it currently wins out.

> So, I submit that people do NOT want skill to win out any more than it currently wins out.

He-he. I think this is what sports monopolies actually think. I mean that’s the ideal scenario to suck the most money out from the mostly unsuspecting public.

What it was, home team wins 67% of the time, right?

>Baseball is like hockey in terms of the amount of luck that wins games.

As for hockey, the current high, IMHO, amount of luck has everything to do that goalies cover almost all of the nets!

In other words, no matter how many extra one-on-one breakaways one team might generate compared to the opponent, how many extra shots, puck conrol and all, everything comes down to that goalie dice roll. Why bother to play good defence then at all? To just cut down the number of shots? Yeah, but, come on ...

And as for baseball, oh, I have this analogy.

Imagine a basketball game. Everything is usual, only one change. There’s a lid, a moving lid that rotates over each basket so that the basket is opened and then closed, opened and closed.

The state of the basket changes, say, every 1/10 of a second. Open, than closed.

The question is: would anybody enjoy such a game, a?

But that’s what baseball essentially is, IMHO again. And the role of that lid in baseball is played by the blind luck.

Because it is simply impossible to consistently make square contact with the ball pitched by a professional pitcher with a typical THIN and ROUND baseball bat.

The hitter’s brain projects where the ball should be closer to the plate (moment 1) before he starts the actual swing (moment 2), but the thing is the ball sharply changes its trajectory between the two moments. Thus the hitter simply swings at a location where he hopes the ball to be. But it won’t, resulting in all kind of slices, mishits or downright misses.

Oh, the third Ashes Test finally has begun. Off to the screen ...

- Sergei

> What it was, home team wins 67% of the time, right?

Well, it mustn’t be right - the observed home WP% figure to maximize attendance.

At least, home teams in mlb win less than 60% of the time, if I’m not wrong again.

> Baseball is like hockey in terms of the amount of luck that wins games.

On another inspection, it may correct if one runs the numbers (like Tango did), but I’m talking about public perceptions.

Let’s see, I don’t know of many people who’d object to the fact that soccer world cups are decided by a single final game, same for champions league, olympic hockey tournament, cricket world cup.

Yeah, some do say that, for example, Russia have proved to be better than Canada today. Only TODAY.

But it was still a Russia vs Canada FINAL contest. Team vs team. All players vs all players.

Hey, but you just can’t say that about any one-game baseball game, final or not.

It is not Jays vs Red Sox:

today’s it’s Juan Guzman+Blue Jays against Rocket+Red Sox,
tomorrow it will be something else.

Look, even in Twenty20 cricket minimum FIVE different bowlers have to bowl, and no more than 20% of total overs available for each individual
bowler.

In other words, every day it’s TEAM Sri Lanka vs TEAM Pakistan.

Just some things to think about ...

- Sergei

Bobby, thanks for bringing up Ryan Anderson, as I was remembering the same thing.  I even remember when the Catholic League went to 3-2 baseball and how controversial it was at the time.  I imagine that any high school kid trying to hit against him with only one strike to take or swing and miss at would be as overmatched as they in fact were.  On the other hand, I saw Anderson’s one and only game at Safeco, a post-spring training exhibition game, and he did the same against major league hitters without the benefit of the count.