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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Does bad defense lead to pitchers having to throw more pitches?
The short answer is, “Yes of course.” The long answer is, “In practice, it really doesn’t make any difference.”
The conventional thinking is this:
A pitcher on a bad defensive team will have to throw many more pitches to make up for all those “lost outs” and thus will get tired faster, the bullpen will have to come in earlier, the pitcher will get frustrated, etc., etc.
On Rob Neyer’s blog the other day, he said this:
Taking that a step further, David Pinto writes: “Better defense means less frustration for the pitcher and less work as he doesn’t need to get four outs in an inning.”
This leads to an obvious question: Are we undercounting the impact of fielding?
When we “count” fielding, what do we end up with? Essentially, we have plays made leading to runs—actually, it’s usually parts of runs—saved. Run down that line drive in the gap, and you’ve just saved 0.23 runs (or whatever). Which is both interesting and useful to know. But you’ve also saved the pitcher 3.2 pitches (or whatever). Do those saved pitches make our pitcher more effective later in the inning? Later in the game? Do those saved pitches allow our manager to replace our starter in the seventh inning with our third-best reliever rather than in the sixth inning with our fourth-best reliever.
Brainy sorts have made a great deal of progress in separating pitching and fielding, but it occurs to me that there might still be a great deal of work to be done.
Now, putting the question of whether the starting pitcher getting tired and having to come out the game early is actually a bad thing, is it true that a reasonably bad or good defense team has any significant effect on the number of pitches a starter has to throw? And the answer is....
No.
A typically bad or good defensive team is a true talent +-30 runs or so. Of course there is no actual precise number for that but I have been working with defensive numbers for 20 years so I have a pretty good feel for what a typically good or bad defensive team means in terms of overall team UZR.
A 30 run per 150 game team averages a savings or cost of .2 runs per game (which is huge of course). One ball that would have been caught but is not is worth about .8 runs. So once every 4 games a bad (-30 runs per 150) defensive team does not catch a ball that is normally caught. An extra 1.5 batters come to bat in order to make up for that lost out. A batter sees around 4 pitches per PA. So that is 6 extra pitches every 4 games, or 1.5 pitches per game. That is per 9 innings. For the starter it is 60 or 70% of that, or 1 pitch per start.
That doesn’t seem like a lot of extra pitches to get all worked up over…
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