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Monday, September 28, 2009
Game theory on pitch selection
A reader sent me a PDF version of a paper written by Steven Levitt. I wrote to Prof. Levitt asking him how can I get my readers access to his paper, so that we can provide critical SME (subject matter expertise). He didn’t reply. I wrote back. Same thing. I was excited by the idea in his paper, and also bothered by a couple of things. Anyway, I forgot about it until Phil wrote about it.
He is totally right about us needing to know the “through count” not the “at count”, as we’ve talked about here alot. As well, using OPS, which is biased against walks, is totally inappropriate here. (This is why I can’t stand the use of OPS. Its limitations seem to be forgotten when people, intelligent people, do their studies. This is why shortcut equations like this should be banned. I’ll keep badgering B-R.com, as hopefully enough of you complain to Sean about it, so I’m not the only one who sounds like a jerk about it.)
In Phil’s critique however, he seems to have overlooked Table 2. That table shows BOTH the results (using OPS unfortunately) if the pitcher did, or did not, end the plate appearance. All you have to do is merge the two (weighted of course by the number of pitches in each pool). And what you will likely end up with is probably that everything is pretty well-balanced, except perhaps for the first pitch.
I do hope that Prof. Levitt takes advantage of us.
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