THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Sunday, September 26, 2010

I wonder how third base coaches think about these things…

In the Yankee game last night, down 4-0, with one out in the sixth, the Yankees’ third base coach Robby Thomson waved Kearns in on a Jeter single to left. He was thrown out at the plate for the second-out, on a fairly close play.

“I thought he was going to score and he didn’t,” Thomson said. “It was a mistake.”

Now, we don’t know what Thompson was really thinking when he said that (hence the title of this thread), but it suggests (if he was being completely forthright) that he is being results-oriented, which is exactly the wrong way to be as a coach or manager, especially for a third base coach.

You also have to wonder what Girardi said to Thompson after or during the game.  Surely he said something.

I was watching the game and at first it looked like Kearns had little chance of scoring (maybe 25%), but it was a good throw and the play, as I said, was fairly close, so maybe he had a 75% of scoring. I am not really sure. It could have been 50%.

I don’t, off the top of my head, know the BE point for 1 out and down 4 runs in the sixth, with those teams and in that exact situation.  It is probably pretty high, maybe 80%, given the large run deficit.

In any case, that is the way Thompson (and all third base coaches) is supposed to think.  Maybe they don’t need to memorize the exact (not that ANYONE knows them exactly of course) BE percentages, but they should all have proper rules of thumb for just about any situation.  Again, whether Thompson or Girardi does or doesn’t, I don’t know.  His comment (mildly) suggests that he doesn’t and that his thinking is not that which you would want your third base coach to have ("he got thrown out, therefore I made a mistake").

My guess also is that there are at least a few organizations that go over this stuff properly (sabermetrically) with their third base coach (among other things like that), but not too many.  (And of course even if you “know” the proper numbers for every situation, you will still occasionally make an error in judgment in the heat of the battle.)

If a team does do that, I wonder how many runs/wins it would add per season.  And then of course, think of the other similar things they could discuss and plan with their manager and coaches in order to optimize strategy.

The other day, Carl Crawford, I think, was thrown out at third base with 2 outs to end a game (maybe I got some of that wrong).  He and the Rays were criticized for that - considering the adage that, “You don’t want to make the first or third out at third base.”

Joe Maddon was talking about that play on the radio and he said that he was perfectly fine with Crawford’s play (and I am pretty sure that he told him so).  He said that it took an absolutely perfect throw to nail him, which it did, implying that there was a very high chance that Crawford would be safe if you redid that play X amount of times (again, correctly so).

He added that he does not go by the old adage mentioned above, again implying that it is all about the chance of being thrown out (going strictly by the adage, the BE point for being safe would have to be 100% with 0 our 2 outs, which it is not of course) given the outs, runners, score, inning, etc.

I don’t hate everything about Maddon, and I have always said that he is a very smart guy. I should probably also add that I think he is very knowledgeable about sabermetrics.  I may even be wrong about him overall.  When I say things about managers and GM’s and teams, there is a very high uncertainty level surrounding what I say, given my lack of information, the emotion of the various situations, the fact that when you see one bad play, it gets magnified, etc.