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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
John Smoltz: Sabermetrician!
Straight out of The Book playbook:
I’ll tell you what I would do against them and I know nobody would ever do this. I would treat it like a spring training game with my pitchers. I would keep bringing in a fresh arm to pitch to them, rather than asking my starting pitcher to go deep into the game trying to get them out two, three, four times. They just wear out a pitcher. I know nobody would ever do it, because what message would people think you were giving your starting pitcher? But their lineup is so deep I would change pitchers every two or three innings, just like you do in spring training.
They should do this especially at home (no DH), so that they always send out a pinch hitter. Here are the Yankee splits against starting pitchers, each time through the order, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com (hey, just noticed… Sean added a line for 4th+ time through the order… I asked him for that a little while ago, so fantastic surprise there for us). Interesting however that they murder relief pitchers.
Anyway, as you can see, each time through the order, the hitters get an extra 8-12 points of OBP and 20-33 points of SLG. This is not much out of the ordinary for the league in general, which you can tell by looking at the sOPS+ column: they are 12% to 16% better than the league against facing the starting pitcher the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. But, they kill relievers, being 36% better than the league average.
And what’s with the 133 at bats that the Yanks faced a starting pitcher the 4th time through the order? If we click the red text (is this f!@ckin cool or what?), we see the list of hitters who saw the pitcher a 4th time! Jeter makes up 48 of those times, and he killed them all.
Anyway, I love Smoltzie’s idea.
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