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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Start of the LOOGY era
Great job from Andy. The post was from last year, but it’s irrelevant to its historic context.
First let me explain what this graph shows. Let’s start with the black line. It shows the fraction of all relief appearances that last just one batter. For all these data, the outcome of the plate appearance is not considered--could have been a strikeout, a home run, a ground-into-double-play, or anything else. The black line above shows that the fraction of relief appearances lasting just one batter was roughly constant at 6-7% from the mid 1950s to about 1990. It seems to have peaked around 1970 at 7.5% and was as low as 5% some years in that span but it was generally pretty flat. In 1992 there was a sudden jump to almost 9%. More on this as we look at the rest of the data.
The other 4 lines on the chart--LH, RH, AL, and NL--break out the data for each subcategory. The LH line, for example, shows the fraction of left-handed relief appearances that lasted one batter. (Do not confuse this to mean the fraction of all relief appearances that were by left-handers.)
We see, then, that left-handed one-batter relief appearances were roughly constant at about 10% of all left-handed relief appearances until 1992, when it suddenly jumped up to 15%. The figure has hovered around 16% ever since. Among right-handers, there was no significant change in 1992 and just a small increase in 1993. Overall, right-handed relief appearances have remained quite flat at just 5% lasting one batter.
He then goes on to note that Larussa’s Oakland, and Tony Fossas of the Redsox, were the big catalysts, much to the benefit of Jesse Orosco.
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