from Amazon
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
The quality of line drives is not strained
From Mike Fast on his blog:
Matt asserted that because we don’t measure a persistent skill for pitchers in allowing or not allowing line drives, that pitchers do not have this skill. (Forgive me, Matt, if I’ve bastardized your position in distilling it here.) I asserted that the physics of the ball-bat collision tells us that pitchers ought to have similar control over the spectrum of batted ball launch angles, including that portion of the spectrum we label “line drives.”
1. Just because we can’t measure it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It can simply be that the line drive per BIP metric does a terrible job of capturing the line driver per BIP skill.
2. To the extent that there is a real line drive skill, it is masked. There are two considerations:
a. This is what I think Mike is getting at: if the launch angle of almost every BIP is from -45 degrees to +60 degrees, and the line drive captured the +20 to +30 angle space, we might expect to see the frequency in this 20-to-30 range to be about the same for every pitcher. That is, a predominantly FB pitcher still gives up alot of GB, and a GB pitcher still gives up alot of FB. So, the in-between frequencies, the line drives, is probably pretty static across pitchers.
b. However, even if this is true (and it’s likely only true among good MLB pitchers, since a bad MLB pitcher who gives up lots of line drives doesn’t stick in MLB to begin with), the QUALITY of the line drives is nowhere near the same.
That is, MGL, in his fantastic DIPS Primer article from 7 years ago showed the correlation in two things:
(i) frequency of LD per BIP among MLB pitchers, and the r was low, something like r=.05
(ii) the rate of outs per LD, and the r was quite high, something like r=.35; getting r=.35 on a low frequency denominator like LD is fantastic.
So, you can look at half the equation and say “little skill in frequency of line drives”, and ok, let’s accept that with some provisions. But, the other half, the quality of each line drive shows a definite skill. And that you can’t ignore.
We don’t believe an Albert Pujols line drive is the same as a Juan Pierre line drive. While not to that extent, we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that pitchers have their own quality level on line drives.
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 344 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date