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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The three faces of the IBB in the All-Star Game
1. I despise the IBB as the most cowardly act in baseball. Indeed, it is not even sporting in the least. It’s like Roger Federer getting to choose to tell Andy Roddick once a game not to serve so darn hard. It’s like a goalie seeing Alex Ovechkin on a breakaway to force him to pass the puck behind him.
2. To the extent that the IBB exists, then we can look at empirical results directly from fifty years of baseball on Retrosheet, from the perspective of the batting team, top of 8th, 1 out:
runner on 3B: .612 win%
runner on corners: .620 win%
So, putting a runner on 1B adds .008 wins to the batting team. If the home team has a good enough reason to do that (get the platoon advantage), that “average” of .008 might even be less than that. It might even be advantageous. Certainly, it’s in the close enough category that a “go with gut” call is appropriate here.
3. In The Book, Andy has a nice chart. On p.306, Andy shows the threshhold for walking a batter compared to the talent level of the batter on deck. “Top 8 --3 1” (meaning top of 8th, runner on 3B, 1 out), under the “Tie” column, he shows “1.40”. This means that the wOBA of the batter at the plate has to be 40% higher than the wOBA of the batter on deck. If based on the platoon advantage, we expect the batter on deck to have a .300 wOBA, then the batter at the plate would need at least a .420 wOBA to make this an IBB call.
You can make a reasonable case for the IBB for this game state. You cannot make a reasonable case for the IBB in baseball.
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