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Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Times through the order with the 9th inning removed…
In light of the new research presented on this blog which suggests that when starters pitch the 9th, the score tends to be lopsided in favor of the pitching team and wOBA tends to be lower than expected given the true talent of the pitchers and batters (and other things that affect offense), I have recalculated the “times through the order” wOBA for both day and night games, with indoor games not in the sample, removing all 9th inning data.
In The Book, this is what we presented:
Times through the order expected actual
1 .353 .345
2 .353 .354
3 .354 .362
4 .353 .354
As you can see, the more a starting pitcher faces the lineup the better those batters do, due to familiarity or pitcher tiring, or both (or some other reason or reasons). However, the 4th time through the order, the trend seems to stop and batters actually perform the same as the second time through the order. This seems to make no sense.
We have speculated two things that might be causing the 4th time through the order depression: One, 2/3 of all games are at night and it is colder the 4th time through the order. Two, and more recently, the 4th time through the order sometimes happens in the 9th inning, and as we have just found, 9th inning wOBA versus starters gets depressed because the score is usually lopsided in favor of the pitching team.
So I reran the numbers separately for day and night games (and ignored indoor games), and I also ignored the 9th innings. The wOBA is adjusted for the pool of pitchers and batters in each bucket. The first row is 1st time through the order in the 1st inning only. The second row is 1st time through the order in all other innings. We see a real depression in the first inning. Although the data is for home and road teams combined, it is actually the road team batting that is heavily depressed in the first inning for some reason. Either home team pitchers are already used to the mound, the road batting team starts out “cold” or there is some other reason or reasons.
Night games
1 (1st inn) .339
1 (other inn) .341
2 .352
3 .359
4 .350
So, again, we see a depression the 4th time even though we are not using 9th inning data.
Day games
1 (1st inn) .330
1 (other inn) .341
2 .349
3 .357
4 .367
Here we see a large jump from the 3th to the 4th time. It does appear that either temperature or pitcher tiring during the day (but not so much at night), or perhaps shadow issues during the day, greatly affect the “time through the order” penalty…
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