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Wednesday, September 07, 2011
What would happen if you had a team with no sluggers?
The work I’m most proud of is the Markov calculator. Baseball is a really simple game: you get on base, you move over, until you make too many outs. It’s one of the easiest thing to program. You can’t run backwards, you can’t jump bases, you can’t have 4 outs or 2 outs in an inning. It’s very structured, very easy to program. Every single person who reads this site needs to try out the Markov calculator. Seriously.
(The only limitation to the calculator, and what makes baseball a bit tougher to code, is that you can have runners out on base. This would turn a very simple program into a fairly complex program. I’ve offered the simple one, for free, with the source code available to all.)
Anyway, using the default values, you hit calculate, and we see that that team will score 4.905 runs. Now, what happens if this team does not hit any HR? Well, click the back button, change the “1” to a “0”, and change the hits from 10 to 11.2. (This is because trading a HR, which has a wOBA value of 2.0, for 2.2 singles, which has a wOBA value of 0.90, is a fair trade. So, we lose a HR, but gain 1.2 hits.) You end up scoring 4.944 runs. That’s 0.039 more runs scored by NOT having a slugger.
Basically, alot of the value of singles and walks is not realized, because you get HR hit. By not having any HR hit at all, each of those events takes on greater importance, as they feed off each other.
As an aside: Ty Cobb and players of his era should not be judged by standard linear weights. The run value of a single shoots way up when there are no HR hit, by something like +.07 runs per single. But the value of an out also has more impact by an extra -.04 runs per out. Cobb gets more hits and makes fewer outs, so his value goes up more than what we’d use with standard linear weights.
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