Quote:
Originally Posted by JayP
I've read several statistical breakdowns that show there's no significant statistical benefit from hitting with protection. I'll try and dig up some articles now.
The problem is that players/managers all buy into traditional baseball logic, which can be terribly wrong, but no one will deviate from it. Good examples are a pitcher's W-L record being a good indicator of their ability, RBIs having any importance, and stolen bases having a significant importance. Looking at the numbers you can break down these beliefs in minutes, but you'd be hard pressed to find a manager that doesn't still hold them true.
EDIT: Here's a really good chapter from a really good book that breaks down protection: http://books.google.com/books?id=uxd...esult#PPA45,M1
The Chapter starts on page 35 talking about how lineup order is essentially meaningless. Protection is brought up at the end of page 38. |
I've read some of that book, not that particular chapter (until just now). They don't make a very convincing case to me - mostly because they don't address my assumption - that a player's statistics increase when surrounded by more talented players.
A lot of the assumptions they make is based off analysis of statistics. They analyze a hypothetical lineup where a high slugging / poor on-base leadoff and a high on-base / poor slugging bats second - and the reverse. But these are scored based on the statistics these players got under the statistics they got in "real" baseball and it's strategies.
The analysis on Bonds was equally perplexing. They "proved" that Bonds walking so much was irrelevant because he faced as many walk-friendly situations as an average player. The average player gets a LOT of walk-friendly situations - batting with one out and no one on is extremely common, and is a failure of a team to "protect" their slugger. Show me that A-Rod sees as many walk-friendly scenarios as the average batter and I'll eat my hat.
I take that 'average walk situations stat' as proof that he was walked so often (intentionally or otherwise) because he had no protection (his team was unable to force the pitcher into difficult situations). If Bonds had faced way fewer walk-friendly situations, he would have had more hit-friendly situations - logically leading to more hits.
(this seems so simple I must be missing something.)
I consider the assumption that the '02 Bonds would have had the same number of quality pitches to hit per at bat if surrounded by other excellent sluggers to be foolish on its face.
David Ortiz batting after Youkilis earns a ten pitch walk and ManRam behind him will see more fastballs than Barry Bonds batting with the bases empty and Pedro Feliz behind him. Numbers be damned, I know my truthiness.