Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Pitching or Hitting?

About the author, Boyd Nation

"Good pitching beats good hitting every time." "You're gonna have to score some runs to win." You've probably heard your favorite broadcaster say at least one (and usually both, sometimes in the same inning) of those more times than you care for. In general, it's probably not a great idea to form your thinking based on what play-by-play or color guys say, since the pressures of filling air time tend not to lend themselves to great depth of thought, but you've got to figure they're right on at least one of those, so I thought I'd take a look and see which way it actually went.

This is the sort of question I love, because it's well-defined and is likely to have an answer. The only real controlling factor was to try to find a set of games that give a fairly balanced schedule. That, of course, means looking at only conference games, so that's the way I went. I decided not to try to include park factors, because I don't think they would change the answers significantly and they would complicate the numbers a bit.

For the 1998-2000 seasons, there were 88 conference races. Looking at those, I came up with the three following sets of numbers:

Conference champions who led in both runs scored and allowed: 20
Conference champions who led in runs scored: 39
Conference champions who led in runs allowed: 50

There were six times, by the way, where a team led the conference in both runs scored and allowed and still finished second. That strikes me as surprisingly high, but there it is.

Average place in runs scored by conference champion: 1.99
Average place in runs allowed by conference champion: 1.76

Correlation between standing in conference and rank in runs scored: .75
Correlation between standing in conference and rank in runs allowed: .79

In short, there's more of a connection between allowing fewer runs and success than there is between scoring more runs and success. I don't know that I'd say that either of the quotes in the first paragraph is definitive, but, at least for the period studied, I'd recruit pitchers first.

One thing that I can't do, since I don't have the data for any other seasons, is see if this changes during times of lower offense than the current climate.

I realize that this makes for kind of a short column -- definitiveness will do that for you -- but it's a result that I wanted to share. Next week we'll rejoice in the fact that games start in about three weeks, and see what the implications of starting early are.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Pitching or Hitting?

About the author, Boyd Nation