Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Just Hit It Somewhere, Baby, Make 'Em Play

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Just Hit It Somewhere, Baby, Make 'Em Play

There's a long-running comic strip called They'll Do It Every Time. It first appeared in 1929; these days it's not very well-circulated (and, to be honest, not all that good). Originally, though, it was the work of a talented artist named Jimmy Hatlo. It was a single-panel slice-of-life strip, and the hook was that most of the content was based on ideas contributed by readers. Hatlo would acknowledge those contributions with a tiny mention in the corner called "a tip of the Hatlo hat". The late, great Jeff McNelly picked up on that same habit for his Pluggers strip; I think the current authors have continued it. I'm starting to think I need a corner.

Increasingly, I feel like there's a growing pool of idea guys out there, and I'm just the mouth of the funnel spitting out the results. I don't mind this at all -- the cross-pollination is producing some good ideas, and I certainly feel like I'm still contributing some brain power at times. I guess I just wanted to point out that I'm aware of the trend; it's fairly obvious around here since I'm a big believer in giving credit for ideas.

I'm gonna get geeky with the numbers now; ain't into that, skip on down.

This week's idea comes from Karl Cunningham, who's had several interesting thoughts here lately. One of the basic tenets of stathead thought is that strikeouts are basically indistinguishable from other outs -- you lose the chance to advance the runner, but you don't have to worry about the double play. This, like many other things such as the non-existence of clutch hitting, is one of the those things that's not true at the level that most of us played (Little League, say), but is true at the major league level, which is why it's hard for some folks to accept. Obviously, then, it stops being true somewhere between the two levels. I had always assumed that college ball was far enough along the spectrum that strikeouts were not a problem (and, conversely, that there was no particular value to just making contact), but Mr. Cunningham pointed out that college defenses are known to be a bit weak at times, and that some players might deserve some extra recognition for forcing the defense to make plays.

The easiest way to study this was to re-do a piece of research that was done a couple of years ago by another reader named Chris Leach -- coming up with an extrapolated runs chart. The basic idea is that if you take the component events that make up each team's stat line and do a linear regression to their run total, you can come up with a value for each event. The correlation between that component model and the run total is over .99, which is essentially perfect. For the 2002 and 2003 seasons, here are the numbers for college ball:

2B    0.85
3B    1.64
HR    1.47
BB    0.48
HBP   0.49
SO   -0.17
GIDP -0.26
SH   -0.15
SB    0.26
1B    0.63
O    -0.14
CS   -0.30

O = AB - H - SO

In other words, the average home run is worth 1.47 runs (and the average triple is worth more; I'll have to make up an explanation for that some time) and so on. This table, by itself, is fun to play with, so spend a moment here; for example, note the values for SB and CS and park your butt on first. Now, Chris stopped there (with slightly different numbers, since he was looking at earlier seasons), since he wasn't looking for any particular answer, but I needed to take one more step, or thought I did.

If you add in the extra out from a double play to a player's outs, though (which isn't perfect, but it's a close approximation), you should get a slight decrease in the value of the O multiplier. It turns out, though, that college teams turn so few double plays that the values don't even move out to a couple of significant digits; a strikeout is still about 15% worse than any other out.

In short, when analyzing college stats for value in context, give a slight bump to guys who don't strike out much. If you're analyzing for future value at advanced levels, of course, this doesn't help any, so the high-strikeout guys may not want to change their approaches, but the error rate is high enough that contact guys are worth having around in college.

As a quick aside, the question comes up sometimes (on the radio, usually, for some reason) of why we see so many stories of misbehaving college athletes. My usual reply is that we see the same range of behavior from college athletes that we see from all 18-21-year-olds; it's just that the athletes are higher-profile, so we notice it more. To support the positive end of that spectrum, I want to pass along the story of Jacksonville pitcher Ashley Roque, who this week rescued a woman from a burning car after a single-car accident. The full story is available from the Jacksonville paper here, but in case they don't keep the story around forever, I just want to quote the following opener from Gene Frenette's story:

Jacksonville University relief pitcher Ashley Roque has three saves in the 2004 season, but none compare to his heroic rescue off the baseball field Tuesday night.

Roque came to the aid of St. Augustine Beach resident Laura Beth Thompson about 6:45 p.m. when he pulled the 25-year-old woman out of her burning 2001 Acura after she lost control on Florida 206 and slammed into pine trees.

Go read the whole story, and remember that there's a good side to these human beings.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

Actually, this is an experiment for me to see how predictable the postseason makeup is. I want to see how accurate my picks are (using myself as the test subject as a moderately knowledgeable observer with no input into the results) at various distances from the selection. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

Southern Conf.     Florida State        Notre Dame             Louisiana State
Atlantic 10        North Carolina St.   Birmingham-Southern    Mississippi
CAA                Virginia             UC Irvine              South Carolina
Horizon            Clemson              Long Beach State       Florida
MAAC               North Carolina       Albany                 Arkansas
MAC                Florida Atlantic     Cal State Fullerton    Tennessee
MEAC               Central Florida      Southern Mississippi   Auburn
Mountain West      Texas                East Carolina          Vanderbilt
NEC                Texas A&M            Tulane                 Texas State
OVC                Nebraska             Texas Christian        Lamar
Patriot            Oklahoma             Stanford               La.-Lafayette
SWAC               Southern California  Arizona State          Georgia Tech
Mid-Continent      Houston              Washington             Rice
WCC                Oklahoma State       Arizona                South Florida
Miami, Florida     Minnesota            St. John's             Coastal Carolina
Wichita State      Penn State           Washington State       Georgia

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Just Hit It Somewhere, Baby, Make 'Em Play

About the author, Boyd Nation