Right Idea.... Wrong Reason

Darren Everson reports in the WSJ of a growing trend among managers to try new things. One idea is to not bat the pitcher last in the lineup. I am not sure this really makes sense since the negatives probably outweigh the positives. A second idea is to have the "Starting" pitcher begin in the second inning. I have long argued that this is a really good idea, but not at all for the reason cited by Doug Melvin (Brewer's GM):

The thinking is that starters are typically among a team's best
pitchers, yet nowadays they often pitch only through the fifth or sixth inning, well before many games are decided. By having them pitch later, they'd be around for the higher-leverage innings.

Right Idea. Wrong Reason. The concept of leverage is important only for the purposes of resource management. The star closer is a scarce resource useful only for one inning at a time. So you would not want to waste it in a low-leverage situation. Ergo, you save the closer. What is forgotten in this calculus is that you inevitably fail to use the closer in many games where his use in an early inning could have changed the game most.

Now consider the first inning. Because team's lead with their best hitters the most runs are scored in the first innings. Since all runs count the same (regardless of the inning in which they are scored) the first innings has the highest expected leverage. This means that if you could go back and erase a single inning and replace it the inning most likely to make the most difference is the first inning. Ultimately what this means is that you want to use a star reliever at the start of the game to face the most feared hitters. Then your starter should take over in inning two. A second star reliever (if you have it) should be used for high-leverage situation towards the end.

Update of SAFE values

I've updated our SAFE fielding values after doing some modifications to the methodology, such as improved measures of shared consequence, park dimensions, and individual fielder curves:

SAFE Website

Nice Fielding Comparison

Nice blog entry and article on comparing current systems for quantifying fielding:

On Baseball and The Reds

Red Sox Nation my Ass!

If you happen to read this:

NY Times Article

You may be surprised to read this:
"Boston's 2004 win ended an 86-year championship drought and exorcised what generations of fans had called a "curse."But it also spawned "Red Sox Nation," an ardent base of traveling supporters who sometimes outnumber home team's fans at Boston road games.Not even the revered New York Yankees played in front of bigger regular-season crowds on the road this year."

While technically true the red sox "out drawing" the Yankees away from home is due entirely to the fact that the Red Sox play the Yankees away at Yankee stadium (big park) and the Yankees play the Red Sox away at Fenway (Small Park).


According to ESPN the Yankees outdraw the Redsox with respect to total percentage of available seats filled. It was not indicated on the site whether this a straight percentage average by game or the faction of total seats sold/ total seats available. Anyway the Yankees lead the world at this number 83%. The RedSox are second at 81%.

see:

ESPN Link

No matter how you slice it. Red Sox fans can't do math.

NESSIS 2007 Talk

The organizers have posted video of my recent talk on SAFE at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports

Preseason Predictions

Great blog entry on comparing pre-season predictions of team records by several analysts (mostly from ESPN):

Vegas Watch

Further evidence that Steve Phillips really has no idea what he is doing.

My recent article with Matthew Carruth on throwing ability has gotten a bit of attention and led to some interesting discussion:

Phil Birnbaum's Sabermetrics Blog