Testing an Old Adage...Again

Mike Fast has a great piece up over on The Hardball Times researching the correlation between working quickly and effectiveness. While I study I did on Baseball Prospectus last May used average game time and was more historical in that it went back to 1970, Mike uses the time stamps that MLBAM is providing in its Pitchf/x data for 2008.

What Mike found largely corresponds to what I concluded, namely that there doesn't appear to be any relationship between defensive support as measured by defensive efficiency (DER) and BABIP and time between pitches for team or individual pitchers measured relative to their teams (although I was using unearned runs instead of DER as I should have).

He does find, however, that when looking at BABIP in terms of the number of seconds that elapsed since the previous pitch, the BABIP is lower for pitches thrown within 10 seconds and higher for pitches thrown in excess of 50 seconds since the previous pitch (he does throw out pitches that came in a minute or more after the previous pitch). As Mike notes, there are other factors to control for, not the least of which are hit type (line drive, fly ball, ground ball, popup) and pitcher quality and hitter quality. Still, it's pretty interesting stuff and just one of the many applications of Pitchf/x data.