Protectionism and Its Effects

Interesting article by Ken Rosenthal on lineup protection. One quote that caught my eye was this...

Bill James, godfather of the statistical movement, called such protection [the idea that the Phillies wanted to sign Alfonso Soriano to protect Ryan Howard] "overrated" and told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would project Howard's numbers to be the same whether Albert Pujols or Corey Patterson were hitting behind him.

He then goes on to say:

With all due respect to James, Pujols and Patterson are not equal, never will be equal and do not merit equal consideration. "Do not let this guy beat you," is a mantra at pitchers' meetings. Previous matchups, left-right concerns and ballpark effects all figure into a pitcher's approach. Still, according to statistical research, the difference in the Phillies' No. 5 spot between relatively comparable batters such as Burrell and Jimmy Rollins would be marginal.

Of course James was not saying that Pujols and Patterson are equals, only that their effect on the performance of Howard would essentially be equal.

Rosenthal goes on to cite J.C. Bradbury's study on protection where he concludes that contrary to a protection effect, a good hitter actually has a negative effect on the previous hitter. Bradbury calls this the "effort externality", which occurs when a good on-deck batter causes the pitcher to use more effort to pitch to the current batter, thereby lowering the hit probability of the current batter. In addition, this means the pitcher will throw more pitches in the strike zone which decreases the walk rate. Bradbury sums up the study in this way.

Using MLB play-by-play data from 1984–1992, we are able to control for many factors, including the quality of the on-deck hitter, that influence the probability that a player reaches base. We find that the quality of the on-deck hitter negatively impacts the preceding hitter, which is consistent with pitchers using extra effort to minimize the damage of the batter who follows. This finding contradicts traditional baseball thinking that a good on-deck hitter protects the hitter who precedes him in the batting order. Though we find that a spillover does exist, its magnitude is very small. It takes a very large difference in the quality of the on-deck hitter to have only a minor impact on the current batter.

The Balance of Power

Fascinating article by David Gassko yesterday on THT related to lineup balance. I've often thought that, offense being slightly nonlinear, a balanced lineup would create more runs in a statistically significant fashion than one where most of the punch was concentrated in a few individuals. The 1998 Yankees and 2001 Mariners are the anecdotal evidence I had in the back of my mind. Gassko uses the case of this year's Tigers and after developing a method to quantify lineup balance, concludes that balance essentially makes no difference.

He looks at both run production and Pythagorean record and although both correlations were in the proper direction, they were statistically insignificant. This result, in part, verifies the findings of Cyril Morong in this study from 2002. It would be interesting to use David's approach for OBP only instead of weighted OBA (wOBA) to see if he could replicate the result.

More interestingly, however, he does a variant study in discussing the dependency on homeruns in the post season. Here he finds that...

It turns out, there is a strong (r = .153, p = .002) correlation between a team’s reliance on home runs and its success in the playoffs. If an average teams jumped to the 68th percentile in terms of its reliance on home runs, it would increase its postseason winning percentage by .037 points (or six wins per 162 games). That is a huge effect. It would most certainly behoove playoff contenders to build up their power.

The result follows logically since in the post season the run environment is smaller (teams have better pitchers), the impact of homeruns is magnified since there will be fewer runners on base. The 2005 White Sox are a case in point and this finding of course flies in the face of the common wisdom that teams that rely on "small ball" are more successful in the post season.