Tough Losses July 8, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, Dan Haren, Jon Niese, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Ubaldo Jimenez, weird lines, Year of the Pitcher, Yovani Gallardo
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Last night, Jonathon Niese pitched 7.2 innings of respectable work (6 hits, 3 runs, all earned, 1 walk, 8 strikeouts, 2 home runs, for a game score of 62) but still took the loss due to his unfortunate lack of run support – the Mets’ only run came in from an Angel Pagan solo homer. This is a prime example of what Bill James called a “Tough Loss”: a game in which the starting pitcher made a quality start but took a loss anyway.
There are two accepted measures of what a quality start is. Officially, a quality start is one with 6 or more innings pitched and 3 or fewer runs. Bill James’ definition used his game score statistic and used 50 as the cutoff point for a quality start. Since a pitcher gets 50 points for walking out on the mound and then adds to or subtracts from that value based on his performance, game score has the nice property of showing whether a pitcher added value to the team or not.
Using the game score definition, there were 393 losses in quality starts last year, including 109 by July 7th. Ubaldo Jimenez and Dan Haren led the league with 7, Roy Halladay had 6, and Yovani Gallardo (who’s quickly becoming my favorite player because he seems to show up in every category) was also up there with 6.
So far this year, though, it seems to be the Year of the Tough Loss. There have already been 230, and Roy Oswalt is already at the 6-tough-loss mark. Halladay is already up at 4. This is consistent with the talk of the Year of the Pitcher, with better pitching (and potentially less use of performance-enhancing drugs) leading to lower run support. That will require a bit more work to confirm, though.
Santana the Late-Blooming Hitter July 7, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Mets, Pitchers batting, home runs, Brewers, Johan Santana, Dave Eiland, Jason Jennings, Yovani Gallardo
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Last night, Johan Santana hit his first home run in his 87th career game as a batter. (Granted, he’s played far more than that many games because he played a few years in the American League.) Out of curiosity, I checked Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index to see how many home runs have been hit by pitchers in their first 87 games as batters.
Since 1961, there have been 431 home runs (although the Play Index only lists games starting at 1970, so that may or may not be accurate). Four pitchers have hit home runs in their first games, including Yankee pitching coach Dave Eiland in 1992 and Rockies pitcher Jason Jennings. Like Johan, Jennings pitched a complete game shutout for the win that night.
The all-time leader in home runs by a pitcher in the first 87 games (how’s that for esoteric?) is Yovani Gallardo, who’s in his fourth season pitching for the Brewers. He’s hit seven of them, and as of July 4 he’s only hit in 71 games. He’s got a lot of time to pick up the pace and possibly hit the triple-digit mark when he gets back from the disabled list some time after July 20.
Pinch Hitters from the Bullpen July 6, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: Micah Owings, sabermetrics, Carlos Zambrano, bullpen, binomial distribution, Livan Hernandez, pinch hitter, margin of error
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Occasionally, a solid two-way player shows up in the majors. Carlos Zambrano is known as a solid hitter with a great arm (despite the occasional meltdown), and Micah Owings is the rare pitcher used as a pinch hitter. Even Livan Hernandez has 15 pinch-hit plate appearances (with 2 sacrifice bunts, 6 strikeouts, and a .077 average and .077 OBP, compared with a lifetime .227 average and .237 OBP).
Like Hernandez, Zambrano has a very different batting line as a pinch hitter than as a pitcher. In 24 plate appearances as a pinch hitter, Big Z is hitting only .087 with a .087 OBP, compared to his .243/.249 line when hitting as a pitcher. Since we see the same effect for both of these pitchers, it seems like there’s some sort of difference in hitting as a pinch hitter that causes the pitchers to be less mentally prepared. Of course, these numbers come from a very small sample.
On the other hand, Micah Owings hits .307/.331 as a pitcher, and a quite similar .250/.298 as a pinch hitter. What’s the difference? Owings has almost double Zambrano’s plate appearances as a pinch hitter with 47. That seems to show that maybe Owings’ larger sample size is what causes the similarity. How can this be tested rigorously?
As we did with Kevin Youkilis and his title of Greek God of Take Your Base, we can use the binomial distribution to see if it’s reasonable for Owings, Hernandez and Zambrano to hit so differently as pinch hitters. To figure out whether it’s reasonable or not, let’s limit our inquiry to OBP just because it’s a more inclusive measure and then assume that the batting average as a pitcher (i.e. the one with a larger sample size) is the pitcher’s “true” batting average and use that to represent the probability of getting on base. Each plate appearance is a Bernoulli trial with a binary outcome – we’ll call it a success if the player gets on base and a failure otherwise.
Under the binomial distribution, the probability of a player with OBP p getting on base k times in n plate appearances is:
with
We’ll also need the margin of error for proportions. If p = OBP as pitcher, and we assume a t-distribution with over 100 plate appearances (i.e. degrees of freedom), then the margin of error is:
so that 95% of the time we’d expect the pinch hitting OBP to lie within
with
We’ll also need the margin of error for proportions. If p = OBP as pitcher, and we assume a t-distribution with over 100 plate appearances (i.e. degrees of freedom), then the margin of error is:
so that 95% of the time we’d expect the pinch hitting OBP to lie within
Let’s start with Owings. He has an OBP of .331 as a pitcher in 151 plate appearances, so the probability of having at most 14 times on base in 47 plate appearances is .3778. In other words, about 38% of the time, we’d expect a random string of 47 plate appearances to have 14 or fewer times on base. His 95% confidence interval is .254 to .408, so his .298 OBP as a pinch hitter is certainly statistically credible.
Owings is special, though. Hernandez, for example, has 994 plate appearances as a pitcher and a .237 OBP, with only one time on base in 15 plate appearances. It’s a very small sample, but the binomial distribution predicts he would have at most one time on base only about 9.8% of the time. His confidence interval is .210 to .264, which means that it’s very unlikely that he’d end up with an OBP of .077 unless there is some relevant difference between hitting as a pitcher and hitting as a pinch hitter.
Zambrano’s interval breaks down, too. He has 601 plate appearances as a pitcher with a .249 OBP, but an anemic .087 OBP (two hits) in 24 plate appearances as a pinch hitter. We’d expect 2 or fewer hits only 4% of the time, and 95% of the time we’d expect Big Z to hit between .214 and .284.
As a result, we can make two determinations.
- Zambrano and Hernandez are hitting considerably below expectations as pinch hitters. It’s likely, though not proven, that this is a pattern among most pitchers.
- Micah Owings is a statistical outlier from the pattern. It’s not clear why.
How often should Youk take his base? June 30, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, binomial distribution, Brett Carroll, Greek God of Take Your Base, hit batsmen, hit by pitch, Kevin Youkilis, R
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Kevin Youkilis is sometimes called “The Greek God of Walks.” I prefer to think of him as “The Greek God of Take Your Base,” since he seems to get hit by pitches at an alarming rate. In fact, this year, he’s been hit 7 times in 313 plate appearances. (Rickie Weeks, however, is leading the pack with 13 in 362 plate appearances. We’ll look at him, too.) There are three explanations for this:
- There’s something about Youk’s batting or his hitting stance that causes him to be hit. This is my preferred explanation. Youkilis has an unusual batting grip that thrusts his lead elbow over the plate, and as he swings, he lunges forward, which exposes him to being plunked more often.
- Youkilis is such a hitting machine that the gets hit often in order to keep him from swinging for the fences. This doesn’t hold water, to me. A pitcher could just as easily put him on base safely with an intentional walk, so unless there’s some other incentive to hit him, there’s no reason to risk ejection by throwing at Youkilis. This leads directly to…
- Youk is a jerk. This is pretty self-explanatory, and is probably a factor.
First of all, we need to figure out whether it’s likely that Kevin is being hit by chance. To figure that out, we need to make some assumptions about hit batsmen and evaluate them using the binomial distribution. I’m also excited to point out that Youk has been overtaken as the Greek God of Take Your Base by someone new: Brett Carroll. (more…)
Edwin Jackson, Fourth No-Hitter of 2010 June 25, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: baseball-reference.com, BayesBall, Dallas Braden, Diamondbacks, Edwin Jackson, no-hitters, poisson distribution, Rays, Roy Halladay, Ubaldo Jimenez
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Tonight, Edwin Jackson of the Arizona Diamondbacks pitched a no-hitter against the Tampa Bay Rays. That’s the fourth no-hitter of this year, following Ubaldo Jimenez and the perfect games by Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay.
Two questions come to mind immediately:
- How likely is a season with 4 no-hitters?
- Does this mean we’re on pace for a lot more?
The second question is pretty easy to dispense with. Taking a look at the list of all no-hitters (which interestingly enough includes several losses), it’s hard to predict a pattern. No-hitters aren’t uniformly distributed over time, so saying that we’ve had 4 no-hitters in x games doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about a pace.
The first is a bit more interesting. I’m interested in the frequency of no-hitters, so I’m going to take a look at the list of frequencies here and take a page from Martin over at BayesBall in using the Poisson distribution to figure out whether this is something we can expect.
The Poisson distribution takes the form
where 
Using Martin’s numbers – 201506 opportunities for no-hitters and an average of 4112 games per season from 1961 to 2009 – I looked at the number of no-hitters since 1961 (120) and determined that an average season should return about 2.44876 no-hitters. That means
and
Above is the distribution. p is the probability of exactly n no-hitters being thrown in a single season of 4112 games; cdf is the cumulative probability, or the probability of n or fewer no-hitters; p49 is the predicted number of seasons out of 49 (1961-2009) that we would expect to have n no-hitters; obs is the observed number of seasons with n no-hitters; cp49 is the predicted number of seasons with n or fewer no-hitters; and cobs is the observed number of seasons with n or fewer no-hitters.
It’s clear that 4 or even 5 no-hitters is a perfectly reasonable number to expect.
| 2.448760831 |
At the other end… June 22, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Diamondbacks, Esmerling Vasquez, weird lines, Reds, Rangers, As, home runs, extra innings, free baseball, Michael Wuertz, Cedrick Bowers, Ramon Hernandez, Joey Votto, Scott Rolen, Andre Ethier
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Although AJ Burnett had a bad first inning last night, the Oakland As had a bad tenth inning. After taking a 2-2 game into extra innings, the Cincinnati Reds knocked three out of the park against pitchers Michael Wuertz and Cedrick Bowers. The first was hit by Ramon Hernandez; Joey Votto and Scott Rolen went deep back to back. Although extra-inning home runs aren’t very rare (there have been 35 so far this year), only three pitchers have surrendered more than one, and neither of the other two (Chad Durbin and Matt Belisle) gave them both up on the same night.
Last year, everyone’s favorite balk-off artist, Arizona’s Esmerling Vasquez, gave up two home runs in extra innings against the Texas Rangers on June 25th. Those were two of 83 free-baseball homers in 2009. Extra-innings home runs are more common in the tops of innings, because in a tied game a home run for the home team is a walk-off whereas the road team will get the chance to capitalize on their momentum, but I would have expected the proportions to be much more different than they are. In 2009, for example, of those 83, only 44 were hit by the away team with 39 hit by the home team (and 33 of those were game-enders).
So far, no batter has more than one extra-innings home run this year, but last year there were several. Andre Ethier led the pack with 3, with a bunch of batters who had 2.
AJ Burnett: Statistical Anomaly June 21, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: baseball-reference.com, weird lines, AJ Burnett, 2 outs, Justin Upton, Adam LaRoche, Mark Reynolds, first inning, home run
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Tonight, A.J. Burnett had a weird first inning in a game that’s still going on as I write this. He got the first two outs fairly easily, and then surrendered home runs to Justin Upton, Adam LaRoche, and Mark Reynolds. Before he knew it, he was down 5-0 in the bottom of the first. That can’t happen very often.
I queried Baseball-Reference.com’s event finder for home runs, then narrowed it down to first inning home-runs with two outs this year. Prior to tonight, there had been 82. None of them came in three-homer games – that answers that.
Just for fun, I checked 2009 as well. In total, there were 209 2-out, first-inning home runs in 2009. Only one of those home runs happened in a three-homer game, so it didn’t happen then, either.
Poor AJ.
Carlos Zambrano, Ace Pinch Hitter? June 21, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, bullpen, Carlos Zambrano, Cubs, Joba Chamberlain, Lou Piniella, Micah Owings, RE24, relief, setup man, starter, Ubaldo Jimenez
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Earlier this year, Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella experimented with moving starting pitcher and relatively big hitter Carlos Zambrano to the bullpen, briefly making him the Major Leagues’ best-paid setup man. Zambrano is back in the rotation as of the beginning of June. I’m curious what the effect of moving him to the bullpen was.
The thing is that not only is Zambrano an excellent pitcher (though he was slumping at the time), he’s also a regarded as a very good hitter for a pitcher. He’s a career .237 hitter, with a slump last year at “only” .217 in 72 plate appearances (17th most in the National League), which was 6th in the National League among pitchers with at least 50 plate appearances. He didn’t walk enough (his OBP was 13th on the same list), but he was 9th of the 51 pitchers on the list in terms of Base-Out Runs Added (RE24) with about 5.117 runs below a replacement-level batter. Ubaldo Jimenez was also up there with a respectable .220 BA, .292 OBP, but -8.950 RE24.
It should be pointed out that pitcher RE24 is almost always negative for starters – the best RE24 on that list is Micah Owings with -2.069. Zambrano’s run contribution was negative, sure, but it was a lot less negative than most starters. Zambrano also lost a bit of flexibility as an emergency pinch hitter (something that Owings is going through right now due to his recent move to the bullpen) – he’s more valuable as a reliever, so they won’t use him to pinch hit. As a result, he loses at-bats, and that not only keeps him from amassing hits. It also allows him to get rusty.
It’s hard to precisely value the loss of Zambrano’s contribution, although he’s already on pace for -6.1 batting RE24. It’s likely, in my opinion, that his RE24 will rise as he continues hitting over the course of the year. His pitching value is also negative, however, which is unusual. He’s always been very respectable among Cubs starters. It’s possible that although he was pitching very well in relief, the fact that he has the ability to go long means that it’s inefficient to use him as a reliever. This is the opposite of, say, Joba Chamberlain, who is overpowering in relief but struggles as a starter.
As a starter, Zambrano has never been a net loss of runs. He needs to stay out of the bullpen, and Joba needs to stay there.
E-Reader Price Wars June 21, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Economics.Tags: e-reader, elasticity, industrial organization, iPad, Kindle, Kobo, microeconomics, Nook, oligopoly, price theory, price wars, substitute goods
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Holy cow… two non-baseball updates in a row! I’ll have to fix that later on.
The news all over is that Amazon has cut the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189. By all accounts, this was prompted by the $60 price cut that Barnes & Noble gave the Nook ($259 to $199), which in turn was prompted by the low price of the Borders brand Kobo ($149). The availability of the iPad, an augmented substitute good for e-readers, will also potentially cause trouble, but the mere existence of the iPad doesn’t necessarily create downward price pressure in and of itself.
The Nook, Kindle, and Kobo are all extremely similar goods. I’d go so far as to say they’re perfect substitutes, if we consider this Kobo advertising table. Taking the American market, the price differential will disappear when the new price cuts take effect. The weight and thickness differences are negligible. The memory is similar. The only major difference is that the Kobo can use Bluetooth, while the Nook uses Wi-Fi and 3G, and the Kindle uses 3G. This difference is probably not going to result in significant market segmentation and no one will be likely to buy a Nook and a Kindle to take advantage of the Nook’s Wi-Fi capabilities, so it’s fair to consider these substitute goods with negative cross-elasticities of demand.
When prices for substitute goods with different producers move together, there are three options, two of which are sensible in a rational market:
- The firms could be colluding.
- The firms could be in a price war.
- The price change could be coincidental.
Coincidence isn’t very likely or very interesting, so we’ll only consider options 1 and 2. Collusion is fun to consider, but probably not relevant here. For one, when prices move due to collusion, they generally move up because firms are no longer attempting to price each other out of the market. Tacit collusion might be the reason that about $200 is the floor for 3G devices, but it’s unlikely to be the reason both firms cut prices.
The price war would explain the fact that the changes in price are negative and that they’re meeting at a similar level. Price war means increased competition. Assuming demand doesn’t change (it will), the firm with the lower price will sell its product. Assuming demand increases as price decreases (it will), each lowering of price should bring additional marginal consumers to the pool of people willing to buy these devices, so while prices fall, profits may or may not increase. If profits increase, however, it will likely be profitable to cut the price even further, because additional consumers can still be reached, and there will be downward pressure from other firms trying to keep up. As a result, price will approach the cost of production. Price won’t reach the marginal cost of production, however, since there are barriers to entry into the e-reader market (including specialized equipment, R&D for a new device since the current devices are protected by patents and trade secrets, and acquisition of rights to books).
A quick rule of thumb to see if we’re dealing with price war or collusion is to check the stock prices of the producer companies. All things being equal, if a price move increases stock price, then the move is the result of anti-competitive measures like collusion, because there will be higher profits. If a price move decreases stock price, then the move is likely to increase competition and lower profits will result. Here, to quote KTTC:
Barnes&Noble shares fell 55 cents, or 3.2 percent, to finish trading at $16.52. Amazon shares declined $3.28, or 2.6 percent, to $122.55.
(Apple’s stock, for the record, ticked down today without much else to explain the drop.) This is probably a pro-competition move. The likely winners fall into two groups:
- E-reader consumers, who will benefit from lower prices and more competition for amenities. The producers will likely be fighting for contracts with publishing houses, and a larger selection of books may be forthcoming.
- iPad users. E-readers are an imperfect substitute for the iPad, so in order for the iPad to remain a rational choice after the price cuts, it will have to become a better product to avoid losing out to people who will get a better value by buying a cheaper product. This should mean more of a focus on the differential aspects of the iPad like the App Store, iTunes, and (yes) iBooks.
This should be fun to watch.
