Loading ...John Erardi has an interesting article in today’s Enquirer:
Some excerpts:
For all the talk about the Reds not being able to hit with runners in scoring position (RISP), they are hitting higher in that situation than the Chicago Cubs, who led the Reds by 6 1/2 games going into Saturday night’s games?
It’s true: The Reds are hitting .257 with RISP, and the Cubs are hitting .244 in the same circumstances. (The Reds are hitting four points higher than the National League average with RISP – .253.)
So, why have the Cubs outscored the Reds by 42 runs? Because the Cubs have 82 more plate appearances with RISP than do the Reds (220 plate appearances with RISP – 14th in the 16-team league).
Conclusion: You’ve got to get runners on base in order to score them.
Does this go against our manager’s beliefs?
That how often your team’s hitters strike out really doesn’t matter?
Maybe this will convince you: The Reds have struck out the second fewest times of any team in the league (134 times to Atlanta’s 123 times) yet have one of the least productive offenses in baseball …
Go figure: Reds pitchers lead the league in strikeouts with 191 through Friday.
This is something I’ve never been able to figure. Guys that know more stats than I do say that strikeouts don’t matter for hitters, but they judge a pitchers chances of success (partially at least) by strikeouts. Isn’t this contradictory?
That the Reds have the fourth-oldest group of position players (30.0) in the league, and eighth-
oldest group of pitchers (29.5)? (The source – baseballreference.com – “weights” the ages by how much the players play. In other words, if there are several 40-year-olds clogging up the bench, their ages are weighted much less.)
The last time the Reds were really good was 1999, when the average ages of their hitters was 28.3 and their pitchers were 28.0. (Keep in mind that a two-year difference in average age between this year’s team and the 1999 team is very significant.)
The last time the Reds won the World Series (1990), they averaged 27.5 for hitters and 27.4 for pitchers. And in 1970 – when the Reds started the season 70-30 and roared into the World Series – they were 25.9/25.2.
Conclusion: The Reds have to get younger before they get better.
This shows the conumdrum the Reds have caught themselves in (probably due to the owner’s impatience). They don’t trust their young players enough (which, IMO, means they don’t trust their own scouts, eyes, decision making) to let them operate without a safety net. If you had Volquez, Cueto, Bailey, Maloney, even Belisle, why did you need a Fogg? If you already have a Hopper, Freel, and Bruce, why did you need a Patterson?
Read the full article. Like almost everything Erardi writes, it’s interesting stuff.
Wow, I never would’ve thought we were so statistically un-sucky. It tells me the law of averages has to tip in our favor sooner or later. But in order for that to happen, yes, we need Bruce in CENTER and Bailey in the rotation. Ride the young guys now and fill in with the veterans on the bench in the dog days.
We need Thompson to get called up to Louisville so he can be part of the Reds rotation in 2009. Jocketty is in the position to take this Reds to the top next year. I’m not saying they can’t be pretty good this year but I think they could be very good next year with a rotation that includes Harang, Cueto, Volquex, Bailey, and Thompson. Jocketty needs to think what he wants that outfield to look like next year as well.
The reason strikeouts for pitchers are more important than hitters: Anytime you let a guy hit a ball in play, he has about a 30% chance of getting a hit. If you strike him out, there’s almost 100% chance of making an out (accounting for the rare strike 3 wild pitch letting the hitter run go to 1st). Once you let a guy make contact, it no longer has anything to do with the pitcher. It’s all on your defense at that point. Ours is bad, so we need more strikeout pitchers.
For hitters, it’s different. Strikeouts are still worse than contact outs, but the negative value is still pretty close. Sure you can’t make a productive out when you K, but also you can’t strike-out into a double play.
But getting runners on base clogs up the bases, and we know how Dusty feels about clogging up the bases…
Reds are hitting .257 with RISP.
Not surprisingly, we are hitting .256 overall.
Will the fixation on “clutch” ever end?
In light of the Erardi article today talking about how the Reds are not providing as many run scoring opportunities as the division leading Cubs, fans should be concerned by the Patterson (lifetime OBP .297) – Hairston (lifetime OBP .325) duo at the top of the order. They sure are not providing many run scoring opportunities.
This has always bothered me as well, because it seems so bizarre to say that it matters for one side of the hitter-pitcher battle, but not the other. Meanwhile, this theory is close to a founding hypothesis that so much else in sabermetrics is built upon.
The hypothesis is in part something that was originally posed by Voros McCracken, which is that pitchers cannot affect the outcome of a ball in play. A subsequent theory was that hitters can.
Hitters can have a skill to hit ‘em where they ain’t. But pitchers can only try to miss bats. They do not have control over whether a ball is hit directly to the shortstop or whether it’s hit 10 feet to his right. But a hitter can try and make that happen, and some are more skilled at it than others.
I’m not sure if I’ve explained it best yet. And these hypotheses have been modified slightly over time to be less absolute – apparently some pitchers can have a slight effect on BABIP, and brainy Brian Bannister in KC is trying to prove that a pitcher is capable of greatly affecting BABIP. But the basic principle is still pretty much accepted, and backed up by statistical evidence. Hitters can affect their own BABIP, and pitchers can’t. Therefore strikeouts (which are not Balls In Play) matter a whole lot to pitchers, and not as much to hitters.
I don’t think that hitters can “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” It has more to do with how hard you hit it. If you look at a list of hitters with consistently high BABIPs, you’ll see guys who have higher LD% than most, basically your traditional sluggers, and/or guys who are really fast and able to let out an inordinate amount of infield hits.
That’s true, Andrew, that Line Drive percentage is usually a key indicator. The idea is that a hitter has some control of what kind of contact he makes. But a pitcher has little to no control over what kind of contact is made (in between the extremes of homeruns and swings-and-misses).