Choices

            OK, recess is over; it is time to go back to working on the Runs Saved against Zero project. 

            Did you ever hear this joke?   Tom Johnson has not lived an honest life, so when he passes away the Devil claims him, and tells his right-hand man to show this guy around, have him choose his room.  So the Devil’s Assistant says, "Tom, you’ve got a choice of three rooms in which you will spend the rest of eternity.  You get to choose which room you want."

            In the first room there are loud obnoxious noises coming from all sides and bright flashing lights, and the room goes from brilliantly lit to dark, back and forth on a one-second pattern, and you can hear people screaming in pain, and everybody in the room is standing on their heads.   

            Then they go to the second room, and the floor is a heated grate; it’s like 140 degrees in the room and the floor is hotter, and everybody in that room is standing on their heads, too.

            So they go to the third room, and the entire floor of the room is covered with a foot of the most foul-smelling sewage you can imagine, and the room smells horrible and everybody in the room is covered with disgusting sores from living in sewage, but everybody is standing and drinking coffee.   So Tom says, "Well, it’s pretty awful in here, too, but at least you’re not standing on your head all day and you get coffee, so I guess I’ll take this one." 

            And he goes in, and the door shuts.  And the devil says, "OK, coffee break is over; all you guys go back to standing on your heads." 

            Anyway, back to work.  On what we are doing now I actually need your help.  I need your guidance, your input.  I need your feedback.

            We have to make a series of choices here, eleven of them.  We have 11 categories of data which contribute to runs being prevented.  While we might think simplistically that some of these are "pitching" and some are "fielding", the reality is that many of them, most of them, perhaps all of them except one, are responsibilities shared between pitchers and fielders.  

            We know, at this point. . . .well, we don’t "know".   We have formed an estimate, at this point, of how many runs each team has prevented by strikeouts, by control, by home run avoidance, by fielding range/DER, by turning the double play, etc.   What we need to do now is to take that information, and turn it into a binary split:  How many runs did this team prevent by pitching, and how many did they prevent by fielding?   One or the other; which is it? 

            There is probably some way to measure the fielder’s impact on each of these things and the pitcher’s impact on each of them, but we don’t have those measurements NOW.   Someone in the next generation will have to develop those methods.  For now, we’re just going to have to decide.   And your opinions on these things are probably as good as mine, so. . . .I need to know what you think.   Category by category:

            Strikeouts.   My first inclination would be to count the strikeout as 99% the work of the pitchers, and 1% the contribution of the catchers. 

            We’re working on the TEAM level here, dealing with TEAM strikeouts, not strikeouts by individual pitchers.   It seems to me that the catcher plays some minor role in this, not only by "framing", but also, at least historically, by calling pitches, knowing the hitters, setting up the hitters, etc. 

            I once talked about this with Joe Garagiola, who of course was a catcher; I asked whether he thought catchers had any impact on the pitcher’s ERA by calling pitches.   Joe said, "Nah, we don’t have anything to do with it," and he gave me this example.   He said that when he was with the Cardinals, he had Harry Brecheen and Howie Pollet and Al Brazle and Max Lanier; you’d get a hitter 1-2, and he’d call for a curve ball, and the pitcher knew that he meant a curve ball a foot out of the zone, make it look like it might be a strike and see if the batter would swing at it and get himself out.  But then he got traded to the Pirates, and he’d do the same thing, and the pitcher would throw a curve ball right over the plate.   He said he would think, "Jesus, you should have known I didn’t mean to throw THAT."  He specifically mentioned Murry Dickson as a guy who just didn’t get it, just didn’t have a clue what he was doing, although Murry was in his 30s by then, had been in the majors for a long time and somehow managed to win 20 games with a 7th-place Pirates team in 1951.   But his basic point was, you just can’t make the pitcher throw the pitch he is supposed to throw.  You just have to live with whatever he does.  

Walks.   Again, my inclination would be to count this as 99% pitching, 1% catching.   Maybe 2% catching for walks; the catcher wants to try to nibble on 2-2, it leads to a walk sometimes.  I don’t know.   I need your feedback. 

Home Runs Allowed.   Same thing.   99% pitching, 1% catching. 

Hit Batsmen.   Again, 99% pitching, 1% catching.

Wild Pitches.   Wild pitches are probably 80% the responsibility of the pitcher, 20% the responsibility of the catcher, maybe?  What do you think? 

Balks.  Who cares?   There are so few runs involved here it doesn’t really seem to matter.   Just place the responsibility all on the pitcher.

DER.   This is really the monster item on the day’s agenda.  Making the right choice here is vital to the success of the project—and there is a huge array of credible options.  

            We all know, from the work stemming from Voros’ original publication, that the pitcher has relatively little impact on whether the balls put into play against him become hits or outs.   The balls put into play against Gerrit Cole have more or less the same generalized outcomes as the balls put into play against David Hess; once the ball is in play, it’s in play. 

            The pitcher has relatively little control of that, but not zero control of it.  But does the pitcher get 5% of the credit here, 20%, 2%, what?   I could make an argument. . . let’s call this argument A.

            Argument A.   I could make an argument that the pitcher gets 70% of the credit for outs on balls in play.   The argument is, 70% of balls in play result in outs.   The pitcher, when he gets the ball put in play, has succeeded 70% of the time.   He hasn’t walked the batter; he hasn’t let it him hit the cheap seats.  He hasn’t gotten him 100% out, like he has on a strikeout, but he has gotten him 70% out. 

            The response to that is Argument B.

            Argument B.    The pitcher has already been given credit for putting the ball in play.  There are five outcomes:  the plate appearance can result in a strikeout, a walk, a home run, a hit batsman, or a ball in play.   We’ve accounted for all of the things that the pitcher does—the strikeout, the walk, avoiding the home run, avoiding the hit batsman.   This is what’s left.  This is the fielder’s little share of the pie.  You can’t give THAT to the fielder, too, can you?

            I’m 80% sure that Argument B is entirely correct, and Argument A is just flat-out wrong.  But I’ll need to look at the data once I have it organized, and I want to hear what you all have to say about it.

            Fielding Percentage:   Appears to be 100% the responsibility of the fielders, right?   I mean, the pitcher is involved as a fielder, but the pitcher is not involved in the allocation of responsibility for his role as a pitcher.

            Double Plays:   Probably 90% the responsibility of the Fielders, I would say?  The pitcher has SOME responsibility; some pitchers are willing to put the guy on first if they think they can get a ground ball; some are not going to do that, and would be silly to try because ground balls aren’t their thing.  

            Stolen Base Value:   Maybe 2/3 the responsibility of the catcher, 1/3 the responsibility of the pitchers?  

            On the individual level, the pitcher’s role in preventing the stolen base may well be larger than the catcher’s.   On the team level, teams are a mix of pitchers, and a mix of players generally is somewhere near the center; thus, on the team level, it’s mostly the catchers who determine where this team stands compared to other teams.  So I am kind of thinking 2 to 1.

            Passed Balls.   Again, about 2/3 or 70% the responsibility of the catchers, 1/3 or 30% the responsibility of the pitchers, I think. 

            In addition to that, I would value your input into one collateral issue.  When I am studying this issue, working out the system in more detail, I will need some "sample teams" to uses for study/illustration.  I would value your input into what teams I might use.

            Thanks for reading, and thanks again for your input.