Saturday, January 05, 2019
Runs on the Knight’s Watch
A continuation of a conversation from Twitter. Read that first. Please. Pretty please with a cherry on top.
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This is what is perplexing the saber community when it comes to separating fielding from pitching: we can identify WHO is there, but we can't assign RESPONSIBILITY well enough. You start with simply ONE game. You have a perfect game, and so is 4 runs better than average and 5 runs better than replacement. But is the pitcher responsible for ALL of it? We've watched enough baseball to appreciate that there's alot of randomness. So, are perfect games usually 3 runs or 2 runs better than average for a pitcher? And are they 1 or 2 runs better than average for fielders? And how much to pure randomness? 0? 1? 4?
So that randomness, while starts to wash away over a season, doesn't completely wash away.
Jack Kralick in 1961 has this split with bases empty and runners on,respectively:
.292/.341/.429
.253/.297/.358
The OPS of those number is 14% higher than league with bases empty and 22% lower than league with runners on. And the Leverage Index with runners on is 2x that of bases empty.
So you have a pitcher that is substantially better... correction... a pitcher who has been ASSIGNED a performance record substantially better when it counts the most. And this explains why, when he's on the mound, he has among the lowest RA/9 in the league.
Do we want to credit Kralick with being on the mound getting better results with men on base, thereby limiting the impact of guys who got on base?
In other words: do we care about sequencing?
Or, do we prefer a "seasonal component" ERA, one that ASSUMES all performance is random in terms of the base-out state?
This was in effect "clutch pitching". Or "clutch results". And if we are trying to account for 101 runs allowed, and not the 110 or 120 (or whatever it is) that randomness would expect, then someone has to absorb that good result.
And you either give it to Kralick and/or his fielders and/or create a "timing-Kralick" bucket that acknowledges there was some 10 or whatever runs that were earned "on the knight's watch", but we don't know what to do with it.
Bill's methods are all about accounting for all those runs. So, we have to account for them, somewhere.
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Fangraphs takes a polar opposite view, and assumes randomness of events, and ONLY targetting BB, SO, HR, HBP of a pitcher. The rest are essentially assigned to fielders and/or timing.
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The true answer is somewhere in-between and since I know that we'll never come to consensus, I simply take a 50/50 approach of rWAR and fWAR and call it a day.
My Game Score v2 is in fact (a simplification of) that middle ground.