Wednesday, December 18, 2013
A’s FB bias in acquiring hitters
Andrew does a great job in showing the trend.
?Andrew then updates a key kinding in The Book:
Two pages cover a less visible effect: batted-ball tendencies. Authors Tango, Litchman, and Dolphin found that fly-ball hitters had an advantage over ground-ball hitters, simply because they are better hitters—you can’t homer on grounders, after all. They also found that fly-ball hitters are especially good against ground-ball pitchers, because the former tend to swing under the ball while the latter want the hitter to swing over the ball.
However, Tango et al. noted that this platoon advantage is hard to exploit because players tend to be neutral rather than lean to either extreme. Also, the advantage itself is very small, and hence overshadowed by the handedness platoon. Such a minimal advantage would (theoretically) require being multiplied through several hitters to become meaningful.
So what happens when a determined, resourceful general manager decides to overhaul his lineup with fly-ball hitters, capitalizing on a league-wide trend toward ground-ball pitchers?
He uses TAv, but I'll convert it to runs so that we can see the impact in a different way. When hitters face FB pitchers, the FB hitter generates 28% more runs than the GB hitter. But, when they face GB pitchers, the FB hitter generates 58% more runs than the GB hitter.
So, we can appreciate that FB hitters are overall better hitters than GB hitters (basically due to the HR), but, when facing GB pitchers, FB hitters are fantastically better. If the AL West is acquiring, say, GB pitchers, then the natural correction to that is for a team to acquire FB hitters. I don't know if this is true (someone can look into it), but Andrew does note:
A related theory on why no other team has capitalized on the A's air-ball plan: the advantage wasn’t a net positive until now, after the growth of ground-ball pitchers. This is less verifiable because labeling a pitcher isn’t an easy exercise. My one-deviation-above-the-mean method is always scaled to the league—it doesn’t declare pitchers as a type based on an actual rate threshold. Given the rising ground ball to fly ball ratio, though, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this platoon advantage has increased enough to be potent.
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