Saturday, March 02, 2013
GB v FB pitchers
?Bill has an article about the two, and how much he (initially) hated GB pitchers, until he decided to study the issue.
Well. ..I still don’t really like Ground Ball pitchers, but I do concede that I was, in the past, too radical in my distrust of them. I think that the advantages of throwing ground balls have been horribly overstated, and that the best way to get batters out is to find pitchers who can throw high fastballs. However, throwing ground balls does appear to be a small advantage for the pitcher, if you control for the number of strikeouts. Given two pitchers with the same strikeout rate and the same walk rate, it does appear that we should favor the one who gets more ground balls, although this advantage is probably no larger than the advantage of being a good fielder or the advantage of having a good move to first.
If you exclude homeruns, the run value of groundballs (hits, outs, DP, errors, etc) is virtually identical to the run value of flyballs. If you include HR, then it's no contest, and GB pitchers are better. That is, Bill's quote here:
"Given two pitchers with the same strikeout rate and the same walk rate, it does appear that we should favor the one who gets more ground balls"
That advantage is totally because of the HR. So, if you extend Bill's quote to pitchers with the same K, BB, and HR rates (or, in other words, the same FIP), then there is no advantage to GB or FB pitchers. Which is basically the point of DIPS.
***
Related thread on old blog.
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 151 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date
FORUM TOPICS
Jul 12 15:22 MarcelsApr 16 14:31 Pitch Count Estimators
Mar 12 16:30 Appendix to THE BOOK - THE GORY DETAILS
Jan 29 09:41 NFL Overtime Idea
Jan 22 14:48 Weighting Years for NFL Player Projections
Jan 21 09:18 positional runs in pythagenpat
Oct 20 15:57 DRS: FG vs. BB-Ref
Apr 12 09:43 What if baseball was like survivor? You are eliminated ...
Nov 24 09:57 Win Attribution to offense, pitching, and fielding at the game level (prototype method)
Jul 13 10:20 How to watch great past games without spoilers