Monday, April 08, 2013
Lineup construction
When I was in college, the first programming language I learned was Turbo Pascal (actually, I learned COBOL and Fortran before that, but neither were available for the PC). You might consider Pascal a scaled-down version of C. Anyway, considering that I love baseball, that I love everything about math, and that I'm learning this tool, the first large-scale project I wrote on my own was a baseball simulator. The best way to learn a tool is to apply it to something you love. I used to run pools in college, and I'd do some pretty nifty things with Lotus 1-2-3.?
Anyway, I just wanted to know the impact of different batting orders, whether to clump hitters or not, whether my softball team with a wide range in hitting talent can be better leveraged. I still have that program, and I wrote it almost 25 years ago.
So, I'm always reminded of that every time someone posts about a simulator they wrote. People seem to forget at times that we don't set out to prove something. We're simply interested in the question, and we just build the application to answer those questions, and we report on our findings. That's all we really do. If you don't like the answer, then build your own method of figuring the answer.
***
Anyway, the reason that batting orders have such little impact is that the lineup turns over: everyone hits! If you swap your #2 hitter for your #6 hitter, you are swapping 0.444 PA per game (1/9th of PA difference per lineup slot, times 4 lineup slots), or 72 plate appearances per season. This is what you are really doing, just taking 72 PA from one guy, and giving it to the other guy. (There are synergies also, with the guys coming up after, but there's also synergies with guys batting before you too. Those count, and if you want to know more, it's in The Book.)
Then, we know that a really good hitter generates about 35% more runs than an average hitter. So, if an average hitter generates 0.12 runs per PA, the really good hitter will generate 0.16 runs per PA.
This is what all the argument is about! Transferring 0.04 runs per PA and 72 PA from one guy to the other. And 72 x .04 = 3. Three runs! Over 162 games.
It's why we have such a hard time finding it. Not to mention that if a guy's ego is placated by having him bat at some supoptimal spot, then let him stay there! It doesn't make sense to increase your chance of scoring by 3 runs over 162 games, if the player will then become a worse hitter and cost your team 10 or 15 runs. Hence, batting order construction is more art than science.
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So, all you guys learning programming: keep on writing those baseball simulators. But do so purely for the satisfaction of writing the simulator, and playing with it.
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