Friday, April 19, 2013
Pitching to the score… or not
Dave looks at CC. What is interesting is his huge change in HR rate, but as Dave notes, that's a tradeoff, because overall, it's the same impact. This is like protection, where we showed in The Book that yes, pitchers and batters behave differently depending on who is on deck. But the IMPACT of that is really close to no difference. Everyone is just getting to the same spot in different ways. This is even most obvious with things like 3-0 counts and man on 3B and less than 2 outs. Yes, obviously, everyone involved is going to behave much differently. But, is there something special about a particular context that makes a particular player "better" in terms of taking advantage of that situation?
The implication of protection and pitching to the score is that the players are getting better than expected results. And we don't see that.
***
CC gives up runs at 80% of the league average, so his 1104 runs implies that he saved 276 runs.
His RE24 is a measure of how he does in terms of pitching to the base-out situation. His RE24 is +284 runs. That it's virtually the same as just looking at his ERA means that we've got nothing new to learn here. ("All hail RE24!")
And 276 runs translates to about +28 wins. His WPA is +28.5 wins. WPA is loosely based on how well someone pitches to the inning-score. Again, this shows that CC is nothing special here.
But, really, we didn't have to go much further than the data Dave presented. That data is easier to understand. The RE24 and WPA is a bit harder, but it's much more concise. Of all the pitchers Reynolds could have chosen, I don't think he could have chosen a worse example of a pitcher who pitches to the score.
I do love though that CC's HR rate is much different, even though overall, it's to the same effect.
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