Sunday, December 20, 2020
Verifying our Baseball Guts
Fifteen years ago, I tried to guesstimate the quality of plays.
Notably, I presumed 60% of the plays were "easy outs" with an average out rate of 98.3%. And another 20% that were "easy hits" with an average out rate of 5%. The other 20% of the plays were uniformly distributed between 10 and 95%, for an average of 50%.
Well, now with Statcast, we can come up with more precise numbers. 43% were easy outs at 98.4% and another 22% were almost-easy outs at 91.4%. The two combined are 65% of the plays at an our rate of 96.0%. So, not bad in terms of my baseball guts.
There's another 21% that were auto-hits (0% out rate), which compares very favorably to what I presumed.
The other 14% were 0 to 85% out rate for an average of 47.1%. That's reasonably in-line as well.
Why was I able to come up with reasonable estimates 15 years ago with no granular data to speak of? There's two reasons:
- I knew that the out rate had to average to 70% since ~70% of batted balls are outs
- We've all watched enough baseball to realize that there are a good deal of gimme hits and gimme outs
Given that, anyone would have been able to come up with a similar distribution. That's how you need to approach analysis, not just in sports. You have to have some level of understanding of the data to expect. Without a prior distribution, you are really not going to be able to have much confidence in what you are doing.
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