Our Game

Very thorough review - Thanks !

Glad they won last night and thank you for the review. Based on what I read it sounded like Cole’s last outing was his best of the season. Is the game winning grand slam the only HR the team has?

Why are defense/pitching and offense mutually exclusive to Augie?

Is it the way he recruits?

There were two HR’s that game for Texas.
While the pitching has been outstanding, the fielding has been average. Hitting is even worse than what most expected just from the previews. Just zero power throughout the lineup. That has to make you wonder why Texas selectively bring in kids with below average hitting. Why make it harder on ourselves than it has to be? We scrap for runs because thats our philosphy? Cmon we need bats not slappy hitters who produce a seeing eye single

Mysterious:

1.) I believe the NCAA changed the bat specifications this year.

2.) The Dish is a pitchers park.

3.) Baseball is a game about pitching.

Granted our offense is always more of a concern than our defense and our pitching, but that is why we are good. Its one of the fundamental truths of baseball born out by the math of an exceptional hitter averaging .400

I’ll be worried when I start seeing blogs about how powerful our hitting is but ummm we got no arms.

Matt, nice writeup. Enjoyed it as I always do your articles.

Roach, excellent points and I agree (of course that is why I think they are excellent).

roach -

Your post is just typical talking head blather being repeated. It’s completely wrong.

Winning baseball games is half preventing runs (pitching and fielding) and half scoring runs (hitting and baserunning). There’s no way around that simple logic. A team that allows 3 runs per game but only scores 3 runs per game will expect to finish with a 0.500 record just the same as a team that scores 9 runs per game but allows 9 runs per game. The former team is not better just because their pitching and defense are better.

And the math of a 0.400 batting average being exceptional offers no supporting evidence to your theory whatsoever. I’d really appreciate it if you could attempt to flesh out your thought process on that one.

You type friendlier on Shaggy Bevo.

“I’ll be worried when I start seeing blogs about how powerful our hitting is but ummm we got no arms.”

Well said. Because, then you become the Texas Rangers.

Huclkeberry, your analysis is correct at the breakeven level, but under Pythagorean theory of expected wins (RS^2/(RS+RA)^2), preventing an additional run is more likely to increase your wins than scoring additional run.

“Pitching and defense win” isn’t just talking head blather. It’s been demonstrated to be successful.

You’re just going to subtract and add runs in equal increments?

The distribution of team run scoring and run prevention doesn’t work like that. It’s not linear. Improving by a standard deviation in scoring runs and preventing runs doesn’t yield the same raw number. What that means is that allowing one fewer run per game is a more difficult task than scoring one more run per game.

Also, some guys at Virginia Tech just ran the numbers and found 2.131 as the preferred exponent (I’ll use 2.13 for now) for college baseball.

Linky

Screw math. This is about how much one player impacts a game. A .400 hitter only goes to the plate 4 times per game, but a 2.00 era pitcher might face 25 out of an opponent’s 35 hitters in a game. The badass hitter might win the battle vs the staff ace, but the ace will win the other 8 battles.

My guess is that there is a bigger deviation between team era’s than there is for runs scored, which is why teams with dominant pitching tend to win.

We’re looking at the team level, not the player level. Yes, a starting pitcher in college can be much more valuable than a position player, particularly because of the schedule setup. A 3-game series means that a good starting pitcher will face a higher percentage of the opponent’s plate appearances than on the pro level.

However, it’s still quite possible for position players to have a large impact in the college game due to relative differences between teammates.

Post about Big 12 Win Shares
2010 Results through 5/16

(Yes, I know you saw that last year because you commented on it)

I didn’t understand it then either. I have an extremely hard time buying that Jungmann’s (2.03 era, 120 IP) win share is lower than Green’s (2.74, 111 IP) - I know Green won more games but I thought a system like this is supposed to correct for things like run support and facing the other team’s ace, and not artificially add points based on actual game results. Not to mention that Jungmann’s win share is lower than Rupp or Shepherd.

But I’m talking team level too, not player level. The argument I’m making is that since fewer pitchers account for more “defensive plate appearances” (and the better pitchers account for a higher percentage of those) than hitters account for offensive plate appearances, teams that have, for example, 3 good pitchers and are otherwise average have a much bigger advantage than teams with 3 good hitters and are otherwise average.

I agree with your point that winning is 50% defense and 50% offense, and I might not be articulating it right, but I think the old saying that pitching and defense win games is true in a sense because one dominant pitcher will affect games more than one dominant hitter.

I can’t find the numbers, do you have quick access to runs scored vs. runs allowed for D-1, or maybe Big12 teams? Curious about the distribution and highest v lowest.

My guess would be that there is more of a difference between the lowest and highest runs allowed than there is between lowest and highest runs scored.

Good post, Matt. Sorry about Huckleberry. We do what we can…

Huck:

I don’t claim to be the statistics genius that you are, but I would appreciate your thoughts on the following:

You stated “allowing one fewer run per game is a more difficult task than scoring one more run per game” but isn’t that at least partially because you have a lower bound to the number of runs you can score but no upper bound? In addition, scoring more runs doesn’t necessarily correlate with winning—winning 10-1 is no better than winning 2-1 but it certainly would affect your runs per game.

You also state “Winning baseball games is half preventing runs (pitching and fielding) and half scoring runs (hitting and baserunning)” But I don’t see how that statement is consistent with your assertion that its a more difficult task to prevent runs than to score runs. Doesn’t that mean that scoring and preventing runs are weighted differently?

Finally if its more difficult to prevent runs than to score runs, doesn’t that make pitching and defense more important, not less important? In other words, lets say you have the opportunity to add runs (you likely would try to obtain better hitters as opposed to say better baserunners), but every other team is just as likely as you are to improve in the same way because it’s easier. The more difficult task of preventing runs will be accomplished by fewer teams and therefore create an advantage.

First and most importantly, I am no statistical genius. I’m just a dork with a calculator, or more accurately a dork with Excel.

Addressing your questions in order, yes, part of the reason preventing one run per game is more difficult is the lower bound. But the why in this case is essentially irrelevant, the important thing is the what; that what is that subtracting one run per game allowed can’t be equivocated with scoring one more run per game. Take a team that averages 5 runs per game allowed and 5 runs per game scored. We can’t compare that team allowing 6 fewer runs per game (impossible) with their scoring 6 more runs per game (possible). So I address that by determing how many more runs per game scored would represent one standard deviation of improvement versus how many fewer runs per game allowed would represent the same. Also, your 10-1 versus 2-1 example is easily countered by noting that winning 10-1 is also no better than winning 10-9. That is a common theme when arguing defense versus offense. For most arguments that defense is more important than offense the converse is equally true.

The question in your next paragraph is the problem caused by intermingling overall arguments with more specific ones. On the general level, there is no argument to be had regarding baseball’s design as half offense and half defense. Unlike many other sports, a team’s defense has no direct effect on their offense. In football, for example, a team’s defensive unit can put points on the board. In basketball a steal in the opponent’s backcourt can lead to points that require no genuine offensive execution. Furthermore, every run allowed by a defense equals a run scored by an offense. In a game- or event-specific view, they are completely equal. So when viewing a game in particular that is tied 5-5, having scored one more run to be ahead 6-5 is exactly the same as having allowed one fewer run to be winning 5-4.

The difference is seen when looking at season-long performance, which is of course what pythagorean expectation is based on. And it’s even trickier than I made it sound at first. When discussing college baseball on a Texas message board, we’ll almost always be dealing with a very good team that scores a moderate amount and prevents a good amount of runs. So allowing fewer runs will be more difficult than scoring more runs. That’s my fault for unclearly expressing what I was trying to say. In Texas’ case, scoring an additional run per game would be a lot easier than preventing an additional run per game. However, because of the park factor, our offense really isn’t as bad as people usually think it is although it indeed usually lags behind our defense. As for college baseball as a whole, it turns out that the standard devation for preventing runs is larger than that for scoring runs. Surprising to me, but the facts are the facts. This is, like everything I talk about, after adjusting the numbers for competition, etc.

What you’ll find is that my major beef with our offensive approach is on a tactical level. We like to bunt for some reason and make our lives more difficult. We could improve our overall run scoring by simple tactical changes which require no improvement in talent or ability on the part of our players. In fact, if we made a conscious decision to bunt less, we could expend more practice time on other facets and possibly improve elsewhere, too.

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