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May 26, 2005

Crooked Numbers

Saving for Another Day

by James Click

Baseball, like life and the school cafeteria, is filled with choices. Swing or take. Steal or stay put. Bring in the righthander or the southpaw. Most of these choices are fairly simple and immediate. If the batter swings at the pitch, the effects of that decision won't extend beyond that at-bat for the most part. But there are small ramifications from that decision that do extend beyond the immediate. Taking the pitch may increase the pitcher's pitch count; he may then leave the game slightly earlier; the earlier departure may lead to the opposing manager selecting a different reliever, etc, etc, etc. Those ramifications are unlikely to be simply the result of that one swing/take decision, but we've all heard the theory of the butterfly effect.

Bullpen and rotation management is on an entirely different level from those simple swing/take decisions. Teams plan out rotations weeks in advance; relievers are frequently unavailable one game after a longer outing the previous night. While decisions in games can be evaluated by their impact on the success or failure of winning that particular game, decisions like these must be evaluated based on the likelihood of winning both the game at hand and future games.

It's this situation that spurred a recent email to me from Will Carroll (while Will would probably think a LEFT JOIN is some kind of political movement, he's excellent for asking these kinds of questions):

Watching Cliff Lee pitch today (Sunday) and got to thinking about a couple things in relation to having a big lead and taking the pitcher out.

How often does a team have a 3,4,5 run lead in the 6th and lose it?
How often does that happen after the starter's been lifted?
Does the pitcher show any advantage next time out? Next couple outings?

In the game Will was referring to, the Indians were leading 3-0 over interleague rival the Reds after scoring a run in the top of the sixth. The Reds scored a run in the bottom half of the inning, but the Indians notched six runs in the top of the ninth to put things out of reach. Up 3-0 heading to the bottom of the sixth, Indians manager Eric Wedge was faced with a multi-game decision. Lee had thrown 82 pitches through five innings having walked three but only allowed two hits and no runs. He clearly wasn't at much of a risk of getting into a dangerous pitch count, but perhaps Lee would perform slightly better in his next outing with a little more rest.