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June 2, 2005

Crooked Numbers

Eight Is Enough

by James Click

Any Dean Chance fan will tell you: Pitchers stink at the plate. Perhaps it's a mental thing: they spend so much time trying to prevent that crack of the bat that they just can't make it themselves or they'll break out in hives. Regardless, in 2004, NL pitchers notched a line more reminiscent of my Little League career than of major-league players: .146/.179/.187. That's an MLVr of -0.653; pitchers cost their team well over half a run over the course of a full game of plate appearances. That they rarely see more than two or three PAs in a game means they're probably only costing the team 0.3 to 0.4 runs. This estimate is borne out by the league run scoring averages: the NL averaged 9.26 R/G in 2004 while the AL managed 10.04, so the two pitchers managed to sap 0.78 R/G compared to their DH counterparts last year.

It's this discrepancy that leads to some interesting strategic situations when the pitcher is due to bat. And these situations are what prompted the following e-mail regarding one of the more common techniques employed in the National League: intentionally (or "unintentionally") walking the eighth-place batter to face the pitcher when there are already men in scoring position and two outs:

Watching Mike Matheny being intentionally walked to get to Jason Schmidt the other day, I wondered if you (or anyone else) had ever thought about whether the conventional wisdom about walking the number-eight hitter to get to the pitcher when there are men on base actually makes sense. Obviously, it should reduce run expectancy for that inning given average number-eight hitters and average hitting pitchers. But avoiding the pitcher leading off the next inning must increase run expectancy significantly as well. Is the short term gain worth intentionally avoiding getting an out from the second worst hitter on a team and facing better batters later in the game?

-- Adam S.

Thanks for the question, Adam. This strategy is almost exactly the same as the idea of walking Barry Bonds to face whomever the Giants have dragged back from the Shady Acres retirement home to bat fifth: Is the difference in the resultant run expectation after a walk greater than the difference in the performance of the current and following batter?

As a first pass, let's look at the various run expectation situations and how they change if a batter is walked. Here's the run expectation chart from 2004:

        0 Outs  1 Out   2 Outs
        ------  -----   ------
Empty    .5379   .2866  .1135
1st      .9259   .5496  .2460
2nd     1.1596   .7104  .3359
1st&2nd 1.4669   .9577  .4605
3rd     1.4535   .9722  .3623
1st&3rd 1.8540  1.2236  .5219
2nd&3rd 2.1343  1.4717  .6179
Loaded  2.2548  1.5946  .8082