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October 19, 2006

Schrodinger's Bat

Clogging the Bases

by Dan Fox

"I think walks are overrated unless you can run. If you get a walk and put the pitcher in a stretch, that helps. But the guy who walks and can't run, most of the time they're clogging up the bases for somebody who can run."--former Cubs manager Dusty Baker

Now that "Sweet" Lou Piniella has taken over in Chicago, Cub fans can begin to put the Dusty Baker era behind them--an era that began full of such promise in a surprising 2003 season. But ever since the fateful foul pop fly that wasn't caught, the fortunes of Baker and his Cubs headed down a path that culminated in the train wreck that was the 96-loss 2006 season.

Would that the results of the last four years could be blamed on something as simple as a curse. Unfortunately, the explanation for the slide is more complex and involves a series of questionable player-personnel moves and what has proved to be an unrealistic reliance on two injury-prone starters. So begins the judgment of history.

Although Baker did not bring a World Championship to the North Side, he did leave fans with a plethora of entertaining quips like the one beginning this week's column. I thought about that quote while contemplating the managerial change as my family and I made our way across the remnants of the Western Interior Seaway after a family wedding in Iowa. The major question to me, spurred on by an interesting post and conversation on the blog associated with The Book, was just how frequently runners tended to "clog the bases" for their teammates. It's hard to underestimate just how little interest my wife had in this question, but for me, much of the final few hundred miles was spent happily crunching the numbers with a laptop.

Advancing and Obstructing

In order to take a look at this question, I used the baserunning framework used to calculate Equivalent Hit Advancement Runs (EqHAR). In particular, we can use the advancement percentages in the following scenarios: