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Reply to "Need guidance"

quote:
Originally posted by Three Bagger:
…I guess the major question I have is, does your stat Leadoff Success really tell anything useful to a coach especially in a small sample such as a high school season. If a guy has 20, 40, or even 100 plate appearances in a season, reaching base even five or six times on errors leading off skews the use of any data since these had nothing to do with what the batter did. You can reach on an error on a rocket or the softest checked swing grounder. You can reach when you strike out and the catcher doesn't handle the pitch. One guy could get on base leading off on twelve hits in thirty AB's with no BB's but two ROE's and another guy could reach on eight hits, no BB's and seven errors. The second guy reached more times leading off, but he is no way the superior hitter leadoff or otherwise. You wouldn't put the second guy as your leadoff batter based on that. If there was found to be a relationship to reaching on errors and that players exceptional speed, then maybe it would be meaningful after all. However, the higher level the player plays at, the less times he will reach on errors as the fielders get better.


Its hard to say what any stat tells any coach, because they all think differently. Wink To me, its not so much what it tells me, but how certain things might be explained. FI, if your team isn’t scoring very well, chances are your lead-off batters aren’t getting on a lot. And since the batter who leads off the most innings is the one in the #1 BPOS, that might be a good place to start looking for improvement.

I’m not a big believer in “skewed” stats because of low sample numbers being unreliable. The numbers are what the numbers are, whether its based on 10 occurrences or 10,000. Now you might say the numbers are more or less reliable based on the number of occurrences, but basing a decision on even a low number of occurrences is better than a flat out guess. What’s happening is, as the sample increases, so does the reliability, but it doesn’t mean everything before a certain point is unreliable.

I don’t try to guess at what any metric I do tells anyone. My job isn’t to make judgments, its to present information. If I was scoring for you and you wanted more in depth information about leadoff batters, as soon as you defined what it was you wanted, you’d get it if it was possible to get. But for me or any other statistician to try to figure out every possible format or relationship to other data anyone might want to see, isn’t an option, at least for me. Wink

quote:
I will admit it is of interest to me if certain extremely fast guys reach base more on groundball or throwing errors than others(Ichiro, for example) because they cause infields to rush more often or play an extra step in, leading to more balls off their gloves. My son is extremely fast down the line as well as lefthanded and I would bet he reached more on errors than most teammates year after year when he was younger. At least it seemed that way to my prejudiced eyes. Smile


I don’t think there’s any doubt that players who are faster tend to reach more on certain BIPs than others. A couple years back I decided to see if there was a relation of “hustle” to reaching base. What I did was time every batter from contact to contact (ball with bat to foot to base) on every at bat I could. Then I broke down the results by what happened. I wish I’d have been able to get a 30 or 40 yard sprint time for everyone to see just how much hustle there really was, but what I found out was, while foot speed was definitely a factor, the more effort a player put into getting to 1st on EVERY BIP, the more likely it seemed to be that he’d be rewarded.

It sure looked as though most players would “give up” on anything in the air that wasn’t hit hard, and just about anything on the ground that was hit “at” a fielder. Unfortunately, I had to give up on the metric because its impossible to score a baseball game and use a stopwatch on every ball put into play. I needed someone to do the watch for me, but at the HS level, almost everyone at a game is much more interested in the game and what’s going on, than in proving/disproving theories. Wink

You may well be correct about your son, but the proof would be in the “pudding”. Unfortunately, there’s no way to go back and get the data that would prove or disprove your perception. That’s a big reason why guys mike myself do what we do. Wink

quote:
I can tell you are passionate about your high school stat keeping though! Smile


Yeah, I am, and that’s why I’m really encouraged by there being so many people now using some kind of software to either keep score or do their stats. We’re getting closer and closer to having a central depository for youth baseball numbers, and to me that means closer to answering a lot of questions and proving or disproving a lot of long held beliefs.
Last edited by Stats4Gnats
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