Originally Posted by Stats4Gnats:
There’s been lots of discussion about success and failure in sports, baseball in particular. I wonder though how many people stop to think that for every success in the game there has to be a failure on someone’s part, and for every failure someone had to be successful.
I don't think this is necessarily true, even if it's often the case. A pitcher can execute his pitch perfectly and a good hitter will still occasionally crush it, and that same hitter will sometimes pop up the meatball mistake.
Originally Posted by Stats4Gnats:
Did Billy go 3-4 because of his great success or because the pitches he hit weren’t executed very well? Did Joey make a bad pitch that got hit for a walk-off double, or did the batter hit a great pitch?
The way the game is structured, the pitcher/defense has the advantage in the individual matchups, so I suspect that more of a hitter's success relies on taking advantage of a pitcher's/defense's mistakes than the other way around. I'm not really sure how'd you go about quantifying that in a systematic way, though.