Youk to White Sox

[Guest]

You're not accounting for the importance of runs at all with your system. I've made my point.

 

Yes, I did. I compared how World Series winning teams were ranked in BOTH pitching (ERA) and hitting (runs scored) in their leagues. As you can see pitching was consistently more important than runs scored during the season.

There is a saying "Good pitching beats good hitting".

There is another saying "Pitching and defense wins rings"

You have made a false point.

[Emmz]

You didn't even show how it was more important. The team who wins is always the one who has the run differential in their favor. You show me how pitching is more important or you're still incorrect.

[Guest]

You didn't even show how it was more important. The team who wins is always the one who has the run differential in their favor. You show me how pitching is more important or you're still incorrect.

 

I agree that run diffential is very important too. Its NOT true that the team with the best run differential always wins because our run differential is +43, second in the ALE even though we are tied for last place.

I modified my original post to show you that although we have nearly always been in the top three in the AL in runs scored (the exception being 2006), the success of the team is related to where they were in terms of pitching relative to the rest of the AL. When our pitching is good we make the playoffs and go deep into them; when its not good, we either don't get in at all or make a quick exit.

[Emmz]

Teams ranked less than 4th in their league? Cherrypicking much? How about teams ranked top-5 that missed the playoffs entirely? Absolutely ludacris way of making your point. And the fact that teams ranked outside your top four won it 4 times out of the last 12 (1/3 of the time) speaks for itself. That whole series of stats not only fails to tell me how pitching is more important, but hardly establishes an importance on pitching.

[Emmz]

I agree that run diffential is very important too. Its NOT true that the team with the best run differential always wins because our run differential is +43, second in the ALE even though we are tied for last place.

I modified my original post to show you that although we have nearly always been in the top three in the AL in runs scored (the exception being 2006), the success of the team is related to where they were in terms of pitching relative to the rest of the AL. When our pitching is good we make the playoffs and go deep into them; when its not good, we either don't get in at all or make a quick exit.

 

Pops, you're getting it almost, but its just common sense. The team that has the run differential wins every time out. Every game, you get the most runs you win. How is this not the easiest concept to grasp? Pitching is one dimension of the game, that is it. Every game you play, you need everything going. So what if you got a shutout, what if they do too? You want an offense that can challenge an ace pitcher.

[Guest]

Emmz: check out this link. It explains it better than I can.

Bottom line: teams with good pitching (defined here as ERA+ of less than 100) won the WS only THREE TIMES in the 106 years they looked at (starting in 1903). On the other hand, teams with below average offense won the WS in over 33% of the years they looked at. Conclusion: you can have below average offense, but not below average pitching, and still hope to be a champion. Here is the most important quote:

 

What you should notice immediately is the plethora of dots above the red line which delineates an average pitching team (ERA+ of 100 or more) and a below average pitching team (ERA+ below 100). There have only been three teams in 106 chances who have won a World Series when their regular season ERA+ was less than 100. They are the 1987 Minnesota Twins, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals and the 1913 Philadelphia A’s. A team of below-average pitching has only won it all 2.83 percent of the time, which I personally find to be mind-blowing.

 

More often than not, the team that wins it all is going to land in the top right portion of the graph, which means they’ll have both good pitching and good hitting. But, a team can be below average offensively and still win it all, as 33 of the 106 winners have proven (33.02% percent).

 

I think this really hammers home the point that pitching really does win championships; that you need at least an adequate stable of arms to have a prayer. Trying to win the Fall Classic without league-average pitching has proven to be about as fruitful as attempting to drive a car without gas. You’re not going to get very far. So, if you had to choose which is more important between offense and pitching, the answer is obvious: run prevention.

 

 

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/pitching-almost-always-wins-championships/

[Guest]

Pops' date=' you're getting it almost, but its just common sense. The team that has the run differential wins every time out. Every game, you get the most runs you win. How is this not the easiest concept to grasp? Pitching is one dimension of the game, that is it. Every game you play, you need everything going. So what if you got a shutout, what if they do too? You want an offense that can challenge an ace pitcher.[/quote']

 

Most teams who win rings have both good (or at least decent) pitching. Some, about a third, have historically had below average offense and a rarely (about one team in 33) a team without good pitching can win a ring.

I see what happens to the Red Sox when their potent (usually) faces a good pitcher like Hernandez or all three Nats SP we faced. They SHUT US DOWN. We did not score runs because we faced great pitching. We must have the kind of SP who can shut them down too and try to squeeze out a victory. Once you reach the playoffs that becomes magnified.

[Guest]

Grandma, here is another article that supports my position. It deals with HOW you produce the winning run differential that you are referring to. Turns out that preventing runs (ie good pitching) is a better predictor of eventual success that producing them.

 

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/2/22/1994723/is-it-better-to-be-an-elite-run-producing-or-run-preventing-team

[Emmz]

It doesn't even say what the below-average offense goes by. Can you find out?

[Guest]

It doesn't even say what the below-average offense goes by. Can you find out?

 

It does. They use OPS+. Here is the quote:

 

I’ve pulled both the ERA+ and OPS+ for every modern World Series champion since 1903.

[Guest]

Here is one more link showing the correlation between good pitching and rings more than good hitting and rings as it relates to the Giants franchise:

 

http://www.baycityball.com/2011/03/06/sunday-graph-110-years-of-baseball/

 

Quote about the graph:

 

It’s a lot of information to take in, but I’ll just comment on a few things I found interesting.

 

* The old adage that, “Pitching wins championships” rings true for the Giants franchise. All 6 championships were brought home with teams that pitched better than league average.

Also, I do not see any championships won by the Giants with above average hitting but below average pitching.

If these references do not convince you then I give up, though I think the evidence is overwhelming. We will have to agree to disagree.

[Emmz]

Pitching is more important game-by-game than hitting. I don't think I ever disputed that, but rather that it's not all about pitching. Great pitching can amount to nothing, just like hitting. An elite pitching team always seems to miss the playoffs.

[Emmz]

Anyways, in the grand scheme it's run support and run stopping together, and if you do one miserably and the other... Uhhh, elitely... You're probably not winning anything.

 

If you can't consistently outscore your ERA, you will lose a lot.

[Guest]

Pitching is more important game-by-game than hitting. I don't think I ever disputed that' date=' but rather that it's not all about pitching. Great pitching can amount to nothing, just like hitting. An elite pitching team always seems to miss the playoffs.[/quote']

 

Pitching is not only more important game by game than hitting, its more highly correlated with winning rings. The great pitching is used to create the run differential you wrote about.

All I am saying is this: you cannot skate by with mediocre pitching and expect to win a ring very often, no matter how good your offense is. Thats simply not what these graphs show; its not true that teams like the Red Sox with mediocre pitching and overall good hitting should expect to get very far. Of course, it helps to have BOTH hitting and pitching, but given the choice, I take pitching every time because of it correlation with success at winning rings. Therefore, I think that the Red Sox need to refocus their efforts on identifying, obtaining, and retaining great young pitchers because if we don't do that we will get more of 2012....and 2011...and 2010.

[Guest]

Anyways, in the grand scheme it's run support and run stopping together, and if you do one miserably and the other... Uhhh, elitely... You're probably not winning anything.

 

If you can't consistently outscore your ERA, you will lose a lot.

 

One (pitching) has been shown in all these analyses to be MORE important, but not ALL important. Thats my point. You win nothing if you cannot score any runs.

[Emmz]

Well it doesn't account for anything but what could easily be coincidence.

 

You cannot win games without scoring a run, you can win games if you give up any number of runs, theoretically.

 

I agree that pitchers are the most valuable players when they take the field, without a doubt, but it doesn't necessarily make pitching more valuable than hitting.

[iortiz]

It's about balance. This team has been unbalanced in recent years, reason why we haven't won a PO game in 3 years, and this could be the 4th in a row.

[SCM33]

Well it doesn't account for anything but what could easily be coincidence.

 

You cannot win games without scoring a run, you can win games if you give up any number of runs, theoretically.

 

I agree that pitchers are the most valuable players when they take the field, without a doubt, but it doesn't necessarily make pitching more valuable than hitting.

 

Pitching is more valuable than hitting if you are 12-20 when Beckett and Lester start. Those guys should be winning the 2-1, 3-2, 4-3 games. They're not.

 

If they were 16-16 in their starts they would be in possesion of the 5th playoff spot.

 

If the Sox were 20-12 when Lester or Beckett start (which they should be) the Redsox would be in second place, and only 1.5 games back of the Yankees.

 

Tells you just how much those two have let us down.

[Guest]

Well it doesn't account for anything but what could easily be coincidence.

 

You cannot win games without scoring a run, you can win games if you give up any number of runs, theoretically.

 

I agree that pitchers are the most valuable players when they take the field, without a doubt, but it doesn't necessarily make pitching more valuable than hitting.

 

Coincidence over 103 years? Unlikely.

The fact of the matter is that good pitching(as measured by ERA+ at least) is more highly correlated that good hitting(as measured by OPS+) with winning the World Series. As you said earlier:

 

".... this isn't even a matter of subjectivity."

 

Bottom line as it relates to the Red Sox: unless the FO refocuses on getting us some great pitching, this team has seen its last ring in a long time.

[SCM33]

Coincidence over 103 years? Unlikely.

The fact of the matter is that good pitching(as measured by ERA+ at least) is more highly correlated that good hitting(as measured by OPS+) with winning the World Series. As you said earlier:

 

".... this isn't even a matter of subjectivity."

 

Bottom line as it relates to the Red Sox: unless the FO refocuses on getting us some great pitching, this team has seen its last ring in a long time.

 

Emmz is not wrong.

 

Look at the Atlanta Braves. What did they ever win?

 

Look at the Oakland A's. What did they ever win?

 

Look at the Joe Kerrigan pitching coach years.....the Sox were #1 in most pitching categories during those years. What did they win?

 

Redsox are terrible this year because their #1 and #2 have been significantly worse than their opponents.

[jung]

I am sure the data that has already been presented in this thread is more detailed than this but I thought it might be fun to see what the 11 year run of WS teams from 2000-2011 might suggest if anything. I used OPS for hitting and ERA for pitching as I could at least rattle off the data year by year without much trouble. Since this was a view from the 10,000 foot level for fun I thought it would be OK.

 

Of the 22 teams, only one has made it into The Show while being in the lower half of team ERA stats. The 2006 Cards finished 16th in that category and still made it to the 2006 WS, winning that WS as well. Interestingly they were 14th in hitting that year.

 

Three teams have made it to the show while being in the lower half of teams for hitting stats. The worst of those was the 2005 Houston team which came in at 22nd in hitting while being 1st in team pitching expressed as ERA.

[Guest]

Emmz is not wrong.

 

Look at the Atlanta Braves. What did they ever win?

 

Look at the Oakland A's. What did they ever win?

 

Look at the Joe Kerrigan pitching coach years.....the Sox were #1 in most pitching categories during those years. What did they win?

 

Redsox are terrible this year because their #1 and #2 have been significantly worse than their opponents.

 

Yes, she is wrong.

You are evaluating a different question. Here is the difference:

 

Question 1: Is it pitching or is it hitting that is better correlated with winning rings?

Question 2: Does good pitching guarantee a ring?

 

I am postulating only question 1, and I agree with the fact that many very good pitching teams do not win rings, probably because their offense is so poor.

Look at link #1 I provided. The scatter graph doesn't lie.

[jung]

So I thought the information about WS champions and whether historically a team could win the championship so interesting that I decided to read the entire piece from Pumps link and then all the comments and then the links from the comments. THT seems to be a place for serious statisticians so there is little that gets past them. Takes a fair amount of courage to post up data like that there as some serious folks are going to take pot shots at it.

 

At any rate the one flaw found in the data was one that is common to contemporary matrices as they normalize to 100 as average in many cases. This is true for stats like OPS+ and ERA+ but there are some variables that effect OPS+. The point is that average OPS+ for the NL is not the same as it is for the AL and it is not 100 in either case. It is about 99 in the AL probably skewed by inter-league play and more like 93-94 for the NL as a consequence of pitchers continuing to hit in the NL (no DH) combined with inter-league play. As it turns out the guy might have been able to used Runs and Runs Allowed (RA) but starting all over again not even sure if that would have worked out better and tossing away all of the data he had already compiled made no sense to him. Using what he had, he still had work to do though to account for the use of the DH in the AL, the continuation of pitchers batting in the NL and inter-league play. The skewing of OPS+ between the two leagues made for variances in that nice tidy little graph that uses ERA+ and OPS+ as the X and Y axis. Normalizing for 100 as average for ERA+ is valid for this purpose. It is only issues with OPS+ that creates complications with the data as originally presented.

 

That forced the guy that put all that data together to unravel NL from AL post DH and AL pre DH data, reproduce the data and then put it all back together again using the segregated post DH, and pre DH AL data and the all time NL data for championship teams.

 

The result was still telling and favored the view that pitching was more important than hitting in the effort to win a championship but the line was not as starkly drawn as it was presented in the original data.

 

Much like the original data suggested, having both good pitching and good hitting made winning the championship easier than only having one or the other. Again the data did support pitching being more important than hitting when you did have only one or the other.

 

Here is the most important elements of the revised data. 13 of 106 championship winners have been able to win the championship with teams that featured below average hitting for an 11.76%. Only 2 of 106 champions have managed to win the championship with teams that featured below average pitching for a 2.86%.

 

The rest of the champions featured both above average pitching and above average hitting.

 

Still and all that is not an insignificant variance in the cut between teams with above average hitting vs. teams with above average pitching.

 

The next step in the process for anyone with the courage to take on the data processing task involved would be to sort for those features of a team and break out the data for winning the division and/or getting through the regular season, qualifying for the post season and then getting through the post season and making it into the World Series.

 

While the modifications to the graphs make the data much more accurate, the data processing task is far more daunting as anyone that wishes to do it has to again unravel the post DH and pre DH, AL data from the total NL data to take into account the difference in average OPS+ between the AL and the NL and then put it all back together again drawing from the data that had been processed separately, AL post DH, AL pre DH and NL, total and has to do it for multiple seasons. That is now a huge undertaking given the amount of data one would have to process to pull it together for success in the regular season (measured by making it into the post season) and then success in getting to the World Series (measured by getting through both the divisional and league championship rounds). In this case the addition of the DH rule in the AL plus inter-league play makes this a much more complicated process involving much more data processing to get a result. However the result achieved would be both accurate and meaningful as teams tend to build for the 162 regular season with an eye to the features they will need to win in the post season.

 

I would not at all be surprised to see somebody take the task on regardless of how hard it will be as parsing these two variables of team performance is at least as interesting if not more for getting to the WS as it is for winning it.

[Lionbush]

So I thought the information about WS champions and whether historically a team could win the championship so interesting that I decided to read the entire piece from Pumps link and then all the comments and then the links from the comments. THT seems to be a place for serious statisticians so there is little that gets past them. Takes a fair amount of courage to post up data like that there as some serious folks are going to take pot shots at it.

 

At any rate the one flaw found in the data was one that is common to contemporary matrices as they normalize to 100 as average in many cases. This is true for stats like OPS+ and ERA+ but there are some variables that effect OPS+. The point is that average OPS+ for the NL is not the same as it is for the AL and it is not 100 in either case. It is about 99 in the AL probably skewed by inter-league play and more like 93-94 for the NL as a consequence of pitchers continuing to hit in the NL (no DH) combined with inter-league play. As it turns out the guy might have been able to used Runs and Runs Allowed (RA) but starting all over again not even sure if that would have worked out better and tossing away all of the data he had already compiled made no sense to him. Using what he had, he still had work to do though to account for the use of the DH in the AL, the continuation of pitchers batting in the NL and inter-league play. The skewing of OPS+ between the two leagues made for variances in that nice tidy little graph that uses ERA+ and OPS+ as the X and Y axis. Normalizing for 100 as average for ERA+ is valid for this purpose. It is only issues with OPS+ that creates complications with the data as originally presented.

 

That forced the guy that put all that data together to unravel NL from AL post DH and AL pre DH data, reproduce the data and then put it all back together again using the segregated post DH, and pre DH AL data and the all time NL data for championship teams.

 

The result was still telling and favored the view that pitching was more important than hitting in the effort to win a championship but the line was not as starkly drawn as it was presented in the original data.

 

Much like the original data suggested, having both good pitching and good hitting made winning the championship easier than only having one or the other. Again the data did support pitching being more important than hitting when you did have only one or the other.

 

Here is the most important elements of the revised data. 13 of 106 championship winners have been able to win the championship with teams that featured below average hitting for an 11.76%. Only 2 of 106 champions have managed to win the championship with teams that featured below average pitching for a 2.86%.

 

The rest of the champions featured both above average pitching and above average hitting.

 

Still and all that is not an insignificant variance in the cut between teams with above average hitting vs. teams with above average pitching.

 

The next step in the process for anyone with the courage to take on the data processing task involved would be to sort for those features of a team and break out the data for winning the division and/or getting through the regular season, qualifying for the post season and then getting through the post season and making it into the World Series.

 

While the modifications to the graphs make the data much more accurate, the data processing task is far more daunting as anyone that wishes to do it has to again unravel the post DH and pre DH, AL data from the total NL data to take into account the difference in average OPS+ between the AL and the NL and then put it all back together again drawing from the data that had been processed separately, AL post DH, AL pre DH and NL, total and has to do it for multiple seasons. That is now a huge undertaking given the amount of data one would have to process to pull it together for success in the regular season (measured by making it into the post season) and then success in getting to the World Series (measured by getting through both the divisional and league championship rounds). In this case the addition of the DH rule in the AL plus inter-league play makes this a much more complicated process involving much more data processing to get a result. However the result achieved would be both accurate and meaningful as teams tend to build for the 162 regular season with an eye to the features they will need to win in the post season.

 

I would not at all be surprised to see somebody take the task on regardless of how hard it will be as parsing these two variables of team performance is at least as interesting if not more for getting to the WS as it is for winning it.

 

That's pretty much what I thought but presented in a more technical way.

 

A top pitching rotation will mean that generally you need less runs to win games. A below average one means you will generally need to score more. So if you were to have one or the other then it would be pitching he sets the tone as to what the batting order needs to do to win the game.

 

Ideally an above average ERA across the whole pitching rotation and a productive run output will mean you will win more than you lose.

[wyo-sox]

If I'm reading all this correctly it sounds like the best way to win is to score more runs then the opposing team.

[Bellhorn04]

If I'm reading all this correctly it sounds like the best way to win is to score more runs then the opposing team.

 

That's right. But why say it in 10 words when we can say it in 10,000?

[a700hitter]

That's right. But why say it in 10 words when we can say it in 10' date='000? [/quote']I respect the statistical analysis and the work that goes into it. It was interesting to read. However, it seems like a lot of effort to show us what is clear to anyone who is not completely blinded by their fandom. The 2012 Red Sox team is a real long shot to make a run at the Championship. The only reason they have any shot at all is because of this stupid second wild card team. Our pitching stinks and our best/highest paid hitter is in a power outage. I don't need stats to prove this to me. I take the same view of statistics as Vin Scully does. I have often quoted him here on this issue:

 

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

[jung]

I tend to agree with you 700 but then you are confronted with the "there is no statistical data to support that argument" crowd which leads directly to the "we can hit our way" out of having the 21st best pitching overall and 27th best starting pitching in baseball debate or the "our starting pitchers are really not that bad" discussion. This for a bunch of stiffs that lived on easy street for about six weeks of the season barely having to face an actual team of major league hitters and were even for that period beginning to give up runs right in the first inning, burying our own offensive efforts before they could even finish tying their shoe laces.

 

We have watched an endless string of games where our pitchers particularly our starters just lay nothing pitch after nothing pitch right down main street for 1-2 innings until they finally get into a groove for lets say about 2-3 innings and then begin to fade from their exertions for another 2 innings before dragging their sorry asses back to the showers. That now I guess can be argued is a "good outing". Well that compilation of good outings has now landed the starters at 27th in all ML baseball. So I guess we have to accept the fact that 26 other team starters have more good outings than these bums. That includes the teams with weak offenses that just handed us our heads for 5 out of 7 games out West. Sure our lack of timely hitting showed up more in those games and our porous defense showed up more in those games as well but the fact remains that their pitchers controlled our hitters better than our pitchers controlled theirs as weak as they were as team offenses.

 

As I have said before all hitters are mistake hitters. If pitchers were to make no mistakes, hitters would starve to death.

 

Lets not forget the esteemed coach McClure who I guess we can say CAN find his own ass with two hands and a hunting dog because it is always planted right there on the bench.

[Guest]

If I'm reading all this correctly it sounds like the best way to win is to score more runs then the opposing team.

 

I think that Emmz is right: run differential IS the most important factor associated with success on the field. Thats really pretty simple. What is not so simple to grasp is that how you produce that differential is not intuitive. Turns out that preventing runs through great pitching is a more important variable than trying to load up on the offense and score as many runs as possible. That is what is very well documented (though as Jung stated, further refinements could make it even more accurate) in the analysis that was done.

This is where the Red Sox have fallen down. They have certainly loaded up on hitting and are generally one of the top run scoring teams (and OPS teams) in baseball year after year. Our FO has seen to it that we have plenty of offense. They have identified, signed, and retained the players to make that happen. I believe that they have tried to identify good pitching too, but have been unsuccessful in doing so. The guys they have signed to long term contracts simply are not that good. The solution is to fire the individuals whose job it is to secure good pitching and hire people who are better at it. Cherington and Lucchino are part of the group who has a history of failure in this regard. I do not think they are capable of identifying good pitchers (though they are very good at signing mediocre ones). Nothing is going to change until those two are gone.....IMO.

[Bellhorn04]

I tend to agree with you 700 but then you are confronted with the "there is no statistical data to support that argument" crowd which leads directly to the "we can hit our way" out of having the 21st best pitching overall and 27th best starting pitching in baseball debate or the "our starting pitchers are really not that bad" discussion. This for a bunch of stiffs that lived on easy street for about six weeks of the season barely having to face an actual team of major league hitters and were even for that period beginning to give up runs right in the first inning, burying our own offensive efforts before they could even finish tying their shoe laces.

 

We have watched an endless string of games where our pitchers particularly our starters just lay nothing pitch after nothing pitch right down main street for 1-2 innings until they finally get into a groove for lets say about 2-3 innings and then begin to fade from their exertions for another 2 innings before dragging their sorry asses back to the showers. That now I guess can be argued is a "good outing". Well that compilation of good outings has now landed the starters at 27th in all ML baseball. So I guess we have to accept the fact that 26 other team starters have more good outings than these bums. That includes the teams with weak offenses that just handed us our heads for 5 out of 7 games out West. Sure our lack of timely hitting showed up more in those games and our porous defense showed up more in those games as well but the fact remains that their pitchers controlled our hitters better than our pitchers controlled theirs as weak as they were as team offenses.

 

As I have said before all hitters are mistake hitters. If pitchers were to make no mistakes, hitters would starve to death.

 

Lets not forget the esteemed coach McClure who I guess we can say CAN find his own ass with two hands and a hunting dog because it is always planted right there on the bench.

 

Ha ha...good stuff, jung. I have to say the Yankee series certainly straightened me out about the state of our starting pitching. It is indeed horrible. Beckett and Lester were brutal enough to convince me that this season is basically down the tubes. If they were ever going to step up, this was the time. Instead Beckett set the tone for the series by giving up an instant five-spot.

 

The only thing I would quibble on is that I think good hitters do get some of their hits on pitches that aren't mistakes. They might be 'strategic' mistakes but I mean pitches that are thrown exactly like the pitcher intended, but get whacked. Some of those would be pitches where the hitter guesses right on what's coming.