Sunday diversion / good baseball numbers

use your power for good, not for evil (or boredom)
Baseball stat geeks are sometimes boring, sometimes stupid as well as trivial (as in “Johnny Littlebat is hitting .350 in Tuesday day games, but at .180 he can’t buy a hit in Friday night games”), and sometimes fascinating. Asking questions and parsing data that bears on a question, perhaps finding an answer, perhaps merely identifying outliers. In this, they are not unlike people who play with (or abuse) sales data from the Manhattan residential real estate market, but this is a no-real-estate-content post, so I will leave that to another day.

I love this May 17 piece on SBNation by Jeff Sullivan about a surly phenom who is almost as dangerous to himself with a bat in his hands as to opposing pitchers. For fans of Readers Digest, the question is why are pitchers (seemingly) pitching to Bryce Harper differently than they have to other highly touted young hitters? and the provisional answer is that they have more respect (fear) of him than of other young hitters. The basic data are rates of fastballs and off-speed pitches, and I highly recommend the piece of that sort of question and that sort of data set may be of interest.

And the highly literate readers who comment on SBNation (not the right word, but you know what I mean) plumb the topic and force Sullivan to add some detail in response. Note, especially, the small sample dialogue and the maybe-they-faced-more-breaking-ball-pitchers hypothesis, bit of which seem to be well handled by Sullivan.

And in other news … go (young) Pacers! go (old) Spurs!

© Sandy Mattingly 2012