New Discovery: Scoring More Runs Is Good!

Which would you rather your team did, score an extra 12 runs every 11 days or an extra seven runs every 11 days?

Ha, trick question! Because to get this question right, you have to know something that isn't in the question.

Without this extra bit of information, Major League managers, players and broadcasters -- particularly that last group -- are getting this question wrong.

What you have to know is that scoring runs is good. Scoring more is better. Ha, I didn't mention that the first time!

And so, three times this weekend, I heard broadcasters rhapsodizing about how a batter had "sacrificed his batting average" in order to hit a ground ball to the right side that moved a runner from second to third. The phrase in quotes is from Don Sutton, a Braves announcer who pitched during the '60s and sometimes sounds like he's still there. 

The is no valor in sacrificing a runner to third. It is simply dumb.

On average, with a runner on second and none out, teams plate 1.083 (more) runs. ("More" because the team might have already scored.) With a runner on third and one out, they score, on average .94 runs. Don, that's fewer runs. Hitting to the right side to trade an out for a base diminishes a team's ability to score runs.

It's even worse with one out. Teams reduce by nearly half their run-scoring ability by trading a second out for advancing a runner to third. The advantage gained by the ability to score from third on an out is more than wiped out by all the lost possibilities that sacrificing an out derails.

Two caveats: 
1. All this assumes average players all around. Obviously, a pitcher should try to hit to the right side. So should a weak #8 hitter if a good pinch hitter waits on deck. 
2. There's nothing wrong with hitting to the right side. Making an out -- in any direction -- is where the screws loosen.

But suppose your team just needs one run? You're tied in the bottom of the ninth. Or in extra innings. Or the pitchers are dominating and one run is worth its weight in gold.* That's a different story. In that case, moving the runner to third with no one out adds a run every 25 opportunities. It's more or less a wash. But with one out it still reduces the chances from 42% to 27%.

*Runs are abstract concepts without weight, even on, like, Jupiter. Better they should be worth their number of letters in gold. Or their game score influence, though I don't know how to translate that into avoirdupois. So forget the whole thing. Runs are really important in that situation, whatever one we were talking about...

The upshot: it's generally a stupid move. Hit to the right with a runner on second, sure, but not at the expense of trying to reach base safely. Unless you're the Padres, in which case your team's goal is evidently to score fewer runs.

Earl Weaver, Sabermetrician

Sabermetrics lost its grandfather this week. 

Earl Weaver, who died this week at age 82, was in many ways the first sabermetrician. Weaver employed, and later elucidated, strategies now supported by voluminous research from the SABR community.

Weaver didn't know VORP or the run expectancy matrix. He had his own innate vision of the game that transcended its time.

Weaver wove his strategies, a particular human resources style and good players to a .583 winning percentage over 17 years, four pennants and a 1970 World Championship.

More specifically, Weaver was the first -- or the first to enunciate -- the following philosophy: because a team has a small and finite number of outs per game, an out is precious and avoiding outs is the key to success.

These rules were the cornerstone of his managerial career and he won 1400+ games using them:

• A home run is the fastest way to score a run.
• Obvious corollary: get players who hit home runs.
• If you play for one run, that's all you'll get.
• Obvious corollary: don't play for one run unless that's all you need.
• Conserve your 27 outs at all costs.
• Obvious corollary: on-base percentage is more important than batting average. (Put another way, walks are very important.) 
• Defense matters.

 As a result of these insights, now confirmed by objective analysis, Weaver hardly attempted a sacrifice unless the pitcher or Mark Belanger (lifetime .582 OPS) was batting. He urged his hitters to take pitches and railed at his pitchers for allowing walks. He limited steal attempts. He used his best relief pitchers in the highest-leverage situations. (To be fair, everyone did back then, but he would still be exercising that strategy even in the age of the sub-optimal bullpen paradigm.) He didn't give speedy out-makers the most opportunities to make outs by batting them at the top of his lineup.

Earl Weaver's valedictory managerial season came in 1986 -- his first and only losing season. Twenty-six years later, half of today's managers and nearly the entire cadre of reporters covering the game know less about it than he did then.