FanPost

Why Teahen Should Have Pulled the Ball The Other Night: With Lessons from Sabermetrics, Poker and Dickens Thrown In: Part 1

I ran into something of a turd-storm yesterday with my post "The Season In Microcosm", which consisted of a review of the Mark Teahen at-bat in the 7th inning of the opening game of the Royals/Orioles series.

Avid fans of my posts may recall that I asserted the (I thought) fairly sound point that the slap-hitting Teahen should have resisted the temptation to engage in yet more slap-hitting (yes, yes, I know Teahen has a whopping six more home runs than Willie Bloomquist, and two more than Das Boot, I've done the research, I know these things), and instead should have attempted to pull the ball in order to "move the runner over." I also thought it interesting that even Ryan LeFebvre and Frank White could not hide their disgust over Teahen's at-bat. And, because context is everything, I also thought it important for the Royals to get "a" run, rather than trying to "score in bunches," like the Chiefs used to do, or something.

One commenter got so mad about these conclusions he told me I didn't belong in this this little corner of cyberspace. Others weren't happy either, but seemed willing to reign in their Inner Stalin over the matter.

And all that got me to googling, which led to the following succinct statement of why Old Schoolers like me might seem out in left field, so to speak:

"Those familiar with the baseball philosophy known as sabermetrics will probably have heard or read that followers of this strategy consider the 27 outs to be a team’s most indispensible asset. So do the numbers support giving away an out in order to move a runner over? A casual baseball fan would probably say yes. If a runner is on third base, it seems simple for the batter to get him home with a sacrifice fly or a hit. However, contrary to what many fans and baseball managers seem to think, this is not the case at all...In brief, you can expect to score around 20% more runs when you have no outs and a runner on 1st than if you have 1 out and a runner on 2nd. More relevant even, you can expect to score 15% more runs with no outs and a runner on 2nd than if you have 1 out and a runner on 3rd, and nearly 40% more runs with 1 out and a runner on 2nd than with 2 outs and a runner on 3rd! These trends hold up when multiple runners are on as well. Simply put, the real life numbers do not support this conventional small ball philosophy."

Who would have guessed it--on average, you can score 15% more runs with a runner on 2nd and no outs than if you have one out and a runner on 3rd. So out of every 10 runs scored by playing small ball, you can score 11.5 playing non-small ball. On average. This is a statistical lesson from sabermetrics.

But let us not forget an entirely different lesson about statistics: as the adage goes, statistics are like bikinis; what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. I have never seen Billy Bulter (the baserunner during the Teahen at bat) in a bikini, but have reason to doubt it's a pretty sight. His nickname is Pudge, after all. Which is another way of saying that the junk in his particular trunk makes him a slower baserunner than most. As one wag said about him last year, there is "larceny in Butler's heart, but his feet [are] honest...Butler still is enrolled in Baserunning 101." Amen. Still enrolled, in fact, as is the rest of the Royals' squad. In any event, and without taking a stopwatch to him, I think it can fairly be said that Pudge, despite his many solid attributes, is slow.

Slow enough to take that 15% number referenced above and cut it in half, wouldn't you say? In all seriousness, is 50% a fair discount on the 15%, given the particular circumstances?

But, don't forget, Butler's footspeed is only part of the equation.

[Next up: What Poker Players might say about all of this.]

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.