Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Pitching is Over Rated?

Jackie Blue sends this outrage.

Pavitt found hitting accounts for more than 45% of teams' winning records, fielding for 25% and pitching for 25%. And, the impact of stolen bases is greatly overestimated.

He crunched hitting, pitching, fielding and base-stealing records for every MLB team over a 48-year period from 1951-1998 with a method no other researcher has used in this area. In statistical parlance, he used a conceptual decomposition of offense and defense into its component parts and then analyzed recombinations of the parts in intuitively meaningful ways.


Well, as long as it's "intuitively meaningful," right? Charlie is a professor of Communication. Me? I "intuitively doubtful."

4 comments:

PeeDub said...

No, that's about right.

Hitting: 50%
Pitching/fielding: 50%

I've always seen fielding be closer to about 15%, but it's not a ridiculous result.

Mungowitz said...

wasn't objecting to conclusion.

objecting to the idea that a Communications Prof has invented a truly new and intuitive statistical technique.

To someone who knows nothing, a LOT of things seem like "inventions." "Look, I can take this and combine it with this. I'll call it... adding!" "Genius!" "Communicating!"

Simon Spero said...

I think he's applying PCA to sabermetrics

Pelsmin said...

Wait -- if hitting is 45% of winning, then doesn't keeping the other team from hitting (aka pitching and fielding) count as 45%? Just sayin'.

Maybe I should leave statistics to the experts too.