The Big Inning

by steincat on May 22, 2008 4:23 PM EDT

Ok -

I tried to go and model what was being discussed in a thread a couple days ago, and had been mentioned by DiaTriber.

Basically, the idea is that the Indians are struggling because they bunch their runs in just a few innings, and don't score otherwise. This seems to bear out in the data and I tried to depict it graphically. The red triangles indicated a Winning Percentage of .550 or greater.

via i284.photobucket.com

The chart essentially maps out two things:

X-axis: Number of innings with 4+ runs / Total number of innings played

Y-axis: Number of runs scored in innings with at least 4 runs scored / Total number of runs scored

The extreme would be if you scored all of your runs for the whole season in one inning, you would be in the upper left hand corner and would not win many games. However, if you scored 4+ runs consistently in bunches over and over again, let's call it being good at having a "Big Inning" then you would be towards the upper right hand corner.

I think it's clear that the majority of the teams that are winning their games (red triangle is a W-L % of greater than .550) are able to have the "Big Inning" more often than the rest of the league. They have a greater proportion of their innings, and a greater number of total runs, that are generated in big innings.

The Indians are generating big innings, but they are clearly concentrated in a smaller number of innings than is being demonstrated for clubs that are successful thus far. The Indians are also 24th in the majors in runs scored, so their absolute number of runs is much smaller than, say the Cubs or Red Sox, who are scoring 250+ runs total so far (compared with 186 for the Indians).

I guess this goes without saying, but if the Indians can move towards the right, that means that they'll be stringing together more "Big Innings", which should be plenty to get them wins if the pitching stays consistent.

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One other comment:

When you sort the data by total runs, you end up seeing really how disproportionate the Indians scoring has been.

Considering the 11 MLB teams that have scored less than 200 runs, the Indians have scored 4+ runs in 2.71% of their innings, and this accounts for 30.11% of the total runs.

The average for this group of 11 is 1.8% and 19.5% respectively. So the Indians are a very different team than the rest of the under-achievers in the league, in terms of bunching their runs together.

by steincat on May 22, 2008 4:37 PM EDT reply actions

I think the problem here is that the Indians don’t score runs, not that they bunch them. The data in your table indicate that the Indians are sort of average in terms of the number of “big innings they have.” They’ve got 11 (for 56 total runs), which looks about the median for the league as a whole in both cases. But, this represents a large % of total runs not because they have many big innings, but because they have so many innings where they don’t score at all. If they scored 5 runs all season, all in one inning, it would look like they “bunched their runs.” True, but misleading.

by peter m on May 22, 2008 4:49 PM EDT reply actions

It’s been a long time since my last statistics class, but I think there’s a small problem here. Your two variables are not independent; I think you would find that they are significantly correlated. That is, all other things being equal, the more “big innings” you have, the higher % of total runs will come from those innings. It’s misleading to draw conclusions from the interaction of two variables that are interdependent.

"A good body with a dull brain is as cheap as life itself."

by Fiddlesticks on May 22, 2008 5:00 PM EDT reply actions

Yeah – I’m out of practice with stats, so you may be right. But I’m not so sure.

If you can space out so that you’re scoring a large number of your total runs over a large number of innings, you end up in Cubs territory. That seems like a good thing to me.

If you score a ton of runs in a fewer percentage of your total innings (towards Indians territory), that seems like a bad thing to me.

So the progression of the datapoints will trend from the Left-hand corner to the Right-hand corner, but it is better to be further up, and to the right than it is to be up, and to the left. But if this thinking is flawed, then I apologize.

by steincat on May 22, 2008 5:27 PM EDT up reply actions