You think?

Oh I don’t know. It’s not such a unique analysis as to reach that conclusion. This numbers are one of the features available on baseball-reference.com, and so it’s a natural topic to come across.

Because I cannot rec him at the ABJ, I am reccing the author here.

well, awesome. I am glad to hear the Beacon is keeping to high standards. Good job tracking this one down Jay.

Thanks for coming by

Thanks for your comment!

Hi Pat,

Good of you to come by and comment on this.

I have to confess, though, that I don’t quite get the connection between your central thesis (at least in the section in question) and the data that you choose to report. I take your main point to be something like, “The pitching is bad, sure, but the team is scoring at bad times, and is giving the team fewer chances of winning than it should given the overall run output”. But the majority of the numbers you cite take runs scored as a given, and ask how often the team wins…. It seems to me that that’s an examination of the pitching, almost exclusively. You compare these winning percentages to the league, but that only shows how bad the pitching is — it doesn’t say anything about the hitting. You write, “the Indians look like a team that hits when things are good and can’t come up with a clutch hit when things are tough,” but I don’t see how the data you include supports that claim.

We discussed this a few weeks ago in this thread, and found that, overall, teams score 3 runs or fewer about 41% of the time — right around how often the Indians do (actually slightly more). Now, you might argue that a team that scores more runs overall than most teams should have a lower rate of scoring 3 or fewer, and this might be a fair point, but the only thing demonstrated by the fact that this isn’t really true is that much of the offense’s excess output comes when they’ve already scored several runs. It doesn’t indicate that the team is any less likely than average to “come up with a clutch hit when things are tough”.

In that other thread I linked, I looked at whether the Indians scoring was more extreme than average, and found that it was, somewhat, but not enough more to reject the hypothesis that the difference is largely due to random variation. Granted, this was a few series ago, so things may have changed, but you don’t cite the relevant league comparisons to know whether they have. You write, “The Indians are scoring an average number of runs just less than 30 percent of the time.” I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to show with this. I’m not even sure whether you take this to be a high number of a low number (I’m guessing low). But again, you don’t cite league averages, and I, for one, don’t have any ready intuition to guess what the league rate of scoring 4-6 would be. I guess if your intuition is that this is a particularly low number, then it does suggest that the team tends to score in a feast or famine way, but it seems like it would have been easy to give a comparison, which you do in several other places, as an indictment of the team’s run prevention.

I’ll give you this one: “[T]he pitchers also have thrown 48 games when they’ve given up five runs or fewer … [T]he Indians are 27-21, a win-loss percentage of .563 that seems decent only until you realize the league average is .729.” That’s actually a relevant comparison (though it feels somewhat tacked on at the end).

I don’t mean to pounce on you after you come here so graciously, but the notion that the Indians “can’t hit in the clutch” is a prevalent one — and I certainly get that subjective impression sometimes watching their games — but perpetuating it while citing irrelevant (or at best only tangentially relevant) data isn’t providing a useful service. You are right to point out that just looking at total runs, or average runs per game, can be deceiving, but you don’t correct this oversimplification in a useful way, in my opinion (with the exception mentioned in the previous paragraph).

Given the length and nature of this comment, it seems appropriate to end by saying:

Just my two cents. No offense.

Very cool. Good on him for actually taking the time to come here and clear that up.

Thanks for stopping by! I believe you.

Pat, thanks for stopping by. I did read your article, but I didn’t think anything of it as it related to my post. As said above, these numbers are pretty readily available, so all I did was pull the numbers down, run a couple of pivot tables, and do some quick math. Nothing revolutionary. I had posted some of those numbers a few weeks ago and just wanted to see how bad they looked now.

Again, I didn’t have any problems with it. Now, about those conclusions you reached… ;)

Many thanks to you and Geoff for such a swift and final clarification.

I am convinced. Thanks for stopping by

I’m convinced.

Geoff, thanks for the post. As I said above, there’s no issues here. When I was reading Pat’s post above and he referenced a different spelling, I thought that you might be the guy who Terry Pluto often attributes data or information to. Yep, sure thing. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for stopping by — though it’s an interesting defense to say, “I couldn’t have plagiarized it, because I would never read your blog.” Right back atcha, buddy.

Feel free to stay and hang out during your convalescence, and I hope you’re feeling better soon.

I thought the same thing you did.

One person, actually.

I am accusing two people of using the subject line. Posterity will decide which is the more serious crime.