Short Week: The Stupid Baseball Hypothetical I've Chewed On For a Decade
this is probably not as interesting as I think it is
This is the fourth post in (the first annual?) Short Week at freddiedeboer.substack.com. Since people constantly complain that my stuff is too long, this week all posts will be 500 words or less. We will return to our usual longwinded ways next week.
In the early 2010s I was in a sim baseball league for a few years. A sim league is not a fantasy league; fantasy leagues are based on real-life results, while sim leagues use nerdy computer programs to simulate every pitch of a baseball season. You assemble a team through a draft or auction, trade players and call them up from the minors, and can choose some basic strategies. After that the computer sims the results one game at a time. This was a massive undertaking - we had major league, AAA, and single A rosters to manage - and after a few seasons I gave my team over to somebody else who liked getting into the weeds more than I did. (Despite getting Mike Trout, Nolan Arenado, and Francisco Lindor as prospects through my savvy GMing.) I realized at some point that staring bleary eyed at a spreadsheet to find Vincente Padilla’s WHIP wasn’t actually fun, for me, where it seemed very fun for others. So I stopped playing. These days I barely follow baseball so it was for the best.
But I did think about baseball a lot in those days, and I dreamed up a hypothetical that’s probably not very clever but that I think about all the time. Here’s the scenario:
Imagine a pitcher who gives up one and only one run in every inning in which he appears.
That’s really it. If we must add a little more, I’ll note that this run can be either earned or unearned if you’re bringing him on in relief. Let’s call him replacement-level at batting for a pitcher. He has a rubber arm and can pitch as many innings as you want, again always surrendering a single run each inning. So: how valuable is he?
In a traditional sense, he’s pretty damn bad. He’d have an ERA somewhere near 9, depending on whether batters are on base when he gets up, which is more than 3 runs worse than the worst ERA in MLB in 2021. As a starter? This past season the team with the highest runs per game, the Houston Cheaters, only scored 5.41 runs per game, so trotting him out there seems like a really bad idea. And yet he’s situationally one of the most useful relievers I can imagine; what manager would not be thrilled to know that he can guarantee only giving up one run in a crucial inning? Also, in any game in which the team leads by more runs than there are innings remaining victory is guaranteed. And he’s an innings-eater.
What’s interesting is that I have posed this question to many serious baseball fans and gotten very different answers. Some argue that he’s not worthy of a roster spot; some say that he’s a borderline All Star. This is most likely not a very clever scenario, but still - what do you think?
Would managers be aware of this pitcher’s “talent” or would it be seen as a weird coincidence?
In any case he would be immensely valuable. Good bullpens shorten games, and with the right lead he would do that on his own.
I think it's interesting! I would need to dig in data, but I would want to know: what is the average lowest number of innings pitched by a pitcher who is on the team for a full season. For example, is it reasonable to have a pitcher on a team who will only pitch 50 innings a year. Then, I would want to know for the average team, how often do the situations you laid out (eg. having a greater lead than remaining innings, scoring more than 9 runs in a game, etc.) occur, what are the total number of innings across all those situations, and is it larger than that average number of innings. If so, then it seems like it would be a valuable pitcher to have situationally.