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.
Houston is not my team but signals stealing isn't something others haven't done. I don't believe they deserve the appellation. Red Sox Apple watch steals pretty bad. So if anyone gets to be the "Cheaters"--Red Sox.
Hmmmm I could see this pitcher being valuable when you have a comfortable lead. Up by 4 runs with 3 innings left? Sure, go for it. He might also be useful in the 9th inning if you're up by 2 or more runs. You can save your very best "lights out" pitchers for another day.
He's very obviously a must-roster player as a reliever. Starting him is stupid, but if run difference - innings remaining > 0 he's an auto-win. This is helpful from a traditional "we win" standpoint and also from a rest standpoint. None of your actually good playefs would have to play or try those innings. Winning a game in four innings is simply worth more in a long-teem sense than winning in nine, and that's what Mr. Consistent provides.
I would say that pitcher would be very valuable, probably about as much as a very good reliever middle of the rotation starting pitcher. I'd assume that pitcher probably pitches 50-60 times a year in situations with the lead. Looking at MLB games over time, it seems like a team with a two run lead in the ninth or a three run lead in the eighth on average has about a 93% chance of winning the game. Given some leads are larger than that, I'd say that pitcher could boost your probability of winning from 95 to 100% 50-60 times a year. That gets to me to that pitcher being worth about a very good (but not quite) reliever or about a 4th starter.
What's super interesting about this hypothetical is that it cleaves the joints of most sabermetric analysis, which basically assumes axiomatically that you can't control WHEN runs are scored, just the total number (I'm oversimplifying, but just a bit). Because baseball players emphatically don't work that way, no one has developed a good sense of how to value it.
I think the value here is mostly that this player can guarantee victory from 2 run leads in the ninth, 3 run leads in the eighth, and 4 run leads in the seventh, so teams could consistently outperform their run differentials. The catch is I think these are situations where the home team is usually going to win, anyway, so the value of a guarantee is limited. OTOH, I could see that being worth 1-2 wins per year, which is considered to be a lot for a reliever. I suspect the player would be worth rostering, but not HUGELY valuable.
If this player really could be called on at any time, any number of days in a row, he’d keep accumulating (1 - current win probability) every appearance when put in to win the game, so I could see that adding up to 2 or 3 wins over the course of a 162 game season.
Of course, both the durability and consistency of this thought experiment are not very realistic. But if! If such a player existed I think they would have significant value.
My immediate instinct is that he’d have some value but not much. Two questions:
1. Does this include inherited runners? If you send him into the middle of an inning with the bases loaded and he lets the runner from third score, that run is not charged to him. If he allows a grand slam he only allowed one run but four runs score.
2. Picking up on that, what if he pitches fractional innings? If you send him out for an inning and a third will he allow one run or two? If you only send him out to get one out per game, will he allow one run exactly every third game?
If he inherits runners, he lets the lead one score and then invariably gets the rest out. In any fractional inning in which he appears he surrenders exactly one run - that is, while he is on the mound, one and only one player will score. If you put him in for one out in the 7th and one out in the 8th he allows one run to score in both innings. So his ERA can technically rise by more than one run an inning but he never surrenders more than one run in any given inning.
I love imagining the logistics of this hypothetical pitcher. Like, every single time he comes in for an inning with no one on base, his first pitch is taken deep by even the meekest of hitters for a violent, towering 550 foot home run. Then there are three soft groundouts and the inning is over.
Ah well in that first case he’s immensely valuable, no? If every time the bases are loaded I can guarantee we’ll only allow one run that’s huge. Expected runs with bases loaded no outs is like 2.5 or so, with one out it’s 1.5.
I agree with most people that he is worth a roster spot, but will not be a great player. His value is in the innings he saves other pitchers from having to appear. And because he probably saves you a bullpen spot (i.e., his team can carry 11 pitchers instead of 12), it allows you more general freedom in roster construction.
He is not just valuable in games where his team's lead exceeds the number of innings remaining. He is also valuable in games that you are already losing badly. If his team is losing 8-0 after two innings, you can have him pitch the final six or seven innings (depending on if his team is the home or visitors), because there is no difference between losing 8-2 and 15-2. You will not have to dip into the bullpen to have guys pitch meaningless innings in a blowout because Rubber Arm will do it. It will keep your other bullpen arms fresher and help reduce overuse injuries with your pitchers.
I'm completely inline with everyone else's opinion that this is a very valuable player. So I'll just note that I didn't think Freddie could get any cooler but these baseball sim league revelations definitely do that, and I will lurk until we get the thread about how many other people stopped following baseball in the last decade. Because wow has it gotten terrible.
The short version is that teams finally embraced the optimal way to play. Unfortunately, the optimal way to play is boring as dirt and takes forever. So games are incredibly long and almost no action occurs. Any thoughts about improving that are viciously fought by the teams and a loud cohort of "purist" fans who want no changes even though the game is unrecognizable from how it was even 20 years ago (when about twice as many people watched).
Super short version is: weak leadership and misaligned incentives leads to organizational failure.
I stopped following in 2009-ish. I say this as someone who loved Bill James and early Baseball Prospectus: analysis got too scientific and following the game got boring. If you can't have fun spirited debates about a sport, it's much less fun, and WAR is both incomprehensible and a debate killer. When I was a kid baseball felt like a mysterious, poetic part of the American experience, but now it just feels like a math exam.
But there are a million other reasons for why I'll never get back into it -- it was helpful background noise for the age of fewer distractions, but now phones serve that purpose; there are too many dang games; the games last too dang long; friends stopped following so that removes incentive to get back into it; etc
Very similar to me. Not only has SABRmetrics killed the game but it's killed talking about the game. My theory is that the early Bill James/Baseball Prospectus stuff was generally smart people who were good with reason trying to find better ways to discuss the game.
Now, it's just people who take these stats (especially WAR) and think they're the be all, end all. I follow Bill James on Twitter and he'll ask stuff like "which player do you think was better?" and half the responses are just people posting their WARs. It's ridiculous and where's the fun in any of that?
despite all that i still believe there's something essentially poetic and mystic about baseball. i'm a giants fan and this season one of our crucial wins over the dodgers came on a blown check swing call (called ball four to walk in a run when our batter definitely swung). then the final out of the division series, in an at bat where we could have potentially walked it off, came on a strike three call where our batter absolutely did NOT go. you can do all the metrics you like but the baseball gods persist.
Fair enough and glad you enjoy it, but these controversies (only the biggest of which come on my radar, so I was only aware of that ALDS check swing) all in my view reinforce the now mechanical, science-y feel of the modern game. Because every time, it feels like people's reaction (or at least the fans of the team that was wronged) is "Ugh when will we finally get robot umpires and more video review!" which again just feels so boring and obsessed with objectivity.
I remember tuning in a few years ago and seeing that now everyone holds the tag on every steal for like 20 seconds just in case someone comes off the bag by a centimeter for a millisecond so they can challenge it with instant replay. What fun!
Yes, this player would be the most valuable player in baseball. Just like a RB who will always and only give you a 1-yard run in football, removing the variance entirely makes this insanely valuable.
This hypothetical player isn't a very good pitcher statistically, as you note, so I don't think he's worthy of any individual accolades, but his magical reliability would be worth a roster spot. You would have to do an entirely different kind of WAR calculation, but I would assume every team blows enough games in the course of a season where at some point they had a larger lead than the number of innings left that turning all those losses into wins would be quite valuable.
Two other angles I find interesting: if you had an ace closer and two run lead heading into the 9th, would you take the 90% chance of a win + preserving your closer's ego, or send in your Matthew Christopher character for a guaranteed win?
Second, assuming we didn't know the origins of this power, how long would it take for the Fangraphs types to admit that this consistency wasn't just an enormous fluke?
I'm interested in the last bit too. What if managers didn't have knowledge of the consistency? I don't know enough about baseball to answer this, as only a very recent fan of the sport... would this player make it to the majors, or would his relatively bad traditional stats keep us from ever getting to see how a manager would use him?
Ironically, this player would be less valuable at lower levels of baseball than in the major leagues. A 162 game season has many more opportunities for his power to be useful than a 25 game Colt or high school season, and a run an inning is bad no matter what level of baseball. So, the biggest hurdle (assuming he had no other way of proving his power) would be getting enough opportunities to demonstrate his remarkable consistency at lower levels before managers stopped giving him the ball.
If he did have the opportunity to build a long track record of always giving up a run an inning, you would have some very heated arguments in major league front offices as to whether it was worth gambling a roster spot and playing time on that ability translating to the highest level.
I think there's no question this person is valuable. At least All-Star level.
A 2 WAR in 2021 would put someone in the top 10 of relievers. I think this person would be able to achieve a 2 WAR in a literal sense very easily (not in a mathematical sense since his calculated WAR would be way way below replacement).
This year's best reliever by WAR according to Fangraphs was Liam Hendriks at 2.7, but Hendriks had 3 blown saves and 1 loss where he gave up more runs than IPs. They went 3-1 in these games, so this pitcher would've only been a literal 1 WAR in those situations, but I assume the team had other games where other relievers lost it before Hendriks could come in.
And this is not to mention innings eater value in blowout leads (lead>than IP left) that come up dozens of times a year for good teams. Or the handful of situational baseball where expected runs are >1 (bases loaded no outs, presumably) and a reliever is coming in.
Such a player would indeed be very valuable, but this value derives mainly for the reduced variance of performance rather than the high mean performance. Think about putting this guy as your closer in games where the lead is at least two runs - it's a guaranteed win every time, and there are a lot of fanbases with terrible bullpens that would kill for that. It's just that in real life, average performance and variance of performance have a strong relationship, and so low ERA/WHIP/FIP serves as a pretty danged good proxy for the fact that the pitcher is probably not going to get shelled. Although I am admittedly not encyclopedic in my baseball knowledge, so if there are any players out there with significant playing time who manage to have high mean pitching stats but low performance variance, I'd be interested to hear about them.
To get a little more deep into statistics, imagine that the number of runs given up by a pitcher in some fixed unit of measurement (like an inning, or 9 innings) follows a Poisson distribution. Obviously this is wrong, but it's a lot better model than assuming normality. Well, the mean and variance of a Poisson distribution are equal. So as a pitcher's ERA increases, their variance tends to increase as well. Minimizing variance of performance is minimizing mean performance using traditional stats. But for this pitcher, the traditional stats don't say anything about the variance, and so they can't really measure this player's value appropriately.
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.
Houston is not my team but signals stealing isn't something others haven't done. I don't believe they deserve the appellation. Red Sox Apple watch steals pretty bad. So if anyone gets to be the "Cheaters"--Red Sox.
Hmmmm I could see this pitcher being valuable when you have a comfortable lead. Up by 4 runs with 3 innings left? Sure, go for it. He might also be useful in the 9th inning if you're up by 2 or more runs. You can save your very best "lights out" pitchers for another day.
He's very obviously a must-roster player as a reliever. Starting him is stupid, but if run difference - innings remaining > 0 he's an auto-win. This is helpful from a traditional "we win" standpoint and also from a rest standpoint. None of your actually good playefs would have to play or try those innings. Winning a game in four innings is simply worth more in a long-teem sense than winning in nine, and that's what Mr. Consistent provides.
I would say that pitcher would be very valuable, probably about as much as a very good reliever middle of the rotation starting pitcher. I'd assume that pitcher probably pitches 50-60 times a year in situations with the lead. Looking at MLB games over time, it seems like a team with a two run lead in the ninth or a three run lead in the eighth on average has about a 93% chance of winning the game. Given some leads are larger than that, I'd say that pitcher could boost your probability of winning from 95 to 100% 50-60 times a year. That gets to me to that pitcher being worth about a very good (but not quite) reliever or about a 4th starter.
What's super interesting about this hypothetical is that it cleaves the joints of most sabermetric analysis, which basically assumes axiomatically that you can't control WHEN runs are scored, just the total number (I'm oversimplifying, but just a bit). Because baseball players emphatically don't work that way, no one has developed a good sense of how to value it.
I think the value here is mostly that this player can guarantee victory from 2 run leads in the ninth, 3 run leads in the eighth, and 4 run leads in the seventh, so teams could consistently outperform their run differentials. The catch is I think these are situations where the home team is usually going to win, anyway, so the value of a guarantee is limited. OTOH, I could see that being worth 1-2 wins per year, which is considered to be a lot for a reliever. I suspect the player would be worth rostering, but not HUGELY valuable.
If this player really could be called on at any time, any number of days in a row, he’d keep accumulating (1 - current win probability) every appearance when put in to win the game, so I could see that adding up to 2 or 3 wins over the course of a 162 game season.
Of course, both the durability and consistency of this thought experiment are not very realistic. But if! If such a player existed I think they would have significant value.
My immediate instinct is that he’d have some value but not much. Two questions:
1. Does this include inherited runners? If you send him into the middle of an inning with the bases loaded and he lets the runner from third score, that run is not charged to him. If he allows a grand slam he only allowed one run but four runs score.
2. Picking up on that, what if he pitches fractional innings? If you send him out for an inning and a third will he allow one run or two? If you only send him out to get one out per game, will he allow one run exactly every third game?
If he inherits runners, he lets the lead one score and then invariably gets the rest out. In any fractional inning in which he appears he surrenders exactly one run - that is, while he is on the mound, one and only one player will score. If you put him in for one out in the 7th and one out in the 8th he allows one run to score in both innings. So his ERA can technically rise by more than one run an inning but he never surrenders more than one run in any given inning.
I love imagining the logistics of this hypothetical pitcher. Like, every single time he comes in for an inning with no one on base, his first pitch is taken deep by even the meekest of hitters for a violent, towering 550 foot home run. Then there are three soft groundouts and the inning is over.
Ah well in that first case he’s immensely valuable, no? If every time the bases are loaded I can guarantee we’ll only allow one run that’s huge. Expected runs with bases loaded no outs is like 2.5 or so, with one out it’s 1.5.
Would he give up multiple runs if he played for the Angels?
I agree with most people that he is worth a roster spot, but will not be a great player. His value is in the innings he saves other pitchers from having to appear. And because he probably saves you a bullpen spot (i.e., his team can carry 11 pitchers instead of 12), it allows you more general freedom in roster construction.
He is not just valuable in games where his team's lead exceeds the number of innings remaining. He is also valuable in games that you are already losing badly. If his team is losing 8-0 after two innings, you can have him pitch the final six or seven innings (depending on if his team is the home or visitors), because there is no difference between losing 8-2 and 15-2. You will not have to dip into the bullpen to have guys pitch meaningless innings in a blowout because Rubber Arm will do it. It will keep your other bullpen arms fresher and help reduce overuse injuries with your pitchers.
This is like the guaranteed 2-yard runner in football. He doesn't and cannot exist.
I'm completely inline with everyone else's opinion that this is a very valuable player. So I'll just note that I didn't think Freddie could get any cooler but these baseball sim league revelations definitely do that, and I will lurk until we get the thread about how many other people stopped following baseball in the last decade. Because wow has it gotten terrible.
The short version is that teams finally embraced the optimal way to play. Unfortunately, the optimal way to play is boring as dirt and takes forever. So games are incredibly long and almost no action occurs. Any thoughts about improving that are viciously fought by the teams and a loud cohort of "purist" fans who want no changes even though the game is unrecognizable from how it was even 20 years ago (when about twice as many people watched).
Super short version is: weak leadership and misaligned incentives leads to organizational failure.
I stopped following in 2009-ish. I say this as someone who loved Bill James and early Baseball Prospectus: analysis got too scientific and following the game got boring. If you can't have fun spirited debates about a sport, it's much less fun, and WAR is both incomprehensible and a debate killer. When I was a kid baseball felt like a mysterious, poetic part of the American experience, but now it just feels like a math exam.
But there are a million other reasons for why I'll never get back into it -- it was helpful background noise for the age of fewer distractions, but now phones serve that purpose; there are too many dang games; the games last too dang long; friends stopped following so that removes incentive to get back into it; etc
Very similar to me. Not only has SABRmetrics killed the game but it's killed talking about the game. My theory is that the early Bill James/Baseball Prospectus stuff was generally smart people who were good with reason trying to find better ways to discuss the game.
Now, it's just people who take these stats (especially WAR) and think they're the be all, end all. I follow Bill James on Twitter and he'll ask stuff like "which player do you think was better?" and half the responses are just people posting their WARs. It's ridiculous and where's the fun in any of that?
despite all that i still believe there's something essentially poetic and mystic about baseball. i'm a giants fan and this season one of our crucial wins over the dodgers came on a blown check swing call (called ball four to walk in a run when our batter definitely swung). then the final out of the division series, in an at bat where we could have potentially walked it off, came on a strike three call where our batter absolutely did NOT go. you can do all the metrics you like but the baseball gods persist.
Fair enough and glad you enjoy it, but these controversies (only the biggest of which come on my radar, so I was only aware of that ALDS check swing) all in my view reinforce the now mechanical, science-y feel of the modern game. Because every time, it feels like people's reaction (or at least the fans of the team that was wronged) is "Ugh when will we finally get robot umpires and more video review!" which again just feels so boring and obsessed with objectivity.
I remember tuning in a few years ago and seeing that now everyone holds the tag on every steal for like 20 seconds just in case someone comes off the bag by a centimeter for a millisecond so they can challenge it with instant replay. What fun!
no i absolutely agree, firmly against stuff like that and the weird karmic balance i talked about would be further stifled with robot umps.
Yes, this player would be the most valuable player in baseball. Just like a RB who will always and only give you a 1-yard run in football, removing the variance entirely makes this insanely valuable.
This hypothetical player isn't a very good pitcher statistically, as you note, so I don't think he's worthy of any individual accolades, but his magical reliability would be worth a roster spot. You would have to do an entirely different kind of WAR calculation, but I would assume every team blows enough games in the course of a season where at some point they had a larger lead than the number of innings left that turning all those losses into wins would be quite valuable.
Two other angles I find interesting: if you had an ace closer and two run lead heading into the 9th, would you take the 90% chance of a win + preserving your closer's ego, or send in your Matthew Christopher character for a guaranteed win?
Second, assuming we didn't know the origins of this power, how long would it take for the Fangraphs types to admit that this consistency wasn't just an enormous fluke?
I'm interested in the last bit too. What if managers didn't have knowledge of the consistency? I don't know enough about baseball to answer this, as only a very recent fan of the sport... would this player make it to the majors, or would his relatively bad traditional stats keep us from ever getting to see how a manager would use him?
Ironically, this player would be less valuable at lower levels of baseball than in the major leagues. A 162 game season has many more opportunities for his power to be useful than a 25 game Colt or high school season, and a run an inning is bad no matter what level of baseball. So, the biggest hurdle (assuming he had no other way of proving his power) would be getting enough opportunities to demonstrate his remarkable consistency at lower levels before managers stopped giving him the ball.
If he did have the opportunity to build a long track record of always giving up a run an inning, you would have some very heated arguments in major league front offices as to whether it was worth gambling a roster spot and playing time on that ability translating to the highest level.
I'm just excited for the comments on this one.
I think there's no question this person is valuable. At least All-Star level.
A 2 WAR in 2021 would put someone in the top 10 of relievers. I think this person would be able to achieve a 2 WAR in a literal sense very easily (not in a mathematical sense since his calculated WAR would be way way below replacement).
This year's best reliever by WAR according to Fangraphs was Liam Hendriks at 2.7, but Hendriks had 3 blown saves and 1 loss where he gave up more runs than IPs. They went 3-1 in these games, so this pitcher would've only been a literal 1 WAR in those situations, but I assume the team had other games where other relievers lost it before Hendriks could come in.
And this is not to mention innings eater value in blowout leads (lead>than IP left) that come up dozens of times a year for good teams. Or the handful of situational baseball where expected runs are >1 (bases loaded no outs, presumably) and a reliever is coming in.
Such a player would indeed be very valuable, but this value derives mainly for the reduced variance of performance rather than the high mean performance. Think about putting this guy as your closer in games where the lead is at least two runs - it's a guaranteed win every time, and there are a lot of fanbases with terrible bullpens that would kill for that. It's just that in real life, average performance and variance of performance have a strong relationship, and so low ERA/WHIP/FIP serves as a pretty danged good proxy for the fact that the pitcher is probably not going to get shelled. Although I am admittedly not encyclopedic in my baseball knowledge, so if there are any players out there with significant playing time who manage to have high mean pitching stats but low performance variance, I'd be interested to hear about them.
To get a little more deep into statistics, imagine that the number of runs given up by a pitcher in some fixed unit of measurement (like an inning, or 9 innings) follows a Poisson distribution. Obviously this is wrong, but it's a lot better model than assuming normality. Well, the mean and variance of a Poisson distribution are equal. So as a pitcher's ERA increases, their variance tends to increase as well. Minimizing variance of performance is minimizing mean performance using traditional stats. But for this pitcher, the traditional stats don't say anything about the variance, and so they can't really measure this player's value appropriately.