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From: dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin)
Newsgroups: net.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Re: Lineup dependency
Message-ID: <472@philabs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 14:28:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: philabs.472
Posted: Wed Oct  9 14:28:05 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 12:15:17 EDT
References: <453@philabs.UUCP> <694@mmintl.UUCP> <769@fisher.UUCP>
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Organization: Philips Labs, Briarcliff Manor, NY
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> Frank Adams has kept the issues clear.  I'd like to comment on one of
> his contributions:
> 
> > On the other hand, batters definitely DO hit better with men on base.
> > The book put out by the Elias Sports Bureau (it has their name in the
> > title) has statistics on this for the entire major leagues last year.
> > As I remember (the book is not here) the effect was about 20 points in
> > terms of batting average.  So clearly there is an advantage to batting
> > after a player who gets on base a lot.  Although the statistics for it
> > are not available, it seems likely that this is enhanced when batting
> > after good base stealers.
> 
> What this says is that if a player played on a team that had a runner
> on every time he hit, he could expect to hit 20 points better than if
> he never had a runner on.  Applying this to my rough guess that the
> best teams have runners on about half the time, and the worst about a
> quarter of the time, the advantage to be gained is no more than
> 20*(.5-.25) = 5 BA points.  Exactly what I mean when I suggest that
> the difference is not something we ought to lose sleep over...
> 
> 						David Rubin

Another case of bad reasoning. This may be the average over all players,
but certain players bat much more than 20 points better with men on
base. For examples, Boggs batted .418 this year with runners in scoring
position. This is about 45 points above his overall average, and about
55-60 points above his average with the bases empty. I certainly don't
lose sleep over this, but it is significant.