One point that's been made in the argument about the AL MVP vote is that a disproportionate share of ARod's HRs have come in blowout wins, while Ortiz's have been more likely to be game deciding blows. Because I hadn't actually seen anyone quantify that difference, and because I know that people will sometimes make incorrect claims based on their subjective impressions, I thought that it would be interesting to see just how many HR each man has hit in different situations. I went through ESPN's game logs and found out the margin of victory for each man's homers. The following is a summary.
1) Almost all of ARod's homers in blowout wins came early in the season. He hit 5 each in April and May, 3 in June, and just 2 since.
2) All of Ortiz's HR in 1 run victories have come since the start of July, with 6 of them so far in September.
3) Ortiz and ARod have actually hit about the same number of HR blowouts (defined as >5 run margin of victory); it's just that all of ARod's blowout HR came when his team was doing the blowing out, while some of Ortiz's came when his team was being blown out.
-- Roger Moore | Master of Meaningless Trivia | (raj@alumni.caltech.edu) There's no point in questioning authority if you don't listen to the answers.
Edward Ruggeri 2 October 2005 06:57:38 [ permanent link ]
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:39:03 -0500, Bucky <uw_badgers@email.com> wrote:
Roger Moore wrote:>> Because I>> hadn't actually seen anyone quantify that difference>
I heard on the radio today that 20 of Ortiz's HRs this year tied the> game or gave the Red Sox the lead. (They didn't say about Rodriguez, so> I don't have a comparison)>
I thought that it would be interesting to see>> just how many HR each man has hit in different situations.>
Pretty good analysis. For games that were decided by 3 runs or less,> ARod had 21 HRs, Ortiz had 27 HRs. The analysis still misses a lot of> points though:>
1. It only looks at the final score. If a team is winning 5-0 and a> player cranks a HR, that should be a "blowout HR". But the closer> collapses and allows 5 runs in the 9th. Final score: 6-5. It works the> other way around too. Scoreless game into late innings, player hits a> clutch HR. Rattles the pitcher and ignites a rally. Final score: 5-0.
WHOA. I totally disagree. This is the win-expectancy type thing I was talking about. A HR in a 5-0 game that suddenly becomes close is underrated by win-expectancy, because w/o the HR the game might have been lost. Now, there were 4 other runs that didn't score on the HR (or less), so the HR is as important as in a game won by one run, but it's still mighty important. That is, a HR scoring the 5th run in the 3rd in a game later won by only one run is as valuable, in my opinion, no matter what inning it's hit or what the opposing team's score is.
The part about rattling the pitcher I don't necessarily believe, but if it were true, than it might be valuable. But the same thing might happen in the 3rd inning (someone made a point about driving a pitcher from the game)
2. It only looks at HRs. There's plenty of non-HR game deciding hits.>
The proper way to do it is to look at situational stats: Despite A-Rod> having a 20-pt higher batting average, Ortiz far exceeds A-Rod in every> single critical situation (close and late, runners on, scoring> position).
True about not just looking at HR's. However, A-Rod's been batting second for a while, so there often aren't runners on for him, so it's a smaller sample-size, I'd say. A while ago (out of date stats), Ortiz was cashing in 21% of RISP, against A-Rod's 12%, which is valuable, but doesn't necessarily speak of his ability, but just his timeliness in getting his hits. Tony Clark has been amazingly productive this year, because he seems to get a lot of opportunities to score runs, and often does - but his statistics wouldn't indict this 'ability.'
Basically, what we're looking for is a way to value a player in terms of the (sorry to borrow from the Sox) only statistic that matters, which is wins. WARP3 is an extrapolation of VORP, and it doesn't necessarily reflect how much those hits count. The WINS statistic at BP is also pretty flawed, as discussed earlier. A better statistic is needed. It needs to represent the value of a player's performance _in the final context of that game_.
