Lies, Damned Lies: Evaluating Pitcher Hitting by Nate Silver

Links (6)

BPro: Silver: Evaluating Pitcher Hitting
Published 5/29/2008 at BBTF's Baseball Primer Newsblog
BPro: Silver: Evaluating Pitcher Hitting Swayed by Owings? Don’t be a fool Remember the Buhl ! In the six years that I’ve generated PECOTA forecasts, I’ve never bothered to run hitting projections for pitchers. In fact, I’ve regarded pitcher hitting as something of a nuisance; I specifically screen out any pitchers so that they won’t be selected as comparable players. This isn’t an aesthetic judgment by any means—watching pitchers try (and fail) to hit is one of my favorite pastimes. But since even the pitchers who make 35 starts a year won’t usually get more than 80 ...

Good and bad pitchers’ hitting
Published 5/29/2008 by Tangotiger (tangotiger@yahoo.com) at THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball
Nate takes a look at everyone’s favorite topic.  If Nate is out there, can you add a blog post describing the method?  I’m guessing you did component regression.  How much did each component regress?  Generally speaking, I agree with all his points. I remember putting out a list of worst hitting pitchers, and, IIRC, I had Ben Sheets as worst hitting pitcher in the league.  Actually, let me see… Of pitchers born since 1960, I’ve got Harang as the worst (Nate has him as #2), Davis as #2 (Nate has him #3), Clark ...

Pitchers hitting and other funny stuff
Published 5/30/2008 by MB at Friar Forecast
Nate Silver looks at the best and worst hitting pitchers in a recent article (it’s free, too). Jake Peavy’s number 7 at +3.5 runs per season, relative to other pitchers. If you just chop those 3.5 runs off of Peavy’s runs allowed total last year, you get a RA of 2.56, compared to 2.70 without the hitting considered. Certainly not a huge factor, but nothing you’d want to ignore in a serious evaluation. Dontrelle Willis is #1 at almost 9 runs above average. Owings is #2 at +6.4 runs — although, as Silver notes, the system doesn’t take into account his great amateur track record. With that considered, ...

Sheets Can't Hit
Published 5/31/2008 by rluzinski (noreply@blogger.com) at Another Baseball Blog
I know, tell you something you don't already know. I knew Sheets was bad but I didn't realize that he might the worst hitting pitcher in the league, though. According to Nate Silver at Baseball Prospectus, Sheets is just that: Lies, Damned Lies: Evaluating Pitcher Hitting Assuming about 80 PA (what an average starter racks up over 32 or 33 starts, Sheets costs his team 2.2 runs, compared to the average hitting pitcher. Showing up on the "best hitters" list is Yovani Gallardo, at 4.9 runs above average. That's good for 4th best in the league. Roughly speaking, ...

When Pitchers Were Hitters
Published 6/6/2008 by Peter Schiller at Baseball Reflections
... and either look up Nate Silver’s article on this topic entitled “ Evaluating Pitcher Hitting” or just click HERE . By the way, it’s also a good read if you bother to read the whole article and not just look at the top 10 list. ;-) Other good hitting pitchers that I can remember are Steve Avery, Josh Beckett, and Tom Seaver; all were within the past 30 years, but to look beyond this timeframe go to the ...

Pitcher's Value as Hitters: BP Found Similar Gains as I Did
Published 6/7/2008 by obsessivegiantscompulsive (noreply@blogger.com) at obsessivegiantscompulsive
... . Baseball Prospectus has recently did a more comprehensive analysis of it (well, they do have a much better database of information; they did the same thing when they replicated my draft study) and came to basically the same conclusion I did, though the range is smaller than what I had posited. Their article is here. ...