Buchholz devaluing himself faster than a third-world currency!
Buchholz has zero command with his fastball tonight. Throw in the fact that the A’s are teeing off on his change-up and it’s going to get uglier as the night goes on. Lucky to only be down 0-2.
Funny, I was just thinking a 1-2-3 inning from the Sox hitters to get Buchholz back out ASAP was just what the doctor ordered.
And the Sox bats: DEAD. Again.
What the heck was wrong with that pitch?
Second time through the order, Mazzaro is toast.
Clay’s changeup is really a thing of beauty.
Clay is much better when he’s not pretending to be Dice-K.
You’ve gotta be shitting me: another night with a roaming strikezone. Change-up was right down the middle, called a ball.
You’re right though SF, it’s absolutely gorgeous. And I just realized I’m watching in HD, so I have a minute of lag.
By the way, that Dice-K story is about the weirdest thing I’ve read in awhile.
Lowell has rocks in his pants. And his shoes. So slow to that ball.
He’s really degrading/degraded.
That won’t go as an error, but really it’s a ball that an above-average 3B gets to and makes a play. So now Clay has given up seven hits, but those of us watching this inning know better. There should be two down and nobody on.
Sigh, slow grounder to Lowell is another infield single. Lot of those this season.
Wow, 7 hits and 7 outs for Clay. Not good.
Sweeney will hit into a DP.
Bot 3, TB 3, CC 0
Buchholz through the inning. Hopefully he’s settled down.
Mazzaro went through the Yankees order like butter the first time through the order last week, then they tore him up after that.
There we go. Leadoff walk.
WTP for Green. Can of corn.
If Ellsbury gets a hit this inning, would we be back to having two players in the lineup hitting .300? Whee!
Ells singles through the hole. 1/2, one down.
LOBs this inning will have me VERY irritated.
Ellsbury is really hot right now.
Pedroia singles. Sacks full. Too hard to score the runner.
Run expectancy here? SOMETHING, PLEASE. ANYTHING.
But no runs …
Mazzaro just got HOSED on the first pitch to Youk.
And maybe on the second pitch too. Low, but basically a good pitch.
And Youk makes him pay.
Yooks for a deuce!
Why’d Patterson go to third? Jesus, the idiotic fielding.
I feel better now. Lead, please.
Wow, tiny strikezone to Youk. He capitalizes, hitting the 2-0 pitch to left to make it a 2-2 game.
Papi makes it 3-0.
Bay?
Bay lucky, makes it 4-2!
That’s how you start to break a slump, Jason.
A’s coach ejected. Good for him, because this strikezone is horrible tonight.
Will a 3-run lead be enough for Buchholz? Eh, I’ll say probably.
Though looking at his pitch count, I almost wonder if he’ll make it through 5 IP.
OCab walks to become 9th Oakland baserunner … Masterson up in the pen.
Amazingly, Oakland has only 2 runs. That’s probably more of a statement about Oakland’s offense than Buccholz’s ability to pitch out of jams.
Kottaras walks to start the 4th; the same way the third started.
Green regressing to the mean.
That rhymes!
This ump really sucks. I think he is being harder on Mazzaro than on Buchholz.
Tampa 4, CC 1, bot 5
Jacoby doubled up on the 3-6-3. Good play on a weakly hit ball.
DP Sweeney
Ump fail.
Nice work. Clay revalued, to an extent.
Hitless inning from Bucky.
Time for the season finale of Deadliest Catch.
A 2-out double, and Clay is pulled. It’s still a close game, and I wholeheartedly approve of them leaving him out there that long.
Buerhle through 5 more perfect innings – can we trade for him.
Buehrle is 12 outs from something unthinkable.
Burhrle breaks MLB record for batter retired in a row, record was 40, he is at 42…..
Buehrle perfect through 5.
First run off the pen since the break.
11 outs to the unthinkable.
10
And Buehrle gives up the walk. Hell of a run. And he’s still got another thing going.
Poof. There it goes.
ah well, damn impressive any way
Maybe we should trade for Ellis. He hits well here.
Thanks, Oki.
Bard in for some high leverage work here.
Another hit. This game is turning ugly.
is a GIDP too much to ask?
Nomah! GIDP.
TB 6, NYY 2, final.
…
Bard induces the DP from Nomie.
Thanks, Nomar.
at the rate they’re hitting Zeigler, I dont’ see the need for this aggressive running
Pap’s save opportunity officially in jeopardy after Kottaras’s double. Awesome. Was it a great throw/relay to get Bay?
Piss poor start by Paps.
Leadoff walk. Idiot. How many clean innings has Paps had all year?
Goddamit, I hate walk-happy Paps. How his ERA is that low is beyond me.
One down, nice play by Pedro.
Good running grab by Green heading towards the LF stands. Two down.
And, a bomb. Near homer. Tying run to the plate, two down. 7-5.
Paps is uninspiring. Seems like a heart attack every time, or at least every other time.
Fuck me.
7-6.
Goddamnit Papelbon.
Egads. Squibber missed by Paps, then thrown into the dugout. Man in scoring position, still two outs. Just an idiotic play by Green. Bad luck for Paps, though. Should be game over.
Super. Fucking hell.
Scratch that, man at first. Ball hit the fence, didn’t go into the dugout. Still an inadvisable throw by Green.
This is awful.
Totally predictable.
God f*cking damnit, infield single ties the game. That stolen 3rd base is now huge.
Davis goes to third on the passed ball. Wow.
What a pathetic inning for Green. And Paps.
Blown save, Green.
Green, stop being Lugo.
Five runs off the pen.
Paps didn’t help himself, IBM, a leadoff walk and a “homer everywhere else”.
Green shit the bed, though. He should sit for a few games.
Ellsbury-Pedro-Youk for the 9th. I smell walk-off.
And an assist on this to DeMarlo Hale, too, for running the Sox out of a four run lead in the 8th.
Yeah no kidding. Why the hell was Bay sent home with ZERO outs?
All three runs with two outs.
…
Agreed, SF. Green made two ill-advised throws, one in particular he should have shoved in his pocket. Then they let Ellis have third. But Paps, he’s getting ahead then giving them up. Gives up the first career hit to Everidge.
I like our chances with an ex-Cub in for Oakland.
2 of 3 runs against Paps are earned.
Paps sitting stewing, but frankly he should have experienced this feeling in several other games. The low ERA hides how tenuous some of his outings have been.
Green and Paps should be shot. I’m sure in his head Green blames it on inconsistent playing time.
I didn’t realize LaRoche had pinch-hit for Papi.
Maybe this is appropriate. Buccholz didn’t deserve the win tonight, anyway.
IBM, it just means he’ll get a chance to be the hero!
Wow, what a play by Kennedy.
Exactly, Ath.
MDC probably will pitch the 10th.
What sucks is that we used Oki and Bard for less than an inning each, with bonus baseball coming up. Good thing we didn’t use Masterson.
Delcarmen in for the 10th.
Nomie whacks one off the wall.
18 hits for Oakland now.
Bay saves the game on a diving play. Whew.
LETS WIN THIS THING!
Yalie Breslow in to pitch for Oakland.
3u.
Varitek jogs in from the pen, presumably for a pinch-hit.
Holy potatoes, Drew misses a walk-off by 5 feet.
The Sox deserve every bit of this shit. 18 hits allowed, 3 errors, a couple of walks, baserunning mistakes and garbage relief pitching,
Crap effort.
Lowell!
Tough to disagree, SF.
Ball 1. Wow.
0-2 count crushed for a double. Get this next guy.
Maybe we should trade for Ellis. He hits well here.
Posted by: I’mBillMcNeal | Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 09:55 PM
Ballgame. A’s up 8-7.
Rajai Davis from Norwich, CT, sticks it to us again.
Six runs for the pen tonight.
You suck, IBM.
It might be the emotions, but this team feels a ways away from being good enough. Too many aging players, a closer who risks too much, a rotation with question marks, slumps all around, and no left side of the infield.
Someone talk me down.
Pitch-out, and we STILL can’t get Davis stealing? Wow. We deserve to lose.
The ultimate indignity: I just realized I have no cold beer.
This loss is planted squarely on some bad infield play in the 9th.
Six A’s, including Davis, who came in as a reserve, have multiple hits tonight.
It must be the emotion of the Rice retirement ceremony.
OH, MY GOD!
A CS, 2-4!
And Paps, too. Leadoff walk in the ninth? Incompetent.
We’ll probably load the bases with no outs and then fail to score anybody.
Lowell with a leadoff single, setting up the double play.
YEAH, first two batters on!
Green better be bunting here.
is it too late to mention that these guys need to win for my birthday today?
My wish is his command. Good sac bunt there.
Teases.
Happy birthday RBF!
One giant tease. Tying run on third with 2 outs; ain’t nothin’ gunna happen here.
Ph lowrie? NO BUNTING.
Too late.
Why waste a fucking out?!?! Goddamned idiots.
35 hits, not a single home run.
What a complete fucking bullshit loss.
Sure enough, Pedro with a long fly out. Game over.
Well, that sucked.
I remember the big-time Baltimore loss, but this might go down as the worst of the year, all things considered.
Honestly, why waste a valuable out with a pitcher struggling? Stupid, STUPID fucking baseball. Nice way to cap off an abomination of a game.
How many ways did they lose?
Bay caught at home in the 8th.
Green screwing the pooch twice in the 9th.
Papelbon never checking on the runner.
Saito letting the inherited runner score.
Bunting in the 11th.
Just a shit shower.
Errors in the run of play are one thing, but a choice made to give up an out is worse to me. Tito just went from having been at the mercy of his players to shouldering part of the blame for this fiasco. Nice job, skip.
Hey, the Yankees had just as poor a game, if that’s any consolation. Although without the heartbreak, so it probably isn’t.
I’d rather we lose 6-2 and be losing the entire time than throw the game away on a dozen miscues in the 9th-11th innings.
I just can’t get over the “winning run at the plate with nobody out and a short bullpen but I am going to donate 33% of our remaining outs towards a loss” decision. There will be few decisions that come close to being that fucking stupid during Tito’s remaining years as the Sox’ manager.
During the game I was happy to see Green bunt, cause he’s been horrible at the plate lately. But SF makes a compelling point. We need a good old fashioned Paul post to settle which is the smarter move!
Tough loss, guys. I’m not usually a fan of bunting, Andy, but doing so with runners on first and second and no outs and down two seems defensible, especially with the 9 hitter at the plate.
I mean, if neither Pedroia or Ellsbury can get on base or get a hit in that situation, don’t you also deserve to lose?
My question is: Why not pinch hit for Green? Sure, it means either Baldelli or Varitek would have to play 1B (with Youkilis sliding over and Lowrie going to SS), but isn’t that a reasonable risk with the winning run at the plate?
I don’t know where to put this, but it is interesting:
“Joe DiMaggio once thanked the good lord for making him a Yankee. Dustin Pedroia needs to thank someone for putting him in a Boston Red Sox uniform, otherwise many of his home runs may not have cleared the fence.”
I poked around for the odds difference on scoring both runs from 1st and 2nd and no outs versus 2nd and 3rd with 1 out. I couldn’t find it quickly. Anyone know?
Also, from that link, have any of you ever seen Pedroia hit one out to centerfield or rightfield? It could explain his power outage this year, if teams are clued in. They could be giving him nothing to hit inside and pounding him away. If all he can do is go the other way for a single or double, that’s a win for the pitcher. It also explains his uptick in walks – he’s not getting his pitches so he’s taking the freebie.
I looked for the odds last night but couldn’t find them. Interesting theory on Pedroia; it would certainly explain a lot. One thing the article doesn’t mention are how he hits a lot of hard line-drives off the monster that would have been homers in other stadia. Not sure how many that is though.
One thing the article doesn’t mention are how he hits a lot of hard line-drives off the monster that would have been homers in other stadia.
How do you judge that though?
Greg at HitTracker seems to be doing the best work in the area and I’d think he’d try his best to account for those.
In 2002, with runners on first and second, zero outs, a team should expect to score on average 1.511 runs in that inning.
If a hitter successfully sacrifices them to second and third, the run expectancy drops to 1.358.
Of course, if he strikes out or pops out, run expectancy drops to 0.936, and if he grounds into a double play, advancing the lead runner to third with two outs, it plummets to 0.363.
The question is how much confidence do you have that your hitter will avoid the double play and at least advance the runners. Nick Green strikes out 21 percent of the time and walks six percent of the time, so the chances are good (73 percent) he will put the ball in play. Of those, 40 percent are ground balls and 60 percent are fly balls.
Meaning that in any given situation, Nick Green is likely:
To hit a fly ball 44% of the time.
To hit a ground ball 29% of the time.
To strike out 21% of the time.
To walk 6% of the time.
Six percent of Green’s fly balls have been home runs, translating to less than 3 percent of his total appearances. Of Green’s remaining balls in play, 30 percent have been falling for hits this season, meaning Green had an overall 19 percent chance of getting a base hit (not counting platoon advantage/disadvantage, park effects and other important considerations I don’t have the time to figure out right now, but one can assume, given the Sox were in Fenway, that Green’s chances of getting a hit were actually higher).
Meanwhile, in GIDP situations, Green has done so at a 16 percent clip. So revising our percentages and remembering that this is context neutral for type of pitcher, ballpark, etc.:
Green had a 21% chance of striking out,
A 19% chance of getting a hit short of a home run,
A 16% chance of grounding into a double play,
A 6% chance of walking,
And a 3% chance of winning the game with a walkoff.
That’s a 28 percent chance that Green’s at bat increases the run expectancy for the inning, and a 37 percent chance that he decreases it worse than he would have done so by bunting. That doesn’t count infield flies, which Green has hit at a nice rate of 19 percent of all his fly balls. If we assume fly balls make up most of the remaining 35 percent of plate appearances, then that means another 7 percent chance that Green worsens the run expectancy by failing to hit the ball out of the infield.
So when Green stepped to the plate, he had a 28 percent chance of increasing the club’s run expectancy in some form or fashion. (His OBP is actually .311, so I might be cutting him short a little here by ignoring things like HBP, infield hits, errors, etc.) He had a 44 percent chance of drastically lowering the run expectancy by failing to at least advance the runners. And he had a 28 percent chance of advancing the runners with a fly ball out.
So bunting is actually pretty defensible in that situation, given how bad Green is with the bat. He had a much greater chance of doing even more damage than bunting, and while I agree that giving up outs is not something you should really ever do, if you’re going to do it, that’s the player and situation with which to do it.
Which is why you should pinch hit Jed Lowrie in that situation.
Holy potatoes Paul, great work. What I like about your posts is that they’re almost completely neutral: you could have posted that bunting the runners over decreased the chance of the Sox tying the game, and been done with it. But you dug deeper, and gave us a world of information.
Well done.
Oh and by the way, they pinch-ran Lowrie for Lowell at 2B, which was kind of stupid since they were bunting them over anyways.
Ah, my bad. I was only half-listening to the game at that point.
159 replies on “Better Late: A’s-Sox Gamer”
So. To reiterate:
Blarg.
Blarg x2.
Buchholz devaluing himself faster than a third-world currency!
Buchholz has zero command with his fastball tonight. Throw in the fact that the A’s are teeing off on his change-up and it’s going to get uglier as the night goes on. Lucky to only be down 0-2.
Funny, I was just thinking a 1-2-3 inning from the Sox hitters to get Buchholz back out ASAP was just what the doctor ordered.
And the Sox bats: DEAD. Again.
What the heck was wrong with that pitch?
Second time through the order, Mazzaro is toast.
Clay’s changeup is really a thing of beauty.
Clay is much better when he’s not pretending to be Dice-K.
You’ve gotta be shitting me: another night with a roaming strikezone. Change-up was right down the middle, called a ball.
You’re right though SF, it’s absolutely gorgeous. And I just realized I’m watching in HD, so I have a minute of lag.
By the way, that Dice-K story is about the weirdest thing I’ve read in awhile.
Lowell has rocks in his pants. And his shoes. So slow to that ball.
He’s really degrading/degraded.
That won’t go as an error, but really it’s a ball that an above-average 3B gets to and makes a play. So now Clay has given up seven hits, but those of us watching this inning know better. There should be two down and nobody on.
Sigh, slow grounder to Lowell is another infield single. Lot of those this season.
Wow, 7 hits and 7 outs for Clay. Not good.
Sweeney will hit into a DP.
Bot 3, TB 3, CC 0
Buchholz through the inning. Hopefully he’s settled down.
Mazzaro went through the Yankees order like butter the first time through the order last week, then they tore him up after that.
There we go. Leadoff walk.
WTP for Green. Can of corn.
If Ellsbury gets a hit this inning, would we be back to having two players in the lineup hitting .300? Whee!
Ells singles through the hole. 1/2, one down.
LOBs this inning will have me VERY irritated.
Ellsbury is really hot right now.
Pedroia singles. Sacks full. Too hard to score the runner.
Run expectancy here? SOMETHING, PLEASE. ANYTHING.
But no runs …
Mazzaro just got HOSED on the first pitch to Youk.
And maybe on the second pitch too. Low, but basically a good pitch.
And Youk makes him pay.
Yooks for a deuce!
Why’d Patterson go to third? Jesus, the idiotic fielding.
I feel better now. Lead, please.
Wow, tiny strikezone to Youk. He capitalizes, hitting the 2-0 pitch to left to make it a 2-2 game.
Papi makes it 3-0.
Bay?
Bay lucky, makes it 4-2!
That’s how you start to break a slump, Jason.
A’s coach ejected. Good for him, because this strikezone is horrible tonight.
Will a 3-run lead be enough for Buchholz? Eh, I’ll say probably.
Though looking at his pitch count, I almost wonder if he’ll make it through 5 IP.
OCab walks to become 9th Oakland baserunner … Masterson up in the pen.
Amazingly, Oakland has only 2 runs. That’s probably more of a statement about Oakland’s offense than Buccholz’s ability to pitch out of jams.
Kottaras walks to start the 4th; the same way the third started.
Green regressing to the mean.
That rhymes!
This ump really sucks. I think he is being harder on Mazzaro than on Buchholz.
Tampa 4, CC 1, bot 5
Jacoby doubled up on the 3-6-3. Good play on a weakly hit ball.
DP Sweeney
Ump fail.
Nice work. Clay revalued, to an extent.
Hitless inning from Bucky.
Time for the season finale of Deadliest Catch.
A 2-out double, and Clay is pulled. It’s still a close game, and I wholeheartedly approve of them leaving him out there that long.
Buerhle through 5 more perfect innings – can we trade for him.
Buehrle is 12 outs from something unthinkable.
Burhrle breaks MLB record for batter retired in a row, record was 40, he is at 42…..
Buehrle perfect through 5.
First run off the pen since the break.
11 outs to the unthinkable.
10
And Buehrle gives up the walk. Hell of a run. And he’s still got another thing going.
Poof. There it goes.
ah well, damn impressive any way
Maybe we should trade for Ellis. He hits well here.
Thanks, Oki.
Bard in for some high leverage work here.
Another hit. This game is turning ugly.
is a GIDP too much to ask?
Nomah! GIDP.
TB 6, NYY 2, final.
…
Bard induces the DP from Nomie.
Thanks, Nomar.
at the rate they’re hitting Zeigler, I dont’ see the need for this aggressive running
Pap’s save opportunity officially in jeopardy after Kottaras’s double. Awesome. Was it a great throw/relay to get Bay?
Piss poor start by Paps.
Leadoff walk. Idiot. How many clean innings has Paps had all year?
Goddamit, I hate walk-happy Paps. How his ERA is that low is beyond me.
One down, nice play by Pedro.
Good running grab by Green heading towards the LF stands. Two down.
And, a bomb. Near homer. Tying run to the plate, two down. 7-5.
Paps is uninspiring. Seems like a heart attack every time, or at least every other time.
Fuck me.
7-6.
Goddamnit Papelbon.
Egads. Squibber missed by Paps, then thrown into the dugout. Man in scoring position, still two outs. Just an idiotic play by Green. Bad luck for Paps, though. Should be game over.
Super. Fucking hell.
Scratch that, man at first. Ball hit the fence, didn’t go into the dugout. Still an inadvisable throw by Green.
This is awful.
Totally predictable.
God f*cking damnit, infield single ties the game. That stolen 3rd base is now huge.
Davis goes to third on the passed ball. Wow.
What a pathetic inning for Green. And Paps.
Blown save, Green.
Green, stop being Lugo.
Five runs off the pen.
Paps didn’t help himself, IBM, a leadoff walk and a “homer everywhere else”.
Green shit the bed, though. He should sit for a few games.
Ellsbury-Pedro-Youk for the 9th. I smell walk-off.
And an assist on this to DeMarlo Hale, too, for running the Sox out of a four run lead in the 8th.
Yeah no kidding. Why the hell was Bay sent home with ZERO outs?
All three runs with two outs.
…
Agreed, SF. Green made two ill-advised throws, one in particular he should have shoved in his pocket. Then they let Ellis have third. But Paps, he’s getting ahead then giving them up. Gives up the first career hit to Everidge.
I like our chances with an ex-Cub in for Oakland.
2 of 3 runs against Paps are earned.
Paps sitting stewing, but frankly he should have experienced this feeling in several other games. The low ERA hides how tenuous some of his outings have been.
Green and Paps should be shot. I’m sure in his head Green blames it on inconsistent playing time.
I didn’t realize LaRoche had pinch-hit for Papi.
Maybe this is appropriate. Buccholz didn’t deserve the win tonight, anyway.
IBM, it just means he’ll get a chance to be the hero!
Wow, what a play by Kennedy.
Exactly, Ath.
MDC probably will pitch the 10th.
What sucks is that we used Oki and Bard for less than an inning each, with bonus baseball coming up. Good thing we didn’t use Masterson.
Delcarmen in for the 10th.
Nomie whacks one off the wall.
18 hits for Oakland now.
Bay saves the game on a diving play. Whew.
LETS WIN THIS THING!
Yalie Breslow in to pitch for Oakland.
3u.
Varitek jogs in from the pen, presumably for a pinch-hit.
Holy potatoes, Drew misses a walk-off by 5 feet.
The Sox deserve every bit of this shit. 18 hits allowed, 3 errors, a couple of walks, baserunning mistakes and garbage relief pitching,
Crap effort.
Lowell!
Tough to disagree, SF.
Ball 1. Wow.
0-2 count crushed for a double. Get this next guy.
Maybe we should trade for Ellis. He hits well here.
Posted by: I’mBillMcNeal | Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 09:55 PM
Ballgame. A’s up 8-7.
Rajai Davis from Norwich, CT, sticks it to us again.
Six runs for the pen tonight.
You suck, IBM.
It might be the emotions, but this team feels a ways away from being good enough. Too many aging players, a closer who risks too much, a rotation with question marks, slumps all around, and no left side of the infield.
Someone talk me down.
Pitch-out, and we STILL can’t get Davis stealing? Wow. We deserve to lose.
The ultimate indignity: I just realized I have no cold beer.
This loss is planted squarely on some bad infield play in the 9th.
Six A’s, including Davis, who came in as a reserve, have multiple hits tonight.
It must be the emotion of the Rice retirement ceremony.
OH, MY GOD!
A CS, 2-4!
And Paps, too. Leadoff walk in the ninth? Incompetent.
Lowell, Kottaras/Varitek, Green, Ellsbury, Pedey …
We’ll probably load the bases with no outs and then fail to score anybody.
Lowell with a leadoff single, setting up the double play.
YEAH, first two batters on!
Green better be bunting here.
is it too late to mention that these guys need to win for my birthday today?
My wish is his command. Good sac bunt there.
Teases.
Happy birthday RBF!
One giant tease. Tying run on third with 2 outs; ain’t nothin’ gunna happen here.
Ph lowrie? NO BUNTING.
Too late.
Why waste a fucking out?!?! Goddamned idiots.
35 hits, not a single home run.
What a complete fucking bullshit loss.
Sure enough, Pedro with a long fly out. Game over.
Well, that sucked.
I remember the big-time Baltimore loss, but this might go down as the worst of the year, all things considered.
Honestly, why waste a valuable out with a pitcher struggling? Stupid, STUPID fucking baseball. Nice way to cap off an abomination of a game.
How many ways did they lose?
Bay caught at home in the 8th.
Green screwing the pooch twice in the 9th.
Papelbon never checking on the runner.
Saito letting the inherited runner score.
Bunting in the 11th.
Just a shit shower.
Errors in the run of play are one thing, but a choice made to give up an out is worse to me. Tito just went from having been at the mercy of his players to shouldering part of the blame for this fiasco. Nice job, skip.
Hey, the Yankees had just as poor a game, if that’s any consolation. Although without the heartbreak, so it probably isn’t.
I’d rather we lose 6-2 and be losing the entire time than throw the game away on a dozen miscues in the 9th-11th innings.
I just can’t get over the “winning run at the plate with nobody out and a short bullpen but I am going to donate 33% of our remaining outs towards a loss” decision. There will be few decisions that come close to being that fucking stupid during Tito’s remaining years as the Sox’ manager.
During the game I was happy to see Green bunt, cause he’s been horrible at the plate lately. But SF makes a compelling point. We need a good old fashioned Paul post to settle which is the smarter move!
Tough loss, guys. I’m not usually a fan of bunting, Andy, but doing so with runners on first and second and no outs and down two seems defensible, especially with the 9 hitter at the plate.
I mean, if neither Pedroia or Ellsbury can get on base or get a hit in that situation, don’t you also deserve to lose?
My question is: Why not pinch hit for Green? Sure, it means either Baldelli or Varitek would have to play 1B (with Youkilis sliding over and Lowrie going to SS), but isn’t that a reasonable risk with the winning run at the plate?
I don’t know where to put this, but it is interesting:
“Joe DiMaggio once thanked the good lord for making him a Yankee. Dustin Pedroia needs to thank someone for putting him in a Boston Red Sox uniform, otherwise many of his home runs may not have cleared the fence.”
I poked around for the odds difference on scoring both runs from 1st and 2nd and no outs versus 2nd and 3rd with 1 out. I couldn’t find it quickly. Anyone know?
Also, from that link, have any of you ever seen Pedroia hit one out to centerfield or rightfield? It could explain his power outage this year, if teams are clued in. They could be giving him nothing to hit inside and pounding him away. If all he can do is go the other way for a single or double, that’s a win for the pitcher. It also explains his uptick in walks – he’s not getting his pitches so he’s taking the freebie.
I looked for the odds last night but couldn’t find them. Interesting theory on Pedroia; it would certainly explain a lot. One thing the article doesn’t mention are how he hits a lot of hard line-drives off the monster that would have been homers in other stadia. Not sure how many that is though.
One thing the article doesn’t mention are how he hits a lot of hard line-drives off the monster that would have been homers in other stadia.
How do you judge that though?
Greg at HitTracker seems to be doing the best work in the area and I’d think he’d try his best to account for those.
In 2002, with runners on first and second, zero outs, a team should expect to score on average 1.511 runs in that inning.
If a hitter successfully sacrifices them to second and third, the run expectancy drops to 1.358.
Of course, if he strikes out or pops out, run expectancy drops to 0.936, and if he grounds into a double play, advancing the lead runner to third with two outs, it plummets to 0.363.
The question is how much confidence do you have that your hitter will avoid the double play and at least advance the runners. Nick Green strikes out 21 percent of the time and walks six percent of the time, so the chances are good (73 percent) he will put the ball in play. Of those, 40 percent are ground balls and 60 percent are fly balls.
Meaning that in any given situation, Nick Green is likely:
To hit a fly ball 44% of the time.
To hit a ground ball 29% of the time.
To strike out 21% of the time.
To walk 6% of the time.
Six percent of Green’s fly balls have been home runs, translating to less than 3 percent of his total appearances. Of Green’s remaining balls in play, 30 percent have been falling for hits this season, meaning Green had an overall 19 percent chance of getting a base hit (not counting platoon advantage/disadvantage, park effects and other important considerations I don’t have the time to figure out right now, but one can assume, given the Sox were in Fenway, that Green’s chances of getting a hit were actually higher).
Meanwhile, in GIDP situations, Green has done so at a 16 percent clip. So revising our percentages and remembering that this is context neutral for type of pitcher, ballpark, etc.:
Green had a 21% chance of striking out,
A 19% chance of getting a hit short of a home run,
A 16% chance of grounding into a double play,
A 6% chance of walking,
And a 3% chance of winning the game with a walkoff.
That’s a 28 percent chance that Green’s at bat increases the run expectancy for the inning, and a 37 percent chance that he decreases it worse than he would have done so by bunting. That doesn’t count infield flies, which Green has hit at a nice rate of 19 percent of all his fly balls. If we assume fly balls make up most of the remaining 35 percent of plate appearances, then that means another 7 percent chance that Green worsens the run expectancy by failing to hit the ball out of the infield.
So when Green stepped to the plate, he had a 28 percent chance of increasing the club’s run expectancy in some form or fashion. (His OBP is actually .311, so I might be cutting him short a little here by ignoring things like HBP, infield hits, errors, etc.) He had a 44 percent chance of drastically lowering the run expectancy by failing to at least advance the runners. And he had a 28 percent chance of advancing the runners with a fly ball out.
So bunting is actually pretty defensible in that situation, given how bad Green is with the bat. He had a much greater chance of doing even more damage than bunting, and while I agree that giving up outs is not something you should really ever do, if you’re going to do it, that’s the player and situation with which to do it.
Which is why you should pinch hit Jed Lowrie in that situation.
Holy potatoes Paul, great work. What I like about your posts is that they’re almost completely neutral: you could have posted that bunting the runners over decreased the chance of the Sox tying the game, and been done with it. But you dug deeper, and gave us a world of information.
Well done.
Oh and by the way, they pinch-ran Lowrie for Lowell at 2B, which was kind of stupid since they were bunting them over anyways.
Ah, my bad. I was only half-listening to the game at that point.