Comments on Tournament Finals

Franky,

Congrats again on the win. Quite an accomplishment to win multiple championships. I fully agree on many of your comments but have a different viewpoint on steals and catcher defense. I can also clarify my thought process with Virdon leading off, as that was intentional.

First with Virdon. I was definitely in a bind at lead off after Woodling went down. I was hoping you weren’t going to sequence the lefty Sadecki in game 7 to effectively eliminate him from the series but you were all over it. Given the pitcher in the 9th spot I had three choices: Virdon, another low obp bat like Johnson or Hal Smith or go with a bigger bat like Santo who had higher OBP but would have far fewer runners on base when he batted. I went with Virdon as he was by far the best runner and chose to keep Santo at the end of my stronger stretch of my lineup.

Regarding the speed comments for both my lineup and mburatti’s use of Hiatt, I’m of the opinion that sb’s and catcher defense is overvalued in the SIM. Comparing the three of our teams and using some linear weight RC to swag impacts, I show that across our sb/cs data on offense that Gritch/Franky/mburatti created 1/7/2 runs. With baserunning, I’d estimate runs created were between 7/17/22 and maybe 1.25x-1.5x of those figures with the former using sb linear weights and the latter accounting for base advances to home likely count for more than an sb – the answer should lie somewhere in between. Finally for sb defense (ignoring any catcher errors), I show saved (lost) (1)/2/(4) of runs.

The obvious conclusion is that the impact of speed is much more from running the bases than from sb. Overall base running is really a 3x-4x effect here of a great catcher vs a bad one. I’m in full agreement this is magnified in pitcher’s parks. Looking at Hiatt specifically versus Battey here, I come up with about an 8 run advantage to Battey on defense here once errors are included, which equates to approximate 50 OPS. They had a 50 OPS gap offensively unadjusted for park. So, unadjusted for parks, Battey and Hiatt were equal here and Hiatt would have the advantage once Battey’s HR’s were adjusted down in the pitchers park while Hiatt was markedly cheaper. I’m in full agreement Hiatt had more trade value moving to a hitters park but he was still quite valuable in the pitchers park and lent some strength on the road.

On the other hand, the lack of base advancement certainly hurt my team and likely some others as well. In the 60’s set particularly options can be limited. I started with Ashburn with a 60% chance of a good season but have now missed on him each time I’ve played the 60’s, at some point he will hit for me. That morphed to Woodling who was inferior on defense and on the bases but still had the ideal emptier type of obp to lead off when pitchers bat.

In the end, your team stacked up well against mine given how much lh batting you could competently carry in your lineup. I had stacked my rotation in my division which had been so rh dominant for mburatti and riggedsplits, they alleviated that somewhat near the end (part of that was Jackson for Clemente). As you said I was in the same boat as them with a 6r/2l vs rhp. I effectively had 4 aces against a 6/2 or 7/1 rh lineup as Singer and Stafford were 5R type pitchers on some of their better cards. It was night and day their pitching lines when going against a 6/2 or 7/1 line during the season versus when I was forced to throw them against a 4/4 or 3/5 team. It was clear mburatti recognized that but, like me, he was somewhat trapped to pivot the team. I started the year with 4l and 4r but the cards failed badly on three of the lefties and I was only able to backfill one spot competently. JimmyJames had quite the team for his 7r / 1l to make it seven games with my squad given I was starting a Seaver/Drysdale equivalent in six of the seven games but both you and Lee300 matched up much more favorably.

Congrats again and I look forward to another shot at the crown this coming year.

linear weight RC to swag impacts, I show that across our sb/cs data on offense that Gritch/Franky/mburatti created 1/7/2 runs. With baserunning, I’d estimate runs created were between 7/17/22 and maybe 1.25x-1.5x of those figures with the former using sb linear weights and the latter accounting for base advances to home likely count for more than an sb – the answer should lie somewhere in between. Finally for sb defense (ignoring any catcher errors), I show saved (lost) (1)/2/(4) of runs.

very interesting! What is "swag"? How did you make these calculations?

btw, your play during last year's tournament jumped out at me for selecting great players. And it's stupid of me to give a competitor of your statistical sophistication a helpful observation, but here goes: Santo '69 is a much better choice for leadoff because, while it is true that Santo has about a 6/108 chance of hitting a homer, he has a 25/108 chance of hitting a double-play grounder plus he has a 6/108 added chance of a clutch hit with 2 outs (which is especially nice batting leadoff behind a bunting pitcher, or batting 5th). '63 Virdon is poor clutch hitter and has only 6/108 dp grounders. So, I think leading off with Santo-Virdon would have been better than Virdon-Santo. Powell '64 is just an incredible card with about 15% homers but he underperformed with only 1 homer in 20 plate appearances, which was probably the difference in the series.

There are various formulas out there, with more variation on the value of SB. Below is Furtado's extrapolated runs. Effectively a SB is worth 0.18 while a CS hurts by 0.32. Also a single is 0.50. Avoiding an out is worth 0.09, so a single is worth 0.59. So I just converted the SB/CS value to equivalent singles to convert to an (12 errors if I recall correctly) that a catcher error was a throwing error and really just an equivalent of an additional SB.

XR - Extrapolated Runs
= (.50 x 1B) + (.72 x 2B) + (1.04 x 3B) + (1.44 x HR) + (.34 x (HP+TBB-IBB)) +(.25 x IBB)+ (.18 x SB) + (-.32 x CS) + (-.090 x (AB - H - K)) + (-.098 x K)+ (-.37 x GIDP) + (.37 x SF) + (.04 x SH)

You are correct on the gidp and clutch, it's something I need to consider more carefully in lineup construction. I do somewhat but not enough and in the earlier decades the gbA prevalence is everywhere.