Maddux, Glavine, and DIPS: Evaluating the Impact of Pitchers on Balls in Play

Mike studies whether a pitcher can influence the direction of a batted ball.

Every so often, a discussion of Defense
  Independent Pitching Stats (aka DIPS) comes
  up on the baseball mailing lists to which I subscribe. One such discussion recently
  occurred on the STATLG-L
  mailing list, where Andy Blumson posted this (reprinted with permission):

“I don’t expect to convince anyone of this, but what I personally have concluded
  is that (1) a pitcher *can* influence, with a varying degree of success, the
  outcome of a *particular* ball-in-play: is it a ground ball or a pop-up? to
  the right side or to the left? He can’t be *sure*, of course, but he can throw
  pitches that make certain outcomes more likely. However, (2), whether he gets
  that result is chancy, depending on things like whether Gary Sheffield takes
  a perfectly good ankle-high splitter out golfing; and (3) regardless of whether
  he gets what he wants, whether the result becomes a hit or an out is dependent
  on defense.”

This triggered this response from me:

“Preliminary research that I’ve done on this subject suggests that the pitcher
  does not have a particular amount of influence on the direction in which the
  ball is hit - or rather if he does, he has far less influence than does the
  hitter. Hitters tend to pull more ground balls than they hit the other way,
  whether they are facing a RHP or a LHP, or a ground-ball pitcher or a fly-ball
  pitcher. “

and Andy?s reply (also reprinted with permission):

“If that’s true for Tom Glavine in particular, I’ll eat my hat. But even if
  I end up eating my hat, the complicating factor is that a ball that rates as
  ?pulled? against Glavine tends to be a roller to shortstop. That’s true of Maddux
  also to a lesser extent.”

It should be noted that, in positioning their defenses, teams by and large
  do assume that pitchers have far less control over the location of balls in
  play than do hitters ? the Williams shift being an extreme example of such an
  assumption. Voros McCracken’s analysis that led to DIPS provides additional
  evidence that would suggest that pitchers have limited ability to control the
  direction of balls in play. Since we know that pitchers do control the type
  of ball hit into play, an ability to control the direction in which the ball
  was hit would suggest that the defense could position itself, more or less,
  in the vicinity where the ball was fairly certain to be hit. We would then see
  a far greater correlation from year to year in the rate at which pitchers allow
  hits than we actually see.

It has been argued on SABR-L that pitchers can “pitch to the defense”, and
  Andy’s assertion is along those same lines. If certain types of pitchers - ground
  ballers or fly ballers, LHP or RHP, hard throwers or finesse guys - can affect
  the direction of balls in play, then those effects should be detectable by looking
  at where the balls that are put into play are hit. And if Tom Glavine or Greg
  Maddux can do the same, the distribution of balls put into play against them
  should be noticeably different from the distribution against a typical pitcher.

To evaluate these questions, I turned to the play-by-play database for 1998-2000
  that I have licensed from Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette, which includes nearly
  complete directional information for balls in play. The directional information
  in these files is based upon the Baseball
  Workshop/Retrosheet hit location diagram,
  with the center field zones and the 1S zone in front of the pitcher divided
  left and right (for example, the 8S zone is divided as 8LS and 8RS). This allows
  for almost every ball in play to be designated as being hit to the left side
  or the right side of the diamond. I can?t express my appreciation enough for
  the work that Pete and Gary have done in making this resource available.

Where do balls that are put into play go?

The Pull Percentage is the percentage of balls that are pulled; it?s
  RS/LS for LHB and LS/RS for RHB. As you can see, right-handed hitters tend to
  pull the ball more often than do left-handed hitters, and ground balls are pulled
  quite a bit more often than fly balls.

How do these percentages look based on whether the
  pitcher is left-handed or right-handed?

 vs LHP

 vs RHP

 To evaluate the performance of hitters against
  ground ball pitchers and fly ball pitchers, I took the following approach:

1. Identify pitchers in each league who meet the
     following criteria: (a) pitched for the same team in 1998, 1999, and 2000;
     (b) allowed at least 100 balls in play in each of those three seasons; and
     (c) allowed at least 500 total balls in play over those three seasons. The
     purpose of this step was to try to prevent seasonal, league, and team variances
     among pitchers from affecting the analysis.

2. For each league, I calculated the average ground
     ball percentage, GB/(GB+FB), and the standard deviation of the ground ball
     percentage among the qualifying pitchers under step 1 in each league.

3. Ground ball pitchers were identified as those
     whose ground ball percentage was one standard deviation or more greater than
     the average for their league; fly ball pitchers were identified as those whose
     ground ball percentage was more than one standard deviation less than the
     league average. This gave me a group of 17 pitchers of each type, almost evenly
     divided between AL and NL, and there were enough LHP in each group so that
     I didn?t have to do another control for pitcher handedness.

Once I identified the pitchers, I did the BIP analysis
  as before, and got these results:

 vs FB Pitchers

 vs LH FB Pitchers

 vs RH FB Pitchers

 vs GB Pitchers

 vs LH GB Pitchers

 vs RH GB Pitchers

 Finally, I identified 19 pitchers with high
  strikeout rates and 21 pitchers with low strikeout rates, following a similar
  method to that described above. I had to change the thresholds a bit to get
  some LHP into the analysis. The BIP analysis yielded these results:

 vs Low-K Pitchers

 vs Low-K LHP

 vs Low-K RHP

 vs High-K Pitchers

 vs High-K LHP

 vs High-K RHP

Summarizing by pitcher hand and type of ball in play,
  we get this:

The consistent patterns in this data are fairly clear:

• hitters tend to pull more with the platoon advantage
    than without (with the LHB GB rate against LH GB pitchers possibly aberrant
    based on a relatively small sample size)

• high-strikeout pitchers have fewer balls pulled
    against them when facing hitters of the same hand than do other pitchers

• ground ball pitchers show a mild tendency toward
    allowing more balls that are hit the other way

But the percentage differences are small, on the
  order of 3-4% across the groups. That suggests that if the pitcher does have
  any impact, it’s not very large. Are Maddux and Glavine exceptions to this?

I started with Maddux. I determined the results from
  all of the balls in play against Maddux in each of the seasons in the database,
  and compared that to the results from the typical batter against a typical RHP
  (Typ %). In addition, I also identified how the batters that Maddux faced
  performed against right-handed pitchers other than Maddux, and calculated a
  separate pull percentage for that combination (Bat %). This removes Maddux
  himself, and all BIP by hitters who did not face Maddux, from the calculation.
  I did this because, with the addition of interleague play and expansion, it’s
  likely that the hitters faced by Maddux are not representative of the typical
  hitter.

Here’s what those numbers look like for Maddux:

Maddux’s overall pull percentages are so high because he is an extreme ground
  ball pitcher (60.5% GBP over the three seasons). If you look at the last two
  rows of the table, though, you can see that hitters pull the ball less often
  against Maddux than they do against other pitchers. A large part of the reason
  for this is that Maddux is an extreme ground ball pitcher, and (as I noted above)
  hitters do tend to pull the ball less often against pitchers of that type. Maddux’s
  percentages stand out a lot less when compared to the pull percentages against
  a typical RH ground baller:

Bats	Type	Pull       %	RHGB       %	Bats	Type	Pull       %	RHGB       %
LH	All	55.7%	54.7%	RH	All	57.8%	60.2%
LH	FB	41.3%	40.0%	RH	FB	42.3%	44.6%
LH	GB	Mike Emeigh Posted: August 21, 2002 at 06:00 AM | 13 comment(s) Login to Bookmark   Related News: Reader Comments and Retorts Go to end of page Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.    1. tangotiger Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605920) Great job Mike! It's this kind of detailed data that we need to do a proper analysis. We should also distinguish between "controlling" type of ball hit, location of ball hit, from out-conversion rates. Certainly a pitcher has influence on whether a batted ball is a ground ball or fly ball. Mike's study here is a good analysis on ball location (based on several criteria). The only thing missing is velocity of balls hit. The other feature is the out-conversion rates of balls in play. It is to that aspect that Voros' DIPS refers to. That regardless of the pitcher, the rate at which that ball in play is converted into an out has little influence from the pitcher. This does not mean that "if it's not the pitcher, then it must be the fielders". It could very well be luck. There's alot of noise in the data. And Mike's analysis of play-by-play data is a great step in trying to find the answers.    2. Mike Emeigh Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605923) I actually intended to include something on the out-conversion rate for Glavine, but I thought this piece was already long enough and I wanted to get it out for discussion. Glavine's $H was significantly lower than the rest of the Braves' pitchers in 1998 and 2000, and significantly higher in 1999 (when he was 14-11 with an ERA above 4). I need to see whether there any differences between the 1999 data and that for 1998 and 2000 that tell us much of anything. -- MWE    3. Chris Dial Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605925) Great work, Mike! Of course, Glavine is easy to select for this study because he pitches like this: away, away, away, inside, away, away, away. It's just difficult to pull that pitch. Maddux doesn't do that. He's is about late movement which (IMO) results in less powerful hits. Do we know of another pitcher whose pitching pattern is so regular? Who else pitches away, away, away? John Franco would be very good over hte 1990s, but I suppose the data isn't available for less than $5k/season. I'm also envious of your stat collection ;-).    4. Rob Wood Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605929) Very good article! A couple of comments. Simply showing that Glavine has different "splits" than other pitchers does not necessarily suggest that he has an "ability" to make this happen. It could just be "random", it could have something to do with the Braves defense (related to a false normalization phenomenon), etc. Ideally you'd perform the same type of analysis on all of the pitchers in your sample and see if there are significant systematic effects (at the individual level) that cannot be explained by higher-level factors (handedness, FB vs GB, etc.) or randomness. I also echo the prior comments about the out-conversion rates. Common sense would suggest that, holding everything else constant, balls hit to the right side would have a higher out rate since the throws are shorter, and that balls pulled would have a lower out rate since they are typically harder hit balls. Oh, by the way, do you remove home runs from your analysis (I hate it when that is done in analyses of pitchers)? Lastly, I've often thought that Glavine, among other pitchers, had much better command to one side of the plate than the other. Typically Glavine has his best success when he pitches to the first base side of the plate (say on the corner or off the plate by several inches). His delivery seems to be grooved for that type of pitch, regardless of the handedness of the batter. If true, then this would be outside pitches to RHB, difficult to pull, resulting in grounders to the right side, and to inside pitches to LHB, easier to pull, resulting in grounders to the right side. Wouldn't this explain the data just as well?    5. Charles Saeger Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605933) Excellent article, Mike. I have a few questions as to persistence and variance. Have you checked the distribution of pitchers' variance on the pull rates? Is this distribution normal? What is the chance (using a binomial distribution) Glavine's variance came from chance? If there are other pitchers who, like Glavine, have an ability to affect a hitter's pull rate, who are they, and what other stats do they have? Does a pull rate variance have other effects on a pitcher's record?    6. Mike Emeigh Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605941) Rueter's patterns are much closer to the norm than are Glavine's, and mostly go the opposite direction: L/L FB: 45.2% vs 41.7% norm (186 BIP) L/L GB: 61.1% vs 65.5% norm (157 BIP) L/R FB: 44.8% vs 42.4% norm (841 BIP) L/R GB: 70.6% vs 69.0% norm (694 BIP) Note that Rueter is a flyball pitcher where Glavine is not. Except for the GB percentage by lefties against him, he's pulled more often than the typical LHP - and the differences are in the typical 3-4% range as the group norms, which is much more likely to be random fluctation than Glavine's much larger splits (which as Rob Wood suggested could also be random fluctuation). -- MWE    7. Mike Emeigh Posted: August 21, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605942) The pitcher's area is divided into 13 and 15 zones, so many of those would also be considered as being hit left or right. There are maybe 20 or so balls a season that are hit right at the pitcher (coded as being in zone 1); these were excluded from the analysis. -- MWE    8. Don Malcolm Posted: August 22, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605945) Typically Glavine has his best success when he pitches to the first base side of the plate (say on the corner or off the plate by several inches). His delivery seems to be grooved for that type of pitch, regardless of the handedness of the batter. If true, then this would be outside pitches to RHB, difficult to pull, resulting in grounders to the right side, and to inside pitches to LHB, easier to pull, resulting in grounders to the right side. Wouldn't this explain the data just as well? Actually not, Rob, since Glavine?s pull rate against LHB is a good bit lower than average, which means that most of the ground balls hit against him by LHB are going to the left side of the infield. ASSISTS by P ?98-?00 A 1 Greg Maddux 190 2 Kenny Rogers 175 3 Tom Glavine 150 4 Mike Hampton 134 5 Brian Anderson 129 6 Kevin Brown 119 7 Kirk Rueter 113 8 Livan Hernandez 112 9 Mike Mussina 110 10 Andy Pettitte 107 Source: SABERMETRIC ENCYCLOPEDIA (I was surprised to find Glavine so high; from years of watching, I don?t associate comebackers with him the way I do with Maddux.) Mike, if you have time at some point, you might want to isolate pitch assists by the various types of plays and scorings: ?regular? assists on grounders (one class of 13, 14 and 16 scorings), sacrifices (another class of 13, 14 and 16 scorings) and ?glove assists? (where the ball glances off a pitcher?s glove to a fielder, resulting in a 143, 153, or 163 scoring not involving a double play). That?s a lot of detail, and it might not pan out to much of anything, but it would be interesting to see for these pitchers, especially since several of them don?t appear to be extreme GB pitchers. For example, is the percentage of GB outs obtained by Rueter a good bit higher than the other pitchers? Mike, you might also want to consider providing this data for all the pitchers in your study. Is there anyone else with a deviation from the norm that?s remotely close to Glavine?s? (Echoing some of Charlie?s questions here?)    9. Mike Emeigh Posted: August 22, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605952) "Mike, you might also want to consider providing this data for all the pitchers in your study. Is there anyone else with a deviation from the norm that?s remotely close to Glavine?s?" At a quick glance there are two other possibilities that warrant further study: Jamie Moyer and Derek Lowe. Moyer tends to be pulled more often than the normal LHP and his splits are fairly large as compared to the typical LHP. Lowe looks like he might be a left-side-of-the-diamond pitcher; lefties pull him less often and righties pull him more often, and the splits are also large. Some of this might be a Fenway Park effect, of course (although Pedro does not show any sort of similar tendencies, even mildly). Speaking of Pedro (not to hijack the discussion or anything) - oddly enough, most of his splits tend to be in the direction of being pulled more often than one might expect from a typical pitcher. That runs counter to what we typically expect of a power pitcher - Curt Schilling, for example, shows the more normal pattern of being pulled somewhat less often across the board. (Clemens and the Big Unit don't make it into this analysis because they changed teams during the three years I evaluated.) -- MWE    10. Rob Wood Posted: August 22, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605955) Don is right, I didn't look closely enough at Glavine's splits. However, I still wonder if the "side of the plate" split isn't also worth investigating, in addition to handedness and GB/FB.    11. Charles Saeger Posted: August 23, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605966) Mike, if you have time at some point, you might want to isolate pitch assists by the various types of plays and scorings: ?regular? assists on grounders (one class of 13, 14 and 16 scorings), sacrifices (another class of 13, 14 and 16 scorings) and ?glove assists? (where the ball glances off a pitcher?s glove to a fielder, resulting in a 143, 153, or 163 scoring not involving a double play). One thing I have noticed when trying to revise CAD formulae (I have better putout formulae for first basemen, second basemen and shortstops, notably, and need to revise my once-finished article appropriately) is that pitchers make many more putouts and assists with runners on base. The putouts are mostly 3-1 flips, of course, meaning first basemen are more likely to throw the runner out than make the play themselves when there is a runner on first. Mike noted that there may be force plays in this, and I think a pitcher may be more likely to take a popup when the other fielders are in position for the double play. The assists, of course, are about what we are talking. Some of this is pickoffs and caught stealings. What I am wondering is how much of this is my thesis with the popup -- the pitcher may be more likely to groundball because the infielders play closer to the bag for the double play. Anyhow, it is something about which to think when looking at pitcher assists. For teams, they are very tied to overall assist/groundball rates, since an individual is, at best, one-sixth of the team total.    12. Mike Emeigh Posted: August 23, 2002 at 12:42 AM (#605970) Combining responses here: However, I still wonder if the "side of the plate" split isn't also worth investigating, in addition to handedness and GB/FB. Well, Derek Lowe might be a "side of the plate" pitcher, as I noted above, since LHB tend to go the other way and RHB tend to pull more against him. Perhaps one of the Red Sox diehards that populate this site can comment on his pitching style. If high K (= high velocity?) pitchers are pulled less (contact early in the swing) and pitchers with low velocity (Moyer) or a killer change-up (Pedro)are pulled more (contact late in the swing)doesn't this suggest that pitchers' characteristics have a lot to do with how hitters turn on a ball? One might think so - but the tendencies in BIP direction aren't strong enough to suggest pitchers have a lot to do with it. Hal McRae once noted that, as he aged, pitchers expected his bat to slow down and figured that they could blow a fastball by him - so he compensated by opening up earlier, focusing on driving that pitch. As he noted, that made him vulnerable to a lot of other things, but not to that inside heater. I think hitters make all sorts of similar adjustments much more quickly than do pitchers, and that's why the hitter's tendencies appear to be the more powerful influence in BIP direction. -- MWE    13. Charles Saeger Posted: August 26, 2002 at 12:43 AM (#605991) Just a quick thought -- wouldn't a screwball pitcher behave like an other-handed pitcher? You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.     << Back to main	BBTF Partner Bookmarks You must be logged in to view your Bookmarks. Hot Topics What do you do with Deacon White? 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