I don't get this working pitching count thing

[Don]

It seems like whenever the Red Sox plays the Yankees I see an article about how these two teams are awesome because their batter works deep pitch counts and tired out the other team's pitcher which is why they're awesome. It's as if working deep count is some strategy only these two teams have mastered. Isn't this backwards? I was under the impression these two teams can just buy up all the best players in baseball, and that people who are good at batting naturally can work on long pitch counts (otherwise they wouldn't be very good).

I mean sometimes I got the feeling these articles are saying the Yankees can hire one of us, and we can just say don't even try to swing the bat until there are two strikes, and after that just try to hit foul each time. We'll assume the pitcher is completely oblivious to the fact that none of us can possibly be a threat at the bat, and if we can make a pitcher use 4 or 5 pitches to strike one of us out we'd have done a good job, even though our overall offensive production is going to be some number really close to 0 by any standard statistics.

[Flip]

I think it is fair to say that good hitters tend to work deep counts... and the Yankees and Redsox buy up a lot of good hitters, therefore they have players who are experienced and good at working deep counts., Which means you both are right.

[Don]

A lot of the article seems to represent deep count as the cause for being a good hitter. I thought it's the other way around, that it's because you're a good hitter so you can get deep counts. The way the articles talk about it, let's say I'm a manga-like powerful hitter, I'd expect to go to Yankees and they'd tell me that I should stop hitting a home run on the first pitch I see because it'd be better to hit a home run on the third pitch since that tires out the opposing pitcher more than just hitting a home run immediately.

I'm not even sure if there are people who are good at working deep counts who aren't good batters. I mean to get a deep count you clearly have to have good vision (so you don't swing on the bad pitches) and yet make good contact & power on most pitches (so you don't pop out on a foul ball), and that sounds like you're already pretty good at batting if you can do all that.

[Flip]

Yeah im not sure how the article put it (link?) but i think that because someone is a good hitter they get themselves into long at-bats and deep counts more often. Patience and the ability to get a piece of a borderline pitch are all attributes of a good hitter. I know the baseball mangas are absurd, but someone who can mash the first pitch everytime is over the top absurd. Good hitters have great at bats, which gives them time to adjust to the pitcher's style and wait for a mistake. Pujols, Reyes, Bautista, A-Rod... they dont just step up to the plate and crush the first few pitches.

[Don]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/w ... xid=cnnbin

It's not like the article is bad or even all that special. Everything in there does make sense, but it almost sounds like the Yankees consulted their local Jedi Master before the game who told them swinging the bat too early leads to the Dark Side and that was why they won the game. I understand on a team loaded with talent you can approach the game slightly differently, but it's not like people just figured out making the other guy pitch more is a good idea today.

From these article I got the feeling that suppose I was one of the manga superheroes in real life with a slugging percentage of 3.0 (or higher) and I joined the Yankees, they'd probably have Yoda consult me and telling me that while in the fictional world hitting a home run on the first pitch 75% (or more) of the time was all good, in the big leagues I must learn patience and hit a home run after a few pitches.

I think these articles just all have the cause and effect mixed up. It's not like either of these teams holds Jedi Meditation camps to teach patience or whatever which is why they're an offensive powerhouse. It's because these teams are an offensive powerhouse which is why they exhibit traits you'd expect in a good hitter.

[Don]

Actually this article is kind of like saying the secret to the Heat's success is that the Big 3 are really good basketball players that overwhelm the opposition with their talent. Then again, I'm sure there were quite a few articles that said exactly that during basketball season!

[Zeus]

A good chunk of strategy for most pitchers is to make you swing at pitches outside the strike zone. If you're patient enough at forcing them to throw into the zone, you get better pitches to hit. Thus, working the pitcher tends to lead to better pitches to hit which, in turn, leads to better hitters. It's a much harder skill than it looks, not all guys can do it effectively. And there's always the pitchers who are good enough to work inside the zone the whole time and still fuck up the batters or make them miss. We call those guys (like Roy Halladay or Mariano Rivera) Cy Young candidates and future Hall of Famers.

A side effect of working the pitcher is getting him to throw more pitches per inning. This leads to getting to the bullpen earlier in the game, which is always a good thing

[Don]

I don't think it's exactly a secret that the guys Yankees/Red Sox pay big money for are really good at batting. If it was some random no name team that turns out to be really good sure it's noteworthy, but an article on how these two teams are good at batting is like an article on how players on Barcelona are really good with a soccer ball.

[Zeus]

It's not just the "what", they're trying to teach you the "how". 70% of baseball fans (and about 95% of those who dislike baseball) don't really understand the pitcher/catcher vs the batter dynamic, they're explaining it to you and why it makes sense.

[Don]

I think explaining stuff like that usually just gets into equivalent of manga-realm nonsense for your average fan. It'd be like you see a team score a bunch of points and the analyst saying: "They (the losing team) got to play better defense."

On TV when you see the guys breaking down anything with the fancy diagrams, half of the time I really think nobody on either team was actually thinking that hard. But even suppose everything really is planned and you see LeBron James blows past a double team by two average NBA players. As a fan I don't need an explanation as to why he does this. He is LeBron James! He's supposed to be able to overpower mere mortals (in NBA standard). Now if LeBron James got stopped by 2 mere mortals sure I'm interested in how they were actually able to stop LeBron James. Even if it turned out it was just a fluke it's certainly meaningful to discuss something. The article I linked basically says: "New York Yankees, known to be an offensive juggernaut, hits like one against the Boston Red Sox".

I guess if the article was meant to be an introduction to sabermetric type concepts (i.e. make the other guy throw more pitches is good) then okay, but I was under the impression basic concepts like that are pretty well known by now. The other day I saw another article about how advanced statistics says you don't want to throw fastballs against people that hit a large number of home runs. I mean seriously, you need advanced statistics to figure this out? Now, the article also pointed out that advanced statistics shows that the number of fastballs thrown after the pitcher is behind on count has steadily decreased with the advent of advanced statistics (it turns out it's a bad idea to throw a fastball just because you're behind), and that is certainly interesting information worth discussing. But most sports article seem to be totally devoid of interesting stuff.

Heck, John Hollinger's advanced basketball stats says the team that scores more points than the opponent (on average) tends to win, and the more you win by (on average) the better your team is. Now I'm sure that's a perfectly true statement, but it's really tiring to see an article that teaches fan the concept that if your team scores a lot more points than the other team, then your team is probably pretty good.

[Zeus]

Working the pitcher has zero to do with sabermetrics. It's just a tested-and-true, win-some-games strategy used in baseball for over a century. It's just hard to do, very hard, even for major leaguers.

In fact, it's quite difficult to measure the benefits of working the pitcher using stats, even the advanced stats sabertitians use. Just because you see a lot of pitches, don't mean you're working the pitcher. It's not a simple correlation like that. Heck, they haven't even really found a good stat to measure moving the runners along by hitting the ball to the right side of the infield.

This is probably what the article (I obviously haven't read it yet) was trying to say and explain. A strategy as old as this being used by the consistently successful teams doesn't show up on stats. Not everything does.

[Don]

Actually the article says Red Sox and Yankees are #1 and #2 at pitches per plate appearance and practically every offensive category of note.

I'd say people don't use this 'strat' probably because most teams lack the personnel to do it. It's like you can say 'defense wins championship' in basketball (which really isn't even true) but if you got players who can't defend they're not going to suddenly be able to play defense.

I think this article (and a lot of similar ones in general) is just stating the obvious, i.e. powerful offensive teams employ tactics that improve their offense!

[Zeus]

Actually the article says Red Sox and Yankees are #1 and #2 at pitches per plate appearance and practically every offensive category of note.

I'd say people don't use this 'strat' probably because most teams lack the personnel to do it. It's like you can say 'defense wins championship' in basketball (which really isn't even true) but if you got players who can't defend they're not going to suddenly be able to play defense.

I think this article (and a lot of similar ones in general) is just stating the obvious, i.e. powerful offensive teams employ tactics that improve their offense!

The pitches per plate appearance is used in conjunction with other stats on a overall team-basis. On it's own, there's too many factors to conclusively determine the reasons for it.

Yes, it's quite hard to do effectively. The Sox, Yankees, and even Phillies have the money to buy the personnel to plug holes so that it can be utilized as a team approach. And for at least the AL East teams, it's clearly a large factor in their success. A team like, say, my Blue Jays, who are stuck behind the Red Sox and Yankees, they do not have the experience/skill at enough positions (generally, only a couple) to be able to do that, so they don't.

That's just it, it's not obvious. The majority of people would never, ever consider this type of stat as being correlated to a team approach leading to some of the most successful teams in the sport today. They simply don't understand baseball to that level. The article is trying to show you what offensive stats other than HR, RBI, BB, and AVG lead to success and are linking that stat to the team approach which is what's working.