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Wednesday, June 16, 2004 |
Getting All Defensive About DIPS
Ken Arneson at Will Carroll Weblog today stumbled onto a doozy joking about why Defensive Efficiency ain't all that. For some reason, the all-baseball.com sites don't all archive the same way, so you'll have to follow the Comments link on that story to see his post, but the relevant part is
Watching Marco Scutaro put up even better RF numbers that Mark Ellis did last year, and seeing Derek Jeter's RF numbers jump way up this year after their pitching staff overhaul, I'm beginning to think that much of what we think of as defense is, in fact, pitching.Ken intended this as something of a joke, but I think he's actually on to something here. Sure, a lot of what we think of as pitching is actually defense, but the reverse should also be true. On at least two occaisions, Stephen at Mariners Wheelhouse has twitted me -- one of them here -- about batted balls in play being more under the pitcher's control than you might otherwise think. If that's so, it makes sense that a lot of those balls will be unplayable hits even if you have a 100% operational Darin Erstad in centerfield. As a refresher, I'll put up this link to Mitchel Lichtman's recent Baseball Think Factory article which found that indeed pitchers have a pretty strong ability to create groundballs and less so for pop flies.
From there, let's take a look at year-to-date team defensive efficiency, courtesy of Hardball Times:
| Team | DER | LD% |
|---|---|---|
| TBD | .727 | .159 |
| NYY | .700 | .165 |
| SEA | .698 | .180 |
| BOS | .696 | .190 |
| CHW | .695 | .194 |
| TOR | .693 | .182 |
| OAK | .692 | .180 |
| TEX | .690 | .179 |
| CLE | .679 | .185 |
| KC | .679 | .175 |
| BAL | .678 | .180 |
| ANA | .677 | .170 |
| DET | .677 | .176 |
| MIN | .668 | .192 |
Here's where it gets interesting: the correlation coefficient for LD% to DER is -.469. In other words, there's a weak but noticeable negative correlation between hard-hit balls allowed and poor defensive efficiency (i.e., the more hard-hit balls a team has, the worse its defense appears to be). This little example is no substitute for actual research, but the fact that it points in the expected direction is not surprising in the least.
Comments:
I would hesitate in using LD% in attempting to prove any point. I mean, have we even been told what constitutes a "line-drive?”
I have seen very little evidence that LD% can be factored into any type of statistical analysis, as it seems to have no correlation to offensive success (i.e. Adam Kennedy has a higher LD% then does Vlad, and Troy Glaus’ was well below league average), and the defensive efficiency example you just gave seems tenuous at best. Also, I would be more apt to believe it if my eyes didn’t consistently tell me that THT’s numbers are wrong.
I have seen very little evidence that LD% can be factored into any type of statistical analysis, as it seems to have no correlation to offensive success (i.e. Adam Kennedy has a higher LD% then does Vlad, and Troy Glaus’ was well below league average), and the defensive efficiency example you just gave seems tenuous at best. Also, I would be more apt to believe it if my eyes didn’t consistently tell me that THT’s numbers are wrong.
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