Archive for Mathemadage

It’s time for another installment of Mathemadage, where I investigate time-honored baseball sayings using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. If you’re new to my writing, I would describe my method as a semi-rigorous blend of math and intuition, with a rigorous amount of skepticism applied on top. If you’re not new to my writing, hi, hello! Welcome back. Today, we’re investigating a saying that was both my top candidate for this article and the one that came up most frequently in the comments of my last one. Yes, it’s time to talk about outs at third base. Oh, and if you’re looking for Five Things, it will return next Friday – Pete Alonso’s return to Citi Field was my favorite thing this week, and Jay Jaffe already covered it.

“Don’t make the first or third out at third base” was one of the rules that got hammered into me most frequently as a kid. It’s so ingrained that the last time I played rec league softball, I bonded with teammates over how we reflexively repeated it every time we coached third base. (I’m a big nerd, OK? I’ll take whatever bonding I can get.)

The logic behind this one makes good sense, too. With no one out, two productive outs could drive you home from second – why risk erasing yourself heading to third? With two outs, most plays that score you from third would score you from second as well – why risk erasing yourself again? But with one out, getting to third base is a big deal, because then a sacrifice fly or well-placed groundout can bring you home. From that angle, the logic is incontrovertible. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Mathemadage, a new series where I investigate time-honored baseball adages using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. I’ll apply my normal Ben Clemens mixture of a bit of math, a bit of intuition, and plenty of healthy doubt in declaring strong solutions to complicated problems. I hope to demonstrate that some of these true and others false, but I’m sure that many will end up in a suggestive but unprovable middle ground. And true to the premise of the series, we’re starting off with a fun adage that resists easy conclusions.

If you watch a baseball game from start to finish, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a hitter get tied up on an inside fastball. “Got jammed,” the announcer might say, or maybe, “He just couldn’t get around on that one.” It’s a visual reminder of one of the pitching truisms that I learned as a kid and haven’t forgotten since: hard in, soft away.

I intuitively look for this pitching pattern when I’m watching a game. Hitters look incredibly uncomfortable when they’re trying to get their bat around a fastball in on their hands. Now that we have a few years of bat tracking data, though, I can do better than just vaguely searching for this effect. So this week, when I saw someone get jammed, I winced in sympathy and then started furiously downloading spreadsheets. Read the rest of this entry »