Archive for correlation

Now kids, I’m not a user of the Twitter, but I did follow a link to it in one of Eno’s articles last week, whereupon I came across an interesting question posed in a tweet by one @b_g_h: “Are hitters with low BB% also more volatile [because] of BABIP variance?”  There are different ways to address the question statistically, but it seemed to me that with an altered version of my pitching correlation tool, one could provide insight into issues like this, at least regarding pitchers.  A hitting version is waiting in the wings, don’t worry.  So, what I bring to you today is an interactive and downloadable spreadsheet that allows you not only to analyze the relationship between any two pitching statistics, but also to filter your data by any three statistics of your choosing. Read the rest of this entry »

In doing my research, I often like to take a look at correlations to get an idea about whether factors might be connected.  At the end of this season, I put together a spreadsheet to help me with that.  Well, I haven’t finished the research yet (FG+ subscribers will probably soon find out what’s been keeping me from it), but in the meantime, I thought I’d share what I hope will be a pretty handy tool for whomever out there might be interested in what lies a little beneath the surface of all these stats on FanGraphs.  And I do mean all of them.  Any pitching-related stat on FanGraphs should be represented in this tool.  You can compare one stat to another, or to itself in a different year.  Or, what the heck, you can even compare a stat to a different stat in a different year.  And, for you sticklers out there, it will even give you a confidence interval on these correlations (by default, it gives you the range of correlations that the true correlation has a 95% chance of being within).

What can you do with this?  Well, let’s say you want to see whether a stat is predictive of the next year’s ERA.  You could, for example, set Stat 1 to K% (after selecting the correct white box, type it in, or select from the drop-down list via the arrow to the right of the box), with the year set to 0 (meaning the present year), then set Stat 2 to ERA, with the year set to 1 (meaning the next year).  If you don’t change the IP or Season filters, you should see a correlation of -0.375.  That shows there’s a pretty decent connection between the two stats, in that if a pitcher has a high strikeout percentage in one season, he’ll likely have a low ERA the next (relative to the rest of the pitchers in the comparison).  If you change the year under ERA to 0, you’ll see the correlation gets stronger, whereas if you change it to 2 or 3, you’ll see it gets weaker.  That has a lot to do with the unpredictability of K%, and especially of ERA.  You’ll notice if you compare year 0 K% to year 1 K%, the correlation is a very strong 0.702, whereas if you do the same for ERA, it’s a moderate-to-weak 0.311.  Hopefully the graph will give you an idea of how strong those connections really are.
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Last month, I did a two-part analysis that showed what happens — strike out-wise — when, say, a pitcher who strikes out 15% of batters faces a batter who strikes out 20% of the time. As a special bonus for you all, I included a few hundred other K%-matchup types too. I made handedness matchups central to the study, as I think it’s pretty well-established that you can expect a hitter to strike out more often against same-handed pitchers. That is, if I was trying to give an expected result for a righty batter against a lefty pitcher, I looked only at the hitter’s past performance rates against lefties and the pitcher’s history against righties. Before I moved on to performing a similar analysis on batted ball types (grounders, liners, outfield fly balls, and infield popups), I wanted to see whether handedness matchups mattered to these as well.

For this study, my sample was all non-switch-hitting batters from 2002-2012 with at least 300 PA against lefty pitchers plus at least 300 PA against righties. I’d have gone by number of batted balls, except I’m throwing some non-batted ball stats into the analysis.

Let’s get right to it — the following table shows the chances that handedness really makes no difference to each stat, according to paired t-tests:

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