Cliff Lee's Second Inning
by R.J. Anderson on Apr 6, 2009 3:59 PM EDT
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In play-by-play form:
Nelson Cruz flies out on the first pitch of the inning
Hank Blalock singles on the fifth pitch.
Marlon Byrd doubles on pitch eight.
Chris Davis strikes out swinging on pitch 14.
Jarrod Saltalamacchia singles on pitch 16.
Elvis Andrus doubles on the 21st pitch.
Ian Kinsler singles on the 23rd pitch.
Michael Young walks on the 31st pitch.
Josh Hamilton flies out on the final pitch of the inning, number 34.
In graphical form:
In trivial form:
It took Cliff Lee 5 innings today to allow seven earned runs, last year it took him closer to 60.
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where's that peter bendix to tell us the indians pitcher who won the cy young in the previous year and is having a bad start to the season is maybe hurt?
glad to see that regression isn’t wasting any time with cliff.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
rays are pretty.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
secrets can't last forever.
i imagine most people (at least who read him, etc.) knew he was working for a club now. too good not to be. i guess cameron didn’t know it wasn’t to be revealed? i didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret. i won’t reference it again.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
the rays are certainly stockpiling talent all over baseball operations.
if they’d only get rid of the retirees working at the lemonade stand they’d have the best talent all around.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
good. when i order, please make the lemonade for me instead of arguing with your wife.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
sorry. i've only been to a handful of rays game.
i thought it was a prerequisite that husband-wife teams worked the lemonade stand.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
i'm out of thunderdome lemonade stand retiree outplacement quips.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
Guys … visiting from LetsGoTribe … you are really being the collective, embarassing example of statheads not actually watching the game.
On the fifth pitch of the inning, that infield single, Lee got nailed by a comebacker on his pitching arm, just above the elbow. He proceeded to allow five more baserunners and four runs that inning.
Not all the information is in the stats.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
So, are you saying the graph is wrong?
by Harry Pavlidis on Apr 6, 2009 7:21 PM EDT up reply actions
i believe the graph is telling cliff lee something.
if you turn it on it’s side and squint it says “cliff, mann up.” not sure why the extra ‘n’ is there – possible reference to field of dreams? i mean, if computers are writing movies about baseball now surely they must watch them, as well.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
.
I actually did watch the first half of the game, hence why I wrote about it in a brisk manner. I didn’t mention the liner because he stayed in the game. If he were hurt maybe he should’ve came out. Considering that’s the unselfish thing to do. How about attacking the analysis — which there is next to none here, it’s more of an overview with a chart thrown in — rather than the writer/commenters?
Thanks much.
by R.J. Anderson on Apr 6, 2009 8:31 PM EDT up reply actions
wait a second.
you watched the game? this is beyond the box score, right? you guys use numbers and stuff? you’re not supposed to watch the game. you’re messing with the image. next you’ll tell me that you guys have jobs and girlfriends and homes above sea level.
"If they had this s--- when i was playing, I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." - Oswaldo Guillen
Forgot.
Back to being an embarrassing stathead. I’m glad I didn’t mention that I hate math, they may have revoked my membership pocket protector.
by R.J. Anderson on Apr 6, 2009 8:45 PM EDT up reply actions
That's it R.J. Give it back...
We’ve had our eye on you.
by Dan Turkenkopf on Apr 6, 2009 9:38 PM EDT up reply actions
Meant as tongue in cheek, not as a personal insult. Fact is, though, this thread is a bunch of guys high-fiving over regression to the mean. The tone of self-congratulation here made for a stark contrast with the reality, i.e., nobody posting thoe comments actually had a certain critical piece of data, even though that data was freely available on dozens of websites. Loud, confident and wrong.
I’m as much of a stathead as anyone here — seriously, should we whip out the standardized test scores or something? — but when a significant piece of relevant data is omitted, you can throw the whole analysis out. That goes for any type of analysis. This piece purports to be a zoomed-in view of a mere half-inning of a single game, yet the singular event on which the inning evidently turned is omitted. That is a critique of the analysis, not the person who wrote it.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
by Jay on Apr 6, 2009 9:04 PM EDT up reply actions
I took them in 7th grade when they changed them to 2400 scale.
1980
"I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf"
-Tug McGraw
i know, isn't it unfair?
Math is what I’m good at, haha. English? Not as much.
Haha
"I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf"
-Tug McGraw
Forgot to mention, treating an event like getting nailed in your pitching arm based on a binary scale — either he was injured, or he was not injured — is not very convincing. If you watched the game or even charted it, it ought to be clear to you that Lee’s command suffered significantly after being struck by the liner, as compared with the first, third and fourth innings. Ultimately, the analysis hastily makes a “cute” point, at the expense of offering the complete facts.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
by Jay on Apr 6, 2009 9:08 PM EDT up reply actions
I don't believe I treated it like that, but by all means, if that's how you took my comment then go ahead.
by R.J. Anderson on Apr 6, 2009 9:29 PM EDT up reply actions
i'd would just note.
that part of regression is instead of, say, lee catching a line drive for an out, it’s getting hit on the arm by a line drive and having that cause a poor inning. when you have a good season (or a great one, like lee had) things go very well. when you have a more “normal” season, the proverbial stuff happening is more a part of it. a bad season is a lot of said stuff happening.
I basically agree with that, but that’s a useful concept when you’re looking at a whole season. It isn’t very helpful when just looking at one inning. If R.J.’s point was, look at the crazy stuff that can go wrong and skew a whole season in the space of 0.2 IP, that would be an interesting point, albeit one that can be made about one reliever or another practically every day of the season.
Also, I didn’t take your first comment in the thread to be a reference to Lee suffering an injury today. I thought you were just ragging on Bendix for his little Indians Apologiarrhea problem.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
a lot of stuff on here is offered without explicit comment.
and we draw our own conclusions. sort of like what we’re doing right now. maybe the injury should have been explicitly mentioned. i dunno. i knew he’d been hit and he stayed in so i didn’t think it was all that important. and i rather thought rj’s final observation sort of got to the interesting point that stuff went “wrong” in the second inning today after things didn’t go wrong for like 58 innings last year.
and i was ragging on a specific thing bendix wrote on here (blogs, as i’m sure you know, can be quite self-referential). but i try to work on multiple levels when i can.
also, that interview series you have with antonelli is great stuff.
Thanks. It was a tough balance, as I was trying to get answers to questions from the perspective of a mainstream but fairly sophisticated fan. So there is a little bit of asking questions where I already more or less knew the answers, but wanted the Indians’ unfiltered take on the question, and then also some explicit discussion of things like regression and variance, BABIP normalizing, valuing closers based on leverage, etc. He was really great about it, but it did take him a while to get used to the fact that, no, you do not need to explain to me (or my readers) why you aren’t paying attention to batting average, and things like that.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
a lot of stuff on here is offered without explicit comment. and we draw our own conclusions. sort of like what we’re doing right now. maybe the injury should have been explicitly mentioned. i dunno.
A good statistician is suspicious of all stats and always looking for reasons to doubt that they mean anything. A bad statistician assumes the numbers are meaningful by definition. Bill James has written about this many times, and it’s a precept that everyone who writes about statistics should take to heart.
There is not a single major league scout or evaluator who would tell you that the story of that inning is worth looking at without knowing that Lee was struck on his pitching arm by a hard liner — it simply defies common sense. A statistical analyst is supposed to have common sense, too, not just facility with numbers and graphmaking.
This post presents a whole bunch of data, and while no conclusions are drawn, its very presentation implies that the data is meaningful. The good statistician looks at the data suspiciously, asking, “Is there any reason for me to doubt that this data is meaningful?” And the answer to that question, in this case, obviously is “yes.”
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Wondering
How did you get the graph? Or did you just make it yourself?
It seems like a lot of top pitchers were roughed up yesterday.
Interesting points here.
I see Jay’s point that there might have been an implied analysis, but I also think we (people in general) need not to always read information presented.
Larry’s point about “regression” taking many forms is a good one.
We also tend to over-use the word “regression” these days, and it’s probably not a great concept to talk about for one game, except maybe in the light Larry mentioned.
By my count, there were three people who might have typed a comment implying any analysis of Lee’s inning, and two weren’t obvious. The more we can address comments to specific authors and specific commenters, the better.
Groupthink is bad, and we all should probably make a more conscious effort to avoid it.
I think concluding that Lee’s performance in the second inning was fully due to getting hit on the arm and that he recovered after in the third and fourth until getting into more trouble in the fifth isn’t great analysis.
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
Do you know where to get graphs like this Sky?
I’d like to use this kind of the stuff to analyze the Dodgers.
by Brendan Scolari on Apr 8, 2009 2:49 AM EDT up reply actions
I don't, sorry.
Hopefully RJ or Harry can chime in here.
The data is readily available at mlb.com pages, I do know.
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
Hmm okay.
I’ll look there. Thanks for the response.
by Brendan Scolari on Apr 9, 2009 1:37 AM EDT up reply actions
I think concluding that Lee’s performance in the second inning was fully due to getting hit on the arm and that he recovered after in the third and fourth until getting into more trouble in the fifth isn’t great analysis.
Yes — and nobody made that analysis. Even in my own recap, to a sympathetic audience, I was careful to lay out the sequence without claiming causality:
Cliff Lee got nailed above the elbow by a line drive comebacker in the second inning, and though he evidently was not hurt, the Rangers scored four runs on six baserunners that inning.
That said, Lee faced 25 batters and allowed 11 on base. Five of those baserunners were among the next 6 batters after Lee’s arm was struck. He threw first-pitch balls to only 4 of the other 20 batters he faced, yet he threw first-pitch balls to 5 of those next 6 batters. He threw a second-pitch ball to two of them, and another two got base-hits on the 1-0 second pitch. The only one who didn’t get a first-pitch ball was a 20-year-old with an OPS of 566 last season; he fouled off the first pitch and eventually hit a double.
I think there is a strong supposition that Lee’s command was worse for those six batters than it was for the rest of the game. Is it a coincidence that that exact 2/3 of an inning was the exact 2/3 of an inning after his throwing arm was struck? You know something? It might actually be a coincidence. That kind of variation isn’t so rare. And yet, there is a big difference between (a) having trouble throwing strikes, leading to a bunch of hits or the lower half of the lineup, and (b) giving up three runs to the 3-4-5 hitters.
But the point is not that it was or wasn’t because his arm was struck. The point is that no conclusion can be drawn, and because of that, what happened that inning is essentially meaningless. In looking at just one inning, Lee is neither blamed nor excused. In looking at a full season or career, yes, eventually that inning just becomes part of the larger picture of variation.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
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