Being broadly interested in OBP Allowed, and working with a database of all American League seasons in the 1970s of 150 or more innings pitched, I happened to sort by percentage of hits allowed that were singles.
Tiant and Jenkins are two I’ve grown up hearing about in the vague context of “great” (albeit to varying degrees), and I love how your piece fleshes them out a little. That run if correlations at the end was fascinating, too. I need to let that bit sit for a bit before I feel out whether my intuition matches any of those results, but this was, to overuse the word, fascinating. Thank you.
I have been thinking about the correlations a bit more. The thinking there was a bit thrown together, and I wanted to be careful not to get too deeply involved there, or the piece would have been more seriously analytical than I intended. I think basically what we are seeing is that, since extra base hits make up more hits than home runs, they correlate more with hits. They could not correlate any less, since home runs are a part of extra-base hits. Hits with extra base hits is part of the ANSWER; strikeouts with extra base hits is a more legitimate GUESS, and all guesses are, in a sense, blind guesses. And that is why the correlation is lower.
Please do check out footnote 20 on the BAbip comparison if you didn't. Substack told me my post fit gmail right up until the "new subscriber prompt icon" was added, which would have cut off footnote 20. Ahhhhh!
The descending size of the correlations of SO w/ hits, versus SO w/XBH, vs. SO w/HR, again, I think, just shows the size of the pool of hits you are talking about. The bigger the pool, the more important strikeouts is to that hit rate.
One r I didn't give in the piece was -.05, BA with HR/H, not significant. As opposed to .00, BA with XBH/H. So, while ns, it does say that pitchers stingy on BA might tend to give up a few more home runs, considering. But again to me this can be read as home runs just beng "real" hits, and the others "luck" hits, in line with BAbip theory....
I did not see footnote 20 reading my email, so thanks for the heads up. Should’ve known to look—I got truncated last month.
Thanks for this extra info. That first about XBH and HRs really clicks, and I’ll keep thinking on the others. I appreciate where you’ve pointed me.
Between your Notes, Lance Brodzkowski’s daily pitcher capsules, and the boxscores, I’ve got baseball back in my morning routine. I was always a “Sports section cover-to-cover” kid, and this is more a much more thought-provoking version of that. (21-0 shutout by Kolek and the Padres. The 2025 Rockies are on a mission to Hold-My-Beer the 2024 White Sox!)
It is certainly a tribute to the Rockies' ineptitude that they seem to be more or less appreciated, even the year after the White Sox. I'm sure there are good articles being written about whether they actually figure to lose 122 or more games. I was noticing this morning that the difference between their record and their runs-suggested record is only -2 wins, a mucher lower bad-luck quotient than I would have predicted with such a terrible team. Came in with 124 runs, 237 against even before the 21-0 loss, which is scoring 34.3% runs in their games. I know, on the other side, the 1969 Orioles are basically the only modern team to have scored 60% of the runs in their games.
Tiant and Jenkins are two I’ve grown up hearing about in the vague context of “great” (albeit to varying degrees), and I love how your piece fleshes them out a little. That run if correlations at the end was fascinating, too. I need to let that bit sit for a bit before I feel out whether my intuition matches any of those results, but this was, to overuse the word, fascinating. Thank you.
I have been thinking about the correlations a bit more. The thinking there was a bit thrown together, and I wanted to be careful not to get too deeply involved there, or the piece would have been more seriously analytical than I intended. I think basically what we are seeing is that, since extra base hits make up more hits than home runs, they correlate more with hits. They could not correlate any less, since home runs are a part of extra-base hits. Hits with extra base hits is part of the ANSWER; strikeouts with extra base hits is a more legitimate GUESS, and all guesses are, in a sense, blind guesses. And that is why the correlation is lower.
Please do check out footnote 20 on the BAbip comparison if you didn't. Substack told me my post fit gmail right up until the "new subscriber prompt icon" was added, which would have cut off footnote 20. Ahhhhh!
The descending size of the correlations of SO w/ hits, versus SO w/XBH, vs. SO w/HR, again, I think, just shows the size of the pool of hits you are talking about. The bigger the pool, the more important strikeouts is to that hit rate.
One r I didn't give in the piece was -.05, BA with HR/H, not significant. As opposed to .00, BA with XBH/H. So, while ns, it does say that pitchers stingy on BA might tend to give up a few more home runs, considering. But again to me this can be read as home runs just beng "real" hits, and the others "luck" hits, in line with BAbip theory....
I did not see footnote 20 reading my email, so thanks for the heads up. Should’ve known to look—I got truncated last month.
Thanks for this extra info. That first about XBH and HRs really clicks, and I’ll keep thinking on the others. I appreciate where you’ve pointed me.
Between your Notes, Lance Brodzkowski’s daily pitcher capsules, and the boxscores, I’ve got baseball back in my morning routine. I was always a “Sports section cover-to-cover” kid, and this is more a much more thought-provoking version of that. (21-0 shutout by Kolek and the Padres. The 2025 Rockies are on a mission to Hold-My-Beer the 2024 White Sox!)
It is certainly a tribute to the Rockies' ineptitude that they seem to be more or less appreciated, even the year after the White Sox. I'm sure there are good articles being written about whether they actually figure to lose 122 or more games. I was noticing this morning that the difference between their record and their runs-suggested record is only -2 wins, a mucher lower bad-luck quotient than I would have predicted with such a terrible team. Came in with 124 runs, 237 against even before the 21-0 loss, which is scoring 34.3% runs in their games. I know, on the other side, the 1969 Orioles are basically the only modern team to have scored 60% of the runs in their games.