Winning the Strike Zone, and Winning the Rest of the Game
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Baseball is about the strike zone. -- Bill James, ca. 1992
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... Winning the Strike Zone and Winning the Rest of the Game, that's the title of an article that James put up last week. It's a piece that forwards our understanding of baseball. It also happens to be weirdly relevant to the 2014-15 Mariners, and to Lloyd McClendon.
James, as you might have heard, had this interesting little idea that you could ratio a team's Runs and Runs Scored to predict their winning percentage. You might not have heard that baseball people hated the idea, for a long time, before they finally all signed off on it. Galileo, indeed.
In fact, you take Pythag and you take Runs Created, and a few other simple ideas, and you revolutionize baseball. You're not looking for players who "know how to win" -- you're purchasing bases gained and bases lost.
But the pendulum has swung too far, and we've moved from humility and insight into arrogance and dogma.
Now he whisks away a curtain and reveals that you can also predict a team's winning percentage by ratio'ing 4 things: their strikeouts and walks, in the top and bottom halves of the inning:
