I am a bit suprised although I expected it to be 3-4 runs even at the higher end..
The actual penalty for Ichiro's infield hits is closer to 1 run a year. I tacked on another run to estimate the difference in advancement value between his non-infield singles and doubles+triples to that of league-average.
This is conservative.. the actual run value penalty in Ichiro's speed hits below league average is likely somewhere in the 1.5-2 run range per year. This will likely cancel out with the value of Ichiro's post-play errors as Matt showed in the thread (although we don't have multi-year data for that stat in that thread).
The difference in advancement value between an infield hit and an average single is just really small. Even if you were to assume that an infield hit would NEVER advance a runner more than one base, the value would still only be 0.08 runs below average. Since this is unrealistic, I set the value at 0.05 runs. I was a little suprised at how little it added up to, but it isn't too suprising since you are comparing two POSITIVE nearly identical outcomes. When you take into consideration that the on-base portion of a single has a higher run value than the advancement portion...Well, you can see that the difference just isn't going to be very much at all.
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