Sharks vs. Piranhas Part III

Hi, I'm Greek House! You may remember me from such posts as Sharks vs. Piranhas Parts I and II. I am also the author of the best selling book "Guppieball: The Art of Leaving Runners on Base".

The 3rd part of the series deals with what happens when our two teams slump. I should add at this point that I tend to think that people make too much of a big deal of slumps and hot streaks. If you're looking at a true .300 hitter and you were to pick a random sampling of 100 ABs for that player, there is about a 50% chance he will be hitting above .300 for those ABs and about a 50% chance he'll be hitting below it. If this player was almost always hitting at least .290 over 100 ABs, his true average would be way over .300.

People shouldn't be surprised when Mauer goes 0-17 or Morneau goes for a month without hitting a HR. These things may be a bit unexpected, but they're certainly within the realm of normal. These things could just as easily be attributed to bad variance as they are to an actual decrease in that player's ability.

I would tend to believe that the biggest risk involved in a slump is that in an effort to correct any problems the player may change something in their current (good) approach and replace it with a worse approach. This problem can be compounded if the player then experiences some good variance, resulting in immediate gratification. He then believes this fixed the problem and continues to hit with this lesser approach.

That said, let's look at what happens when our teams efficiency decreases. This could happen because we have an old team that is beginning to show signs of age, the team loses some good hitters to injury, or any number of other things. When they're both producing with 100% efficiency, both teams produce 4.5 R/9. Let's look at what happens when they produce at lower rates.

There is a much more drastic dropoff in runs for the Piranhas than there is for the sharks. In fact, the Sharks will still win 56% of the time playing at 80% even if the Piranhas are playing at 90%. The reason for the discrepancy is that the Sharks aren't relying on stringing hits together to score runs. The Piranhas on the other hand need at least 3 hits to score, and when the chances of them getting a hit drops by 10%, the chances of them at least 3 hits in an inning drops off much more drastically.

To me, these numbers say as much about prospects as much as it does about slumps. If you bring up a singles hitter and a power hitter that seem to be roughly equal in their ability to create runs, it would still be more valuable to sign the power hitter. The reason being that if you're hitters don't live up to their expectations, the power hitter will still be somewhat serviceable whereas your singles hitter will be garbage. It is only fair to note that if the players exceed their expectations, the singles hitter will be much better.

You could also make the same argument for aging players. There is significantly more risk in signing a veteran singles hitter since you know that there's very little chance of them improving, but a significant risk of them getting worse.

It's also fun (or perhaps miserable if you're a Twins fan) to look at how a team of Tyners or Puntos would fare. Since both players have very little power, replacing average with OBP seems a reasonable way to approximate this. Tyner's OBP is .332 on the year, so a team full of Tyners would score about 3.5 R/9. Meanwhile, a team of Puntos (.293 OBP) would score a pathetic 2.3 R/9.