The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed (5 page)

However, there is another possible spillover that we need to consider. It’s also possible that good on-deck batters have a negative impact on the batters who hit in front of them. A good on-deck hitter becomes even more dangerous if the hitter in front of him reaches base; that is the reason we expect pitchers not to walk protected batters. However, it’s also reasonable to assume that the pitcher will put forth more effort against protected batters with the pitches he throws in the strike zone. The traditional hypothesis of protection discussed by baseball fans assumes that pitchers can only vary their pitches by throwing in the zone or out of the zone, which is not really the case.

Pitching a baseball game is like running a marathon. Going full speed all of the time is not the way to succeed. If a pitcher throws as hard as he can on every pitch, he’s going to wear out quickly. This is why most pitchers vary their pitch speeds throughout the game. The difference in effort from batter to batter may be small, due to the quality of all major-league hitters, but pitchers do pitch slower to some batters and faster to others. Veteran manager Tony La Russa explains it this way:

If you have a veteran pitcher who may know what he’s doing out there, he may throw 140 pitches—but of the 140, he’s only maxing out on 40. The other 100, he’s taking a little off, putting a little on. But when the slop is flying, he’ll reach back and make his best pitch.
¹²

This impacts the hitting externality in an interesting way. While having a good on-deck batter may help the current hitter see more pitches in the strike zone, the pitches he does see may be tougher to hit than if he had a stiff hitting behind him. When there’s more to lose from letting up, that’s when we expect a pitcher to reach back for more. In the language of La Russa, a better on-deck batter creates more “slop.” And more slop for a hitter ought to make it more difficult for him to hit the ball.

If pitchers do vary their effort according to the game situation— and we have good reason to think that they do—then we need to modify the traditional protection argument. The externality of a good on-deck hitter may not be positive, but negative. If the good on-deck hitter causes the pitcher to ratchet up his effort, the batter might actually have a tougher time hitting. Having a poor on-deck hitter may cause the pitcher to be less fearful of the hitter reaching base, and therefore save his effort for a more crucial situation. In this case, a poor on-deck hitter would provide a positive externality. I can easily see a pitcher letting up on an eight-hole batter in the NL, because there is a weak-hitting pitcher on deck. The pitcher may say, “If I don’t get this guy, I’ll just get the pitcher.”

While, theoretically, it’s easy to see why the traditional view of protection might be wrong, we don’t know this. This is a problem that we can examine, but it requires some advanced statistical techniques. My math professor colleague, Doug Drinen, and I pondered the existence of hitting externalities over several lunches and decided the subject warranted further investigation. So we designed a test that would measure hitting externalities if they existed.

Using individual plate appearances of batters, we were able to observe how the hitting prowess of the on-deck hitter affected the hitting outcome. We had to be especially careful because there are many other factors that could impact the hitting of a batter. Therefore, we used a multiple regression technique to “hold constant” these other factors. As long as we could include in the model other factors that might influence the hit probability of the batter, we could isolate the impact of the on-deck hitter on the outcome. These were the outside factors we controlled for:

For data from 1984 to 1992, we measured the influence of on-deck-hitter quality (measured by OPS) on the likelihood that a batter would walk, get a hit, get an extra-base hit, or hit a home run. Doug and I were a bit shocked by what we found. Though the conventional baseball wisdom—a better on-deck hitter does protect a batter from being walked—is partially correct, the hitter also lowers his ability to hit for average and power. Therefore, a good hitter imposes a negative externality and a bad hitter imposes a positive externality on the batter who
precedes him in the batting order. This is completely counter to the conventional baseball wisdom.

However, there is one crucial caveat. Though we found the impact to be real—it’s more than a product of random chance—the size of the effect is tiny. So tiny, in fact, that it’s best to say that on-deck hitters have virtually no effect on the performance of a batter. It takes a very large difference in the ability of an on-deck hitter to have a tiny impact on the outcome for the batter at the plate. Table 1 shows the magnitude of the impact of the ability of the on-deck hitter on the current batter. A one-hundred-point increase in the OPS of the on-deck batter lowers the probability that the current batter will walk by 2.6 percent, get a hit by 1 percent, get an extra-base hit by 3.7 percent, and hit a home run by 3 percent.
¹³
Even with this rather large difference in on-deck hitter ability, the impact is very small.

Although protection is a regular topic of concern in the banter of sports commentators, it turns out that it’s not something to worry about at all. Protection is a myth. While pitchers do seem to fear walking batters when there is a good hitter on deck, the benefits of seeing more pitches in the strike zone are offset by greater pitcher effort. Sports announcers have more important things to worry about than protection.

3

The Extinct Left-Handed Catcher

left-hand.ed
(l
₂
ft′h
_a
n′d
i
d), adj. 4. Of doubtful sincerity; dubious:
left-handed flattery; a left-handed compliment.

—THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FOURTH EDITION

CATCHERS TYPICALLY have two qualities: good arms and bad legs. Adam LaRoche ought to be a perfect fit. As the son of former big-league pitcher Dave LaRoche, he has a cannon for an arm. Many teams wanted to draft him as a pitcher, but he wanted to hit. And no one would describe him as speedy. He broke into the majors with the Atlanta Braves in 2004 and has shown the potential with the bat to be a good-hitting catcher. Instead, he toils at first base—a position typically manned by hitters much better than Adam—which makes him seem very ordinary. Why? Because Adam is a victim of discrimination: he’s left-handed, and left-handers don’t play catcher in baseball.

Benny Distefano is a player whom you might know only as the answer to the trivia question: “Who was the last left-hander to play catcher in the major leagues?” In 1989 Distefano played three games at catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, becoming only the fourth southpaw to step behind the plate since the AL and NL merged. The fact that the catcher is a right-handed position has always puzzled me. There seems to be very little gained from excluding one class of players from a sport that generally favors left-handedness. But, as an economist, I’m a big believer in persistence signaling the superiority of a practice. As Nobel Prize–winning economist George Stigler wrote:

Mistakes are indeed made by the best of men and the best of nations, but after a century are we not entitled to question whether these “mistakes” produce only unintended results? Alternatively stated, a theory that says that a large set of persistent policies are mistaken is profoundly anti-intellectual unless it is joined with a theory of mistakes. It is the most vacuous of “explanatory” principles to dismiss inexplicable phenomena as mistakes—everything under the sun, or above the sun, can be disposed of with this label, without yielding an atom of understanding.
¹⁴

In answering this puzzle, it’s clear that I should heed Stigler’s advice. The strict use of right-handers at catcher is not the result of some whim or official policy of Major League Baseball. It’s a practice that has existed for nearly a hundred years. There has been too much time and too much incentive for teams to discontinue an inferior practice for this to be some sort of historical accident in the guise of traditional wisdom. In this chapter, I reveal what is desirable about limiting catching duties to right-handers, which causes this practice to persist.

The handedness of a baseball player matters on the field, and we tend to think it matters most in the matchups between pitchers and hitters. Typically, batters perform better against pitchers of the opposite hand, which is known as the “platoon advantage”—because two opposite-handed players on the same team sometimes take turns at a position based on the handedness of the pitcher. The handedness of players would probably be of very little interest in baseball if left- and right-handedness were equally distributed among the general population. Because humans tend to be right-hand dominant (87–90 percent of the population), this creates unique advantages and disadvantages in baseball. A left-handed hitter who is of equal hitting ability as a right-handed player is a more valuable offensive weapon than a righty because a left-handed hitter will have more opposite-hand at-bats than a right-hander, and will therefore produce more offense than a righty of equal hitting skill.

Conversely, the advantage for pitchers would
seem
to be the exact opposite. Right-handed pitchers will face more same-handed at-bats than lefties, thereby reducing offense of the opposing team. However, because lefty batters and switch-hitters populate lineups at a rate greater than in the general population, left-handed pitchers are actually quite valuable commodities. Left-handed hitting is something that right-handed fielders can learn to do, while handedness in throwing is an inborn trait. In 2004, 14 percent of position players threw with their left hand, which is not much higher than the incidence of left-handedness in the general population. However, out of this same group of players, 45 percent had the ability to hit left-handed—29 percent were pure left-handed hitters, and 16 percent were switch-hitters. The platoon advantage has created a strategic use of left-handed pitchers in order to limit the effectiveness of left-handed batters. Many teams carry a “LOOGY,” which stands for Lefty–One–Out–GuY, on their rosters to use as a relief specialist against left-handed batters. In 2004, left-handers pitched to 27 percent of all batters faced. Due to their rarity in the general population, being left-handed in baseball, both as a hitter and as a pitcher, is generally considered to be a desirable trait.
¹⁵

Handedness also plays an important role in fielding. The rules of the game dictate that players run the base path in a counterclockwise direction, which results in a high frequency of plays at first base. Due to the angle and distance at which the non–first basemen infielders must throw the ball to first base, right-handed infielders have an advantage in getting the ball to first. Therefore, the positions of second base, third base, and shortstop are almost exclusively manned by right-handers. As evidence, since the birth of the American League in 1901, a left-hander has played second base 86 times, third base 55 times, and
shortstop 8 times.
¹⁶
Handedness poses no such advantage/disadvantage in the outfield or first base, and players of either hand play these positions.

But now we reach the curiosity of the catcher. The catcher doesn’t face the same problem with fielding the ball that the other infielders do. In fact, a catcher who is left-handed will have an easier time making a throw to first base on a bunt than a right-hander. Yet left-handers have not played catcher with any more frequency than the other infield positions. Table 2 lists every player and the number of games he’s played at catcher by team and season since 1901. Jiggs Donohue is the only player who has logged any significant time at catcher, playing in two-thirds of the sixty-three total games in which a left-hander has played catcher. Since 1905 only four left-handed players have played catcher.