Happy 12th Annual Pirate Got Hit by a Car Day!

Hooray! Still not dead! Also, pitchers and catchers have reported to St. Lucie. This day just keeps getting better and better!

Heads up -- I will murder the first person that asks me if I was looking the wrong way.* Anyway, I should probably go drink a bunch of beer, as is my tradition, to express thanks for my survival to an ultimately merciful, if occasionally sadistic Maker.


* I was not looking the wrong way. Vaunted London cabbie drove up onto the sidewalk and plowed through a crowd of pedestrians, then crashed into a building. Nicely done, Reg.

The Dugout Is Funny

And so are advanced sabermetric acronyms.

One more day.

Let's Compare

Does anybody still find this interesting? Apart from me, I mean?

Here's the graphs of HBP/G, ISO, SLG, and OPS presented all together. I added a different constant to each to get them to appear on the same graph. If you follow me, OPS (that's On-Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage) will run somewhere between .625 at the bottom and .780 at the top, while the number of Hit By Pitches per Game ranges from .125 to .389, so I added .500 to all my HBP values. Crude? Yes. Good statistics? Probably not. But who cares?

So, ah . . . what does this tell us? Well first of all, for our purposes, OPS, SLG and ISO are all equally good as indicators of a year's offensive fireworks. Apart from being different colors, all those graphs may as well be the same. And second, wow, guys are getting hit like crazy these days. Why?

Well, I guess it's a couple of different things, like those articles said. Guys are wearing all that body armor these days, so they're not afraid to get hit -- remember, batting helmets weren't even mandatory until, like, the sixties, and if you don't think that had an effect on HBP rates, you obviously don't know who Ray Chapman is. Batters are also diving out over the plate more these days, so they're more likely to get hit. So what do we do about it?

Bill James wrote that he would gradually move the batter's box four inches further away from the plate, making it both easier to hit the inside corner of the plate, but not the batter; and also making it more difficult for batters to dive out over the plate and pull an outside pitch. And that might work. But the very first thing I would do, is stop awarding first base for getting hit on armor.* Already, the umpires don't give you first if you don't make an effort to get out of the way of the pitch -- same principle.

*Except the helmet.

Even More HBP

It just dawned on me that, implicit in my arguments is that there’s some idealized rate at which a pitcher “should” be hitting batters. Here’s a little thought experiment:

Imagine a baseball league in which nobody ever hits anything but singles. Logically, pitchers in such a league would never want to walk a batter or hit him, because those ALWAYS lead to baserunners; whereas a pitcher who makes the batter put the ball in play will get him out two-thirds of the time. And even if he does get a hit, you're basically no worse off than if he'd taken a base on balls or a HBP.

Conversely, imagine a league where EVERY hit goes for extra bases. In this slugging league, pitchers might decide that they're better off pitching inside and risking a walk or HBP, rather than giving up a double, single, or homer. You can't score the runner on first with a walk.

So, it seems logical that the more extra base hits there are, the more willing a pitcher should be to pitch to the inside of the plate and risk either walking or hitting the batter. What that exact rate should be, I don't know. But it seems like isolated power and HBP would go up and down together. And they do!

More HBP

I was thinking about this again today and realized that maybe ISO would be a better stat to compare to HBP. ISO, or Isolated Power, is just Slugging percentage minus Batting Average. Slugging %, or SLG, is the total number of bases a batter hits -- one base for a single, two for a double, three for a triple, and so on -- divided by his at bats; so if you subtract a guy's batting average from his slugging percentage, you'll get a pretty good idea of how frequently his hits go for more than one base. It's a general measure of how hard guys are hitting the ball.

I also plotted this graph using a three-year linear moving average, to smooth out the curves and make the line a little less jumpy. Hopefully, that makes my point a little clearer, but mostly it's because I was bored.

HBP

I read a really interesting article by Steve Treder yesterday at the Hardball Times, about the sudden HBP (that's Hit By Pitch, for you non-baseball people. Hi, honey!) explosion that nobody seems to have noticed, and it got me thinking. Apparently, batters are getting plunked at unprecedented rates. Pitchers today are hitting batters more frequently than Don Drysdale and Sal "The Barber" Maglie. Steve also cites a series of very interesting articles by Dan Fox, which I frankly can no longer read because I have allowed my Baseball Prospectus subscription to expire*. Anyway, I remember reading 'em when they came out, sort of. They were good.

My basic theory is that HBP is a self-regulating system. When offense goes up, eventually batters start getting hit more frequently -- either by pitchers needing to pitch on the inside part of the plate and hitting guys by accident, or pitchers just saying "fuck it," and figuring that it's better to just go ahead and plunk Barry Bonds and put him on first rather than letting him hit -- until batters are so consistently getting backed off the plate (or taking first on an HBP) that batting levels start to drop. And then it starts all over again.

So, to figure out if I was on to anything, I had to do a couple things. Number one, I had to reconstruct Steve's HBP graph (which involved a lot of time on both retrosheet.org and baseball-reference.com) so I could screw around with the data, and compare the relative rates of HBP and slugging (a general measure of how hard batters are hitting the ball) and OPS (which correlates extremely well with overall scoring). That was a pain in the ass. Anyway.

Wow, look at that -- batters really are getting hit more often. Huh. Anyway, take a look at OPS and Slugging over the same time period.


They look similar, yeah? If you look at the graph of HBP per Game, and the graphs of OPS and SLG, the shape of the graph is almost the same -- it starts out low, then there's a hump in the 60's before it starts taking off in the late 70's/early 80's -- but the HBP graph is a couple of years behind. Let's not forget that the pitchers who are hitting all of these batters are human. I don't imagine that Dontrelle Willis conjures up a batter's ISO power before he decides whether or not to plunk a guy in the ribs. But I do think that pitchers apply the lessons they learned last year to the batters they face this year.

If you look at the graph of changes in HBP rate with the changes in SLG and OPS, they're kind of opposite. When the rate of hitting is going up, the rate of hit batsmen is going down, and vice versa. I wish I knew enough statistics to do a correlation, because it looks to me like HBP and offense are negatively correlated. But I'm not that smart. Anyway, here's a graph of the percentage of change in ML HBP, SLG, and OPS.



*I allowed my Baseball Prospectus subscription to expire on principle, because I refuse to pay for baseball analysis on the internet; especially when you can get so much great stuff for free. Look, I really like the BP site -- it's great; I have their book and everything. But if retrosheet.org is free, I just can't see my way clear to pay for Baseball Prospectus. I don't pay for ESPN Insider, either.

This Is Going To Take Crackerjack Timing

While I'm working on my HBP post . . . you know who's awesome? Fucking John Carpenter. The Thing, Halloween, Escape From New York . . . They Live, for the love of God. Jesus Christ. What more can a man do?