Well put, billfer. Why can’t I be so succinct? Ah well…

We should pick up this luck topic again some time, though. Another possibly fruitful discussion would be one about the use and abuse of baseball statistics. Which matter more, which less, what’s the difference between a significant difference and an insignificant one, some clarification of what makes a significant sample size in what context, etc., etc., that sort of thing.

Hey. It’s a long offseason. We can only make so many imaginary trades, sign so many imaginary free agents, and make so many imaginary lineup/rotation changes.

With regard to the spray charts, that is helpful but incomplete. You can’t discount the singles and you most certainly can’t discount the outs. Was he hitting fewer balls to right or was he getting fewer hits on balls to right? I actually don’t know.

As for Sheffield and his lack of XBH, that’s the way he’s hit the bulk of his career. A career that has been remarkably successful. I don’t think you get extra HOF consideration depending on whether or not you hit the ball to the opposite field. Although with the BBWAA I wouldn’t put it past them.

@others

On the topic of luck and the widespread with Ordonez, I’m entirely comfortable saying that the .496 batting average was largely a function of luck. That just isn’t a natural number so he was likely quite lucky. The .295, that’s a tad to the unlucky side. One, it’s below his normal batting average, and 2, it’s below a normal batting average on balls in play.

@Smoking Loon
Luck isn’t always a first resort, and I’d say among the larger baseball loving community it is treated more as a last resort, especially when it comes to individual performances. There very well may be a number of other factors that go into these things, but the difficulty is in measuring them. Because a great deal of the variation comes within the normal limits it is easy to dismiss it as luck.

(The Snorg girl I’m sure really is Irish though. Not sure about DD, he could be one of those where his great-grandfather moved to America and changed his name from Devin O’Dumbrowski to Dave Dumbrowski or something)

This was such an unlikely statement that it made me suspicious. Now I’ve finally figured out billfer’s cryptic message:

Dombrowski likes Cate Snorg thinking she’s going to be in Ulster very soon.

I did some research just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Sure enough, a check of the passenger manifest on a recent flight to Northern Ireland revealed both a C. Snorg and a “D. Smith.” Yeah. I told you his hair was good.

Meanwhile your fate is being decided somewhere amidst some smoke and grumbling…

now hold on here I can’t put Guillen at 3rd I think I told him he was our Leftfielder now. I guess for one game it wouldn’t hurt him. Hmm, I can’t put Thames in left though, I told him he was the everyday LF and then didn’t play him there, then if I all of a sudden act like he really is the LF, that’s not really playing straight with him…oh hell Inge can play Left…OK hold on Jimmy slow down here, I’m gonna try an experiment here, I’ll have these guys try switching positions, that puts Inge at 3rd and Guillen in LF…I hate moving Carlos around so much though. Oh hell what am I doing Inge has to catch, maybe I have to play Raburn at 3rd. Wait no I think he can catch too. And there’s that tall guy…Hey! Gene! Who’s that guy who catches sometimes whose not Inge?…

[to be continued...]

Ha. OK, hit ‘em where they should be but ain’t. Is it legal to position defenders in foul territory or in the stands, by the way?

I just think it’s usually more interesting to look at other things – hard – first before citing fortune or luck or ____. Up to a point, of course. We all have our patience limits.

Maybe more pitchers (and more defenders?) had the benefit of good scouting work on Maggs and his first-pitch tendencies in 2007 – those numbers would frighten anyone – and Maggs just didn’t make the required adjustment, though it wasn’t enough to drag him down much overall.

That explains Sheffield…The Shef’s eagle eye detects a large space between 3rd base and the stands, with no player from the other team in sight! He flexes his oblique and yanks a hard line drive straight into this unguarded territory, haha you guys are pretty “ain’t” where the Shef just put it, ain’t ya?

I think what I really want to say here though is a hitter’s success rate will be the combination of his actions–what he decides to swing at, the type of swing, how fast he runs after he hits it,m etc–with external factors, such as how good the fielders are, the decisions they make, the baserunner situation, the weather even. Most of these the batter has no control over, some he might have some control (they put 3 infielders on the left side of the infield, the batter can try to hit it to the right side etc).

This is the part, all of the things out of the batter’s control, where I’m saying most of the good/bad fortune occurs. Most of these things happen within a certain range; if you hit a ground ball up the middle once a game, there will be a few times somebody somehow snags it and gets you out; most games you will have your hit though.

But it’s at least possible that you could hit a ground ball up the middle once a game all season and NEVER get out, or likewise end up getting out 3/4 times hitting the same pitch just as hard to the exact same spot. What else would you call it besides lucky/unlucky or fortunate/unfortunate that the probability is you will bat about .400 on these, altough there is a chance, with the same swing, it might be 1.000 or .250?

Which is why your boss won’t be happy–unless a freak earthquake collapses all the freeways, in which case he will probably assume you proceeded as usual in an on-time manner, and external factors outside the normal range caused this to result in an “out”

Where is the line drawn, is what I want to know. How wide would the difference between Ordonez’s first-pitch swing results for 2007 and 2008 have to be before it might be informative to look for for explanations other than luck? Why is luck a first resort explanation rather than a last resort one? If we apply the “luck rules” for this particular Ordonez split more broadly, what happens?

The job of the hitter is to hit ‘em where they ain’t. If you keep hitting them where they are, no matter how hard or far or perfectly line-drive, you’ll soon be out of a job. This fact is what makes me look askance at luck as an explanation. Luck is real, true. But has anyone here thought clearly about where its limits are as an explanation? You could account for every event in the universe as luck or chance or fortune, if you really wanted to.

I’ll take my random statistical variations on a good answer.

Think of it like this: both years Ordonez swings at the 1st pitch 19.4 % of the time, and both years let’s say he hits 44% ground balls, and both years half of those ground balls are hard grounders to the right side of the infield. Even with this consistency, the result could be that one year 50% of those end up in right field as singles, and the next year only 20% do, and on top of that 10% of them turn into double play balls.

So he does the same thing, gets different results (I think billfer was making this same point); maybe because he hits them a tiny bit more right or left; maybe because the infielders this year play him differently, or maybe this year Thames and Cabrera are on 1st and 2nd, and last year usually Granderson was on first and wanting to steal, and that left larger gaps for Magglio between 1st and 2nd…

I’m sure you get the idea?

I didn’t mean to imply that there aren’t good flyball pitchers. I think these guys tend to be pretty good strikeout pitchers, too. Astute of you to suggest that what they really are, at best, is avoid-line-drive pitchers. Possibly “pitch-to-no-contact” pitchers, too.

11 balls that go one way or the other doesn’t seem much as a simple number. In terms of percentage, however, I must insist that 10% is – or at least can be – significant over any repeatable sample size. With 500 AB, a mere 15 hits more or less is the difference between batting .270 or .300, or .330 or .300, not something generally ascribed to luck even when luck has a good deal to do with it. Decisions about contracts and money are based on such things.

This is only what I’ve gathered from hearsay over the course of 2008, but apparently, Gary Sheffield in 2008 hit a veritable ton of line drives and even HR that were foul to the left. I don’t have the explanation, but I know it isn’t luck (and he wasn’t injured the whole season, either – not yet, anyway), and it had an effect on a guy with career borderline-HOF numbers hitting for a miserable average and poor OPS.

Think of variation this way:
Lets say the guy who hit .495 and then .295 has a ‘natural’ ability to hit right in the middle of them, .395. That’s what he would end up hitting if he took infinite ABs right at this moment. Over 110 at bats, .295 = 32.5 hits. Over 110 at bats, .495 = 54.5 hits. His ‘natural’ ability would give 43.5 hits. So, if 11 balls over those 110 ABs go just fair instead of just foul, or right by a fielder instead of at ‘im, that makes the difference between .495 and .295. There could, of course, be a lot of other things going on, but luck would be one possibility. Looking at things like BABIP and LD% can help you determine the likelihood that luck played a big part.

AB-BA-SLG-GIDP-HR-RBI

2008: 105 .295 .400 9 2 13
2007: 115 .496 .835 2 8 38

SO what this means now is: if Ordonez this season–swinging at the 1st pitch with almost the same exact frequency as last season–ALSO had the same results on 1st pitch swinging as last season, he would have finished 2008 BATTING .355 and won the batting title by almost 30 points, with a very slight dropoff in power, finishing with about 27 HR 128 RBI.

Billfer:

As for Ordonez and the difference between hitting .355 and what he hit last year, my guess is that it was random variation. From his stand point there is very little difference between hitting one through the hole between first and second and a ground ball to second. More of them just found there way through for hits in 2007. I think it was more a case of him being lucky in 2007 than anything changing this year.

Smoking Loon:

I don’t think Billfer’s comment addresses what Coleman points out, exactly. Maybe it wasn’t intended to? The first set of numbers up there, um… well, I need to understand if random statistical variation is supposed to account for that kind of spread, and if so, how. I mean, if a guy had between 105-115 AB over 2 consecutive seasons and batted .496 one year and then .295 the next, would we say he was first lucky and then unlucky? Even with an accompanying dropoff in SLG from .835 to .400? Maybe I’m not very bright, but I can’t yet fathom such an explanation.