Platoon Differential

[schittenden]

1 minute ago, SteveA said:

There seems to be a few "asymmetrical" type things in sabermetrics that has always bothered me a bit.   The one that always jumped out at me the most was how a high emphasis was put on pitchers' stirkeout rates (more = good, obviously) and yet you aren't supposed to care if your hitters strike out a lot.   If more strikeouts is good for a pitcher, it seems to me it should be bad for a hitter.

 -- 

I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess that makes sense.  There could be some counterarguments, I guess.  Not sure what they'd be off the top of my head, but there must be some.

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, schittenden said:

I'm just curious.  Would you apply the same logic to LOOGYs?  I mean, after all, if they only had faced more righties, perhaps their differentials wouldn't be so bad.  The logic seems the same.

I don't think so.  I think pitchers are a different beast, because they can do things to specifically tailor their approach to be really good against lefties and that necessarily makes them much worse against righties.  I don't think batters have the option to do the equivalent of throwing a sidearm Frisbee slider 60% of the time.

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, SteveA said:

There seems to be a few "asymmetrical" type things in sabermetrics that has always bothered me a bit.   The one that always jumped out at me the most was how a high emphasis was put on pitchers' stirkeout rates (more = good, obviously) and yet you aren't supposed to care if your hitters strike out a lot.   If more strikeouts is good for a pitcher, it seems to me it should be bad for a hitter.

 -- 

I'm good with the strikeout asymmetry.  There's nothing, at least yet, acting as a balancing force for strikeouts.  We may be near/at a tipping point, but Ks are a weird case where they're great for pitchers, and a secondary effect of power for hitters.  Pitchers it's obvious, strikeout leaders have always been among the best pitchers in the game from the 1800s on.  You can see it in the batter's splits by looking at results when an at bat ends on a ball not in play (i.e. K, HR, BB, SAC, HBP, CI) - batters might hit .140, but with an .875 OPS.  ABs that end on an in-play ball have an OPS almost .200 points lower.

But at some point it will be bad, we may be near that now.  Or maybe a little past.  Where so many Ks mean that batting averages go down, driving down OBP, and power finally can't keep up so overall production goes down.

[DrungoHazewood]

5 hours ago, Since'54 said:

Should this be a matter of notions -- preconceived or otherwise?  Its certainly a matter of statistical fact and I am particularly surprised by the assertion that variation doesn't apply for individual batters. And then the immediate citation of an exception.

The exception was an obvious way of saying that "no variation" really meant "way less than is commonly thought."  The takeaway shouldn't be that all hitters have a .050 OPS platoon split.  It's that nobody has a true talent .290 overall batting average and a .150 against lefties, .350 against righties.

[DrungoHazewood]

3 hours ago, El Gordo said:

I think I'm understanding this. If Lowenstein Had been given closer to the same 3600 PA v LHP, his splits wouldn't be so extreme ,rather much closer to the average? That platoon splits are to some extent a self fufilling prophesy?

I think that's kind of true.  What happens is a player, early in his career, has a 100- or 200-PA stretch where they OPS .600 against lefties.  They get platooned.  They OPS .775 against righties, but maybe they only get six PAs a month against lefties.  They play 10 years, they end up with 500 PAs against lefties, heavily weighted by their .600 OPS in 200 PAs in their first year or two along with very sporadic ABs afterwards.  

But the postulation here is that if you just let them play they'd probably have OPS'd .775 against righties and .700 or .725 against lefties.  That may not have made sense if you had someone better against southpaws... so that helps reinforce the idea that there are players who are just helpless against left-handers.

[BohKnowsBmore]

2 hours ago, schittenden said:

I'm just curious.  Would you apply the same logic to LOOGYs?  I mean, after all, if they only had faced more righties, perhaps their differentials wouldn't be so bad.  The logic seems the same.

One thing about LOOGYs... Not sure how this affects the analysis, but Davis, for example, has a decently worse split against LH relievers (compared to his split against LH starters).  It seems that teams often deploy their best lefty (for facing lefties) against very strong LH batters.  Maybe this washes out to some degree, but I feel like it's a small example of how tactical decisions and the overall chess match muddies the waters for broad-based analysis that leads to the conclusion of there being no difference across players w/r/t platoon splits.

[DrungoHazewood]

55 minutes ago, BohKnowsBmore said:

One thing about LOOGYs... Not sure how this affects the analysis, but Davis, for example, has a decently worse split against LH relievers (compared to his split against LH starters).  It seems that teams often deploy their best lefty (for facing lefties) against very strong LH batters.  Maybe this washes out to some degree, but I feel like it's a small example of how tactical decisions and the overall chess match muddies the waters for broad-based analysis that leads to the conclusion of there being no difference across players w/r/t platoon splits.

I've had a notion once in a while to see if I could find Strength of Opponent stuff on LHers who face a lot of LOOGYs.  Years ago it seemed like Nick Markakis was almost always facing a guy with a huge LH platoon split in the late innings of any semi-close game.  But I've never really looked into it.

[Tony-OH]

19 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I think that's kind of true.  What happens is a player, early in his career, has a 100- or 200-PA stretch where they OPS .600 against lefties.  They get platooned.  They OPS .775 against righties, but maybe they only get six PAs a month against lefties.  They play 10 years, they end up with 500 PAs against lefties, heavily weighted by their .600 OPS in 200 PAs in their first year or two along with very sporadic ABs afterwards.  

But the postulation here is that if you just let them play they'd probably have OPS'd .775 against righties and .700 or .725 against lefties.  That may not have made sense if you had someone better against southpaws... so that helps reinforce the idea that there are players who are just helpless against left-handers.

This just makes zero sense. To suggest that a hitter would suddenly get much better at something he's shown over a significant period that he can not do just doesn't make sense. If you watch a left handed hitter pull off, swing and miss by a foot or more or totally look lost because he just can't pick up a pitch from the same side, thre is no indication that he's suddenly going to get better with more time doing it. Besides, the major leagues is about success, not giving a guy 1000 PAs to prove he can't do something. 

The reason the platoon differentials are close for everyday players because they ARE EVERDAY PLAYERS who have proven they can hit both. For the life of me I can't understand how anyone who has watched baseball would take those numbers and somehow come to the conclusion that platoon players wouldn't be platoon players because the everyday player's platoon differences aren't that different. 

This is utter madness. Some guys just can't do certain things well. A human scout can tell this by watching how they react to certain pitches and pitchers and then they can look at the stats to re-enforce that scouting opinion. 

This is the kind of thing that gives some of the real good work done by Sabermetricians a bad name.

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, Tony-OH said:

This just makes zero sense. To suggest that a hitter would suddenly get much better at something he's shown over a significant period that he can not do just doesn't make sense. If you watch a left handed hitter pull off, swing and miss by a foot or more or totally look lost because he just can't pick up a pitch from the same side, thre is no indication that he's suddenly going to get better with more time doing it. Besides, the major leagues is about success, not giving a guy 1000 PAs to prove he can't do something. 

The reason the platoon differentials are close for everyday players because they ARE EVERDAY PLAYERS who have proven they can hit both. For the life of me I can't understand how anyone who has watched baseball would take those numbers and somehow come to the conclusion that platoon players wouldn't be platoon players because the everyday player's platoon differences aren't that different. 

This is utter madness. Some guys just can't do certain things well. A human scout can tell this by watching how they react to certain pitches and pitchers and then they can look at the stats to re-enforce that scouting opinion. 

This is the kind of thing that gives some of the real good work done by Sabermetricians a bad name.

The point I think you're missing is that most guys with "normal" platoon splits still vary a lot from year to year.     Let's take Nick Markakis for example: .813 vs. RHP, .721 vs. LHP and certainly an everyday player by any definition.    But he's had years where he didn't hit lefties well, like 2011 when he had a .628 OPS against them in 212 PA.    So let's say that had happened in his rookie year, instead of in the middle of his career.     Some manager might have concluded that he wasn't very good against lefties, started using him as a platoon player, and he might never have been a regular again.    

Now, I happen to think (and believe you agree) that one can watch Nick bat and discern that he doesn't bail out and isn't fooled by breaking stuff when it's thrown by a lefty.    So I'd like to think that a manager would be patient in that situation.    But I don't know that all would be.    And then it gets harder to hit lefties because you rarely see them and the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.     My guess is, there are some platoon guys who probably could have hit lefties at a normal rate if given the opportunity.    

[Tony-OH]

3 hours ago, Frobby said:

The point I think you're missing is that most guys with "normal" platoon splits still vary a lot from year to year.     Let's take Nick Markakis for example: .813 vs. RHP, .721 vs. LHP and certainly an everyday player by any definition.    But he's had years where he didn't hit lefties well, like 2011 when he had a .628 OPS against them in 212 PA.    So let's say that had happened in his rookie year, instead of in the middle of his career.     Some manager might have concluded that he wasn't very good against lefties, started using him as a platoon player, and he might never have been a regular again.    

Now, I happen to think (and believe you agree) that one can watch Nick bat and discern that he doesn't bail out and isn't fooled by breaking stuff when it's thrown by a lefty.    So I'd like to think that a manager would be patient in that situation.    But I don't know that all would be.    And then it gets harder to hit lefties because you rarely see them and the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.     My guess is, there are some platoon guys who probably could have hit lefties at a normal rate if given the opportunity.    

Now I can agree with this line of thinking, but the thing is, these guys have a minor league track record that already give managers and GMs a pretty good feel due to stats as well as a lot of scouting reports from the minor league managers, hitting coaches, and scouts.

It's not like these guys show up and are unknown, go 20-for-100 against a certain hand and suddenly a manager thinks he's a platoon guy. Is it possible that a guy was pigeonholed into a reputation unfairly at some point, sure, that's possible, but the whole line of thinking that takes the average results from everyday players and applies it evenly across all players and concludes there are no platoon players is ridiculous.  

[Can_of_corn]

4 minutes ago, Tony-OH said:

Now I can agree with this line of thinking, but the thing is, these guys have a minor league track record that already give managers and GMs a pretty good feel due to stats as well as a lot of scouting reports from the minor league managers, hitting coaches, and scouts.

It's not like these guys show up and are unknown, go 20-for-100 against a certain hand and suddenly a manager thinks he's a platoon guy. Is it possible that a guy was pigeonholed into a reputation unfairly at some point, sure, that's possible, but the whole line of thinking that takes the average results from everyday players and applies it evenly across all players and concludes there are no platoon players is ridiculous.  

Or even a track record from playing in Asia.

[Frobby]

24 minutes ago, Tony-OH said:

Now I can agree with this line of thinking, but the thing is, these guys have a minor league track record that already give managers and GMs a pretty good feel due to stats as well as a lot of scouting reports from the minor league managers, hitting coaches, and scouts.

It's not like these guys show up and are unknown, go 20-for-100 against a certain hand and suddenly a manager thinks he's a platoon guy. Is it possible that a guy was pigeonholed into a reputation unfairly at some point, sure, that's possible, but the whole line of thinking that takes the average results from everyday players and applies it evenly across all players and concludes there are no platoon players is ridiculous.  

I agree with you.