I was wondering about some of the HOFers in this leagues thoughts on Strand Rate for pitchers. Do you find it an effective measurement? I've been looking at it lately and trying to draft pitchers with high rates but I don't have any solid evidence as to whether it's important or not in this game. Any feedback would be cool. Thanks.

I suspect that it doesn't have any meaning or effect within the WIS system. 

But in real life baseball I would VERY interested in knowing more about it, since we are so obsessed with WHIP now (see my own obsessive writing on it in this Forum on WHIPs under 1.00) that we forget that sometimes people on base don't score. 

ARE there pitchers that strand more runners that others? Are they the same pitchers that have the lower WHIPs, so that Stranding runners is just a function of being a better pitcher? 

This is sort of asking the same question as: how is ERA correlated to WHIP? Since the purpose of baseball is to win games, and to do that you need to drive in runs and keep the other team from doing the same, and with all the (admittedly correct as far as they go) criticisms of RBI and ERA for being depending on one's teammates, I wonder if we have not been sold a way of understanding baseball that is more appropriate to winning a Fantasy Baseball or even a Simulation Baseball league (where you only draft individual players and their stats, not a team that works together), thereby taking the whole way players play baseball - as and only as part of a team and only in that context do their performances have meaning - out of context. 

This is part of the whole trend of our times of emphasizing ONLY individual performances that can be measured - this is what a lot of the standardized testing in schools, which has made such a mess of things - is about, in part to drive home the idea that everyplace is merely a marketplace and all of us - students, ballplayers, etc. are forms of entrepreneur in competition against each other. 

But classrooms are groups, and learn together, and, the culture and context of the classroom matters. Teams are teams, and only function together (something recent management theory - which since it has to actually address how to run businesses - is well aware and so eschews the individualization approach) and if we see players performances as having meaning ONLY in the context of what the point of baseball is: to win games for teams - then IF some pitchers are better at preventing runs from scoring once runners are on base, and are so consistently, that would be of real importance. 

If we keep to the wholly individual methodological approach that has produced WAR etc. then that would likely be seen as a coincidence like clutch hitting or RBIs. 

But if it is the deciding game of the World Series, bottom of the 9th, are you more comfortable with A-Rod up because the stats tell you he is the better hitter and context does not matter? Or Reggie Jackson? 

Prof - I expect you're right that Strand doesn't matter in Sim. And I agree with you on that it is a stat I'd want to know about in real baseball. It's also called %LOB....percent left on base. A pitcher who has a high Strand Rate seemingly doesn't fall in the face of pressure and can bear down and get out of jams. He has to ability to not fatigue in these situations where he is throwing many pitches. The ability to focus. You especially want a Closer who has a high strand rate...but a good Ace SP you would think would also have one. I drafted a Roger Clemens who does not have good Sim numbers...OAV is like .234...but his strand rate is like .837. So I'm curious to see how he performs. He'll probably get bombed, but finding out these kinds of answers it what makes the game fun to experiment with. Thanks for the response.

cwillis802, I was already doing some research on the relationship between ERA and WHIP and, did not think to just go straight to the Strand Rate. What I am seeing in the DC is fascinating. I think. 

It is too early to say, but if Strand rate were to prove more of a contributor to ERA than WHIP? The whole idea that emphasizing keeping people off bases instead of keeping runs from scoring would need to be rethought. But that is way down the road. For now I am still working on something and hope to post in the next few days some more historical analysis of how these relationships have moved. 

It seems to me that, while Strand rate is taken seriously by sites that deal with advanced statistics (I just did some searches and found that it is treated seriously) it throws into question what has been almost Bible faith for Sabermetrics - there is no such thing as clutch play. 

If instead some pitchers consistently had high Strand rates, but did not consistently also have really good WHIPs or OAV, wouldn't that be statistical evidence of the existence of  "clutch pitching"? What else to call it? 

If instead Strand rates for the same pitcher are all over the place, and very few, and very rarely and only in exceptional cases varies more than a little from the league average (which I am finding according to other sites is 72%, though WIS' DC gives Strand as three numbers from the decimal point like batting average -  0.720  - then that would suggest we are just finding coincidence, luck, the effects of fielding and team play behind the pitcher (though if some TEAMS had consistently good or bad Strand rates with different pitchers that would tell us again that we need more than just individual player stats). 

So more from me soon on all this - a lot more research to be done.

"Sabermetrics - there is no such thing as clutch play. "

If the above quote is really consistent with the "Sabermetrics" theory, then the theory is blind and stupid on that point.

ANYONE who has ever played baseball (on the field!) (or basketball, and other sports) KNOWS without doubt that "clutch" is real.
Some players just perform better than their norm when UNDER the pressure of clutch situations. 2 out walk off game winning hits, buzzer beaters, etc happen occasionally for any competent professional level player, BUT some players just deliver in the real clutch "team oriented" situations with more reliability than others.
It's real. Ask any long time player who has been a part of a competitive winning cohesive TEAM. Usually the team members themselves know which of them they'd prefer to be up with the game on the line, to use baseball as the game involved.  Good teams have belief that any of them can deliver BUT they still have a "pecking order" of preference (or trust?) for whom they'd prefer up. In my experience anyway.    :-)

I hear you Laramiebob, but there have been a lot of studies refuting the idea that any players hit better in later innings in game-winning situations or in close games with runners on base than any others independently of them just being better hitters under normal conditions anyway. 

So while my own experience watching baseball tells me what yours does, any argument needs to take this into account - that statistics seem to show this not true - Bill James, SABR institute and others seem to have refuted its existence. 

BUT the results of looking - admittedly very quickly, so I am not making any claims here - at the relationship between WHIP, ERA and Strand rate are interesting. 

On the one hand, most pitchers with good Strand rates - say over .800 - also have good WHIPs, and so are generally good pitchers. But since 1947, at least 500 pitchers have had WHIPs of 1.20 or higher and Strand rates of .800 or better, and of these 100 have pitched at least 150 IP (so let's call these starting pitchers). Of those 100, I count fewer than 10 (looking quickly) with ERAs over 3.00 and most of those are just over 3.00. 

Twenty pitchers  with 150 or more IP since 1947 have had WHIPs of 1.30 or higher but Strand rates of .800 or better. Only 4 had ERAs over 3.00. Six of those had WHIPs of 1.40 or higher, and only one of those had an ERA over 3.00. 

So it is at least possible to have a pitcher season long who gets into trouble - 1.20 WHIP in a 9 inning game is 11 base runners not counting errors, but an ERA of 3.00 means that pitcher prevents more than 3 of those from scoring. 

Still among SPs were do not have many - 100 in 68 years is almost exactly 3 every 2 years. A rarity but not heard of, but I am not sure if any repeat. 

But among relief pitchers this is a much more common thing: 

Posted by laramiebob on 1/13/2016 11:18:00 AM (view original):
"Sabermetrics - there is no such thing as clutch play. "

If the above quote is really consistent with the "Sabermetrics" theory, then the theory is blind and stupid on that point.

ANYONE who has ever played baseball (on the field!) (or basketball, and other sports) KNOWS without doubt that "clutch" is real.
Some players just perform better than their norm when UNDER the pressure of clutch situations. 2 out walk off game winning hits, buzzer beaters, etc happen occasionally for any competent professional level player, BUT some players just deliver in the real clutch "team oriented" situations with more reliability than others.
It's real. Ask any long time player who has been a part of a competitive winning cohesive TEAM. Usually the team members themselves know which of them they'd prefer to be up with the game on the line, to use baseball as the game involved.  Good teams have belief that any of them can deliver BUT they still have a "pecking order" of preference (or trust?) for whom they'd prefer up. In my experience anyway.    :-)

When I'm on a baseball team, yes, I know who I want batting when the game's on the line.

Funny, that list of players is exactly the same list as the list of best overall hitters...

When I tell the DC I want pitchers 1947-2015 with 0 to 149 IP and WHIPs of 1.30 to 2.00 and Strand rates of .800 or better I get at least 500. If I add the criteria of an ERA of maximum 3.00 or lower, I STILL get 500. Meaning we still don't know how many, since the DC page maxes out at 500 names.

So I broke the list up to 1980 to 2015 and got 346 names of pitchers in 35 years - about 10 per year - with WHIPs of 1.30 or higher, ERAs no higher than 3.00, Strand rates of .800 or better - 339 with 0-149 IP and 7 with 150 IP or more. 

In a 9-inning game, 1.30 per inning is close to 12 batters allowed on base, and with an ERA of 3.00 or lower we have pitchers who are allowing 1 person per inning on base without letting them score (with the other 0.30 per inning scoring the 3 earned runs per game - rounding up). 

That means that pitchers who have success - ERA of 3.00 or lower - despite WHIPs of 1.30 or higher - success therefore due to an ability to keep people from scoring once they are on base, would seem to exist. "Clutch pitching". 

Now, it could be an effect of fielders behind the pitcher - especially good double-play combos or outfielders with great range making that catch with two outs and a runner on second to save their pitcher. EXCEPT that unless we assume that a fielding change has been made mid-inning - often - we have to ask why those same fielders didn't stop the original hits that got the 1.30 people on base in the first place. Unless they were on base due to walks. 

Looking at baseball-reference I see that the MLB average for walks per 9 innings from 1980 to 2015 (the years I searched for) has ALWAYS been between 3.1 and 3.8 walks per 9 innings. Except for three years: 2013 - 3.0, 2014 - 2.9, 2015 - 2.9. So there have been fewer walks per 9 innings FEWER per game in the past three seasons than at any point in the past 47 years - the last time it was lower than 3.0 per game was - ta-duh ! 1968, the all-time greatest pitcher year. 

From 1994 to 2000 EVERY year but one had 3.5 walks per 9 or higher - with a high of 3.8 in 2000 - but none of the other seasons between 1968 and 2015 ever had a 3.5 or higher walks per 9 innings rate except for 1969, 1970 and 2009. By the way for some reason 2001 sees a sharp drop in BB/9 back to 3.3 from 3.8 the season before - one walk every two games difference in one season, despite Bonds setting the record. I figure once pitchers saw Bonds they were no longer intimidated by anyone else and decided to take their chances pitching to them !

So I am going to take 3.3 as a "normal" walk per 9 rate, and consider pitchers that are not pitching in the steroid years of 1994-2002 to have a high BB/9 rate if they are over that 3.3 norm. 

And indeed 269 of those 346 pitchers do have 3.4 walks per 9 over higher. BUT only 94 are from 1980 to 1993, 117 are from 2001 to 2015, and 62 in the 8 years of 1994 to 2001 when the whole steroid fireworks would be the biggest factor. 

Twenty-one pitchers with WHIPs of 1.30 or higher, ERAs of 3.00 or lower, 3.4 walks per 9 or higher and Strand rates of .800 or better are from the past three seasons, 2013-5. 

Since we just established that the percentage of walks per game is historically low - the lowest since 1968 in these three seasons, having 3.4 walks per game in a three-season period in which the league average was just 2.9 is a minimum of half a walk per game higher than average - pretty significant. Yet these 21 pitchers - 7 per year, have managed to keep runners on base to a remarkable degree, despite being a WHIP nightmare - walking a lot of people. Since there walk totals are so high, some as high as 5 or 6 a game, it is possible that the keeping of runners on base and not letting runs is partly due to teammates' defense. This would suggest again that ERA is highly team-driven, not indicating that much about the pitcher's quality. 

BUT, aside from the larger point that this exactly WHY you play on a team - a minor point negated by all the individually-oriented stats of today - Sandy Koufax once said he became a good pitcher when he started trying to get the batters to hit the ball, and Trevor Hoffman is quoted in the book "The bullpen diaries" as stating that Nolan Ryan was not an all-time great pitcher because he was always trying to strike everyone out - we have the same issue as before in reverse. 

If we say that fielding can't explain runs not scoring if the same fielders were on the field when the guys got on base in the first place, as then we are giving fielding credit for the runners staying on base but blaming the pitcher for them getting there in the first place (a problem with WHIP as with all individually oriented stats of today), then we also can't say that the pitcher's tendency to walk batters explains their being on base but not them coming in to score. Unless, of course, as I argued in the thread on batting (see in the Forum) analysis, a walk is really NOT as good as a hit (it is not - it is the thing little league coaches said to really bad hitters like me to encourage us to not swing because they thought we would strike out, to make us feel better. It is a nerd's revenge now in the form OBP-obsession by people who could not hit when they were 9 and 12 and now want those who get on base by other means to be appreciated). 

Of course it takes a lot of walks to get runs in as opposed to hits which can move runners more than one base and presumably that is what OPS is measuring, a batter's ability to both get on base and to move runners along. I for one am less impressed by a double with no one on than one that clears the loaded bases, but I think actual game situations should be the standard to judge performance by, just as I prefer to look at the real economy instead of the economic models created by neo-classical market economists, who likewise try to get the real world to conform to their imagined models. But OPS is used to deal with this issue, that getting hits that can drive runners is is important, presumably more important than the actual driving in of runs which since RBI as a stat requires you to play on a baseball team, something of course irrelevant to baseball knowledge, can be ignored. But I digress...

So we have a stalemate now, OPS  can allow us to give credit to the fielders for the runners allowed on base by these 346 pitchers, including the 21 in the past three seasons, with such high WHIPs and walks per game (the pitcher let them get on base in a way that the fielders could not affect) having such good Strand rates and low ERA success, since once runners were on base, unless the bases were loaded it would take more than a walk from the profligate pitcher to get them home and the fielders could prevent that. 

So that may be all this is. But of course you have to make up your mind how much pitching is actually meant to get batters TO hit to fielders, and can ONLY be evaluated by how well a pitcher coordinates their pitching with the defensive setup of their team and its abilities, and how much that defensive setup is oriented toward the kind of pitcher on the mound (good infielders for sinker-ball pitchers, good outfield range for fastballers, shift to the right side of the infield if pitching inside to a left-hand batter etc.) and how much we can really instead, as the more recent fads, um, I mean trends in sophisticated baseball stats argue, really evaluate the precise individual contribution of the individual pitcher separate from the team on the field around them and likewise with each of the fielders, separate from the team, its defensive setup and the pitcher on the mound, that pitchers' style, pitches, and location etc. 

Anyway, since 1980 269 pitchers, or 7.7 per year, have walked at least 3.4 batters per 9 innings, had WHIPs of 1.30 or higher, and with Strand rates of .800 or better kept their ERAs to 3.00 or better. And without the walk minimum that number grows to 346 - just about 10 per year. 

I think it is a "thing". And if it really exists, it would be an example of "clutch pitching" and if "clutch pitching" exists, then it is possible we are just not doing the right kind of research, asking the right kind of questions, to figure out why clutch play would exist in pitching but not in hitting, or rather what measures would bring out its existence if existence there be. 

From 1947 to 1979 the number of pitchers with WHIPs of 1.30 or higher, with 3.4 or higher walks per 9 innings and Strand rates of .800 or better with ERAs of 3.00 or under was 160 - in 33 years. That is just shy of 5 per year, a little lower than the 1980 to 2015 era which saw 7.7 of such pitchers per year. Why the difference? 

When we eliminate the 3.4 walks minimum as a search criteria, we get 201 such pitchers from 1947 to 1979, or just over 6 per year, whereas we have 10 per year since 1980. Why the difference?
This difference is just one of absolute numbers, so it may be a mere function of there being more teams than in the earlier period. If so, then we have a relatively consistent presence of pitchers who are able to keep people from scoring once they are on base over historical time.

But how do we interpret this fact then? One way would be to say that there is therefore no clutch anything happening, just a statistical probability. Somewhere between 6 and 10 pitchers a year will have a Strand rate such that it keeps their ERA under 3.00 despite their WHIP being over 1.30. So no individual anything is happening here. 

Another possibility is to see this as being common enough to support the hypothesis that such pitchers exist. See, it is not automatic in either direction, though the serious SABR-heads will argue that since only things that they can show to have been happening statistically can be said to exist, then the relatively consistent range of numbers of such pitchers means that it does not - that there are no individual pitchers that are especially good at keeping keeping people from scoring separate from their overall WHIP, since players being on base or not, the score, etc. should statistically have no more significance or meaning than the bases being empty. As Descartes taught us (supposedly) all time and place is homogeneous and so one hit counts as one hit, one walk as one walk, and 3 outs as one inning - whether they actually occur in one inning, across two innings, or in three different games in which a pitcher pitches one-third of an inning each. Context is irrelevant to such thinking.

This thread is perhaps not the place for this debate but...........

"When I'm on a baseball team, yes, I know who I want batting when the game's on the line.

Funny, that list of players is exactly the same list as the list of best overall hitters..."

My own experience forces me to disagree with the second sentence of that quote.  There were times when that was perhaps so, but I played on many a team wherein our best hitter was decidedly NOT our best 2 out winning run in scoring position hitter.

Not to argue or anything............

Italyprof, I think your analysis of strand rates has a glaring hole - it's functionally ignoring luck.  You actually pointed out yourself that most of the "outlier" pitchers with strand rates that don't seem commensurate with their WHIP have relatively low IP totals.  That means small sample sizes, so random occurrences are bound to be more likely.  The question is, how many names repeat?  Do the guys with 100+ IP who make the list actually have unusually good strand rates in other seasons?  If it's really a skill, rather than luck, it should repeat season after season.  I suspect that in most of the cases it doesn't.  To an extent, stranding runners is a skill.  Some pitchers are better than others at pitching out of the stretch.  Prior to the emergence of the big bullpen in the past few decades, the better starters would generally not throw at 100% with a few-run lead until runners got on base.  A few - Verlander and Halladay come immediately to mind - still have the "cruise control" capability well in hand.  But even with those factors, I don't think you tend to see guys have massively anomalous strand rates over a career.  Some are better or worse than expected, but a strand rate of .8+ from a guy with a 1.3 WHIP is almost certainly getting lucky.  I suspect this will manifest as a lack of surrounding seasons with comparable numbers.

I would also point out that it would probably be more informative to look for guys with strand rates anomalously out of synch with their OAV than their WHIP.  Doug Drabek and Nolan Ryan pitched at a similar time and both had a 1.25 career WHIP, but you would certainly expect Nolan Ryan to have a better strand rate.  You have to load the bases before you can walk a guy in.  Bases loaded is a small enough proportion of all PAs against that you can basically assume that most of the time walking a guy is not going to score the baserunner.  And even if you have a walk 4, K 3 inning, you'll wind up with a strand rate of 75%.  If you manage to K 3 the next inning while only walking 3, you wind up with a cumulative strand rate of 87.5%.  So it's hard to walk your way into a bad one.