Quote:
Originally posted by draven085
The poise rating sounds like a mechanism that will be used to generate statistical outliers that would not be generated as easily from a DIPS based game engine. If that is the case, I would hope that any sort of 'poise' rating would be hidden.
Still, I share Aadik's concerns about the poise rating. I think the idea of veterans possessing it over young players is generally bunk. Many of the pitchers typically cited as evidence of 'poise' existing are very good pitchers who hang because they have a more impressive skillset than a typical major league pitcher. If 'poise' exists and is so important, why don't we see more pitchers like Moyer? How come more medicore veterans don't develop this poise and outpitch their 'stuff'?
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I agree 100% with the above. "Poise" seems to be Markus' way of reproducing a pitcher's BABIP relative to his teammates. One way to see if this is true is to see if there is an inordinate number of knuckleballers with high poise ratings (6 of the top 35 pitchers in terms of avoiding hits on balls in play in Major League history were knuckleballers, according to Tom Tippett's article -- see below). Unlike other objective measures of pitching ability (BB, K, and HR rates), BABIP's correlation year-to-year is low, so it can often vacillate wildly, from season to season, about a pitcher's "true" ability of preventing hits on balls in play (BABIP). Oftentimes, the signal gets lost in the noise. We know now that many pitchers have the distinct ability to prevent hits on balls in play over the course of a career (see Tom Tippett's excellent article on this at
http://www.diamond-mind.com/articles/ipavg2.htm), however this is something that is often known only retrospectively about a pitcher, after he's pitched several seasons. For this reason, keeping this rating "hidden" makes sense. Also, keep in mind that the impact on a pitcher's skill set by BABIP will often be dwarfed by the big three (BB, K, HR). The very BEST pitcher in real life at this skill, in terms of rate, was Charlie Hough, allowing 0.026 less BABIP than his teammates. That comes down to less than 1 hit for every 38 balls in play, or about 1 hit every 2-3 starts -- for the BEST pitcher at this skill.
The following is excerpted from Tippett's article:
"The following table shows how eleven groups of pitchers compared with the overall averages. The first row includes all pitchers who faced less than 1,000 batters in their careers. The second row includes all pitchers who faced at least 1,000 batters but less than 2,000 batters during their careers. And so on.
"Career BF BF HBP BB K HR vsLg vsTm
1 - 999 401,138 .002 .027 -.017 .002 .017 .015
1000 - 1999 931,981 .001 .013 -.009 .001 .006 .004
2000 - 2999 1,105,712 .001 .007 -.005 .000 .002 .001
3000 - 3999 1,179,916 .000 .006 -.003 .000 .000 .000
4000 - 4999 906,271 .000 .002 -.002 .000 .000 .001
5000 - 5999 920,680 .000 .001 .000 .000 .000 .000
6000 - 6999 647,553 .000 -.004 -.002 .001 -.001 -.001
7000 - 7999 843,937 .000 -.003 .000 .000 -.002 -.001
8000 - 8999 716,200 -.001 -.005 .005 .000 -.002 -.002
9000 - 9999 788,532 .000 -.008 -.001 -.001 -.002 -.001
10000+ 2,589,409 -.001 -.010 .008 -.001 -.004 -.003
"Let's walk through the first row so it's clear how to read this table. Those pitchers, as a group:
"faced a total of 401,138 batters in their careers
"hit batters at a rate that was .002 above the league average. In other words, they hit two more batters per 1000 BF than did the average pitcher.
"walked 27 more batters per 1000 BF
"struck out 17 fewer batters per 1000 BF
"gave up 2 more homers per 1000 BF
"gave up 17 more hits per 1000 balls in play when compared with the league-average pitcher
"gave up 15 more hits per 1000 balls in play when compared with the in-play averages of their teammates
"As you can see from the table, the pitchers with longer careers were progressively better than their shorter-career counterparts in every respect. They walked fewer batters, struck out more hitters, gave up fewer homeruns, and gave up fewer hits on balls in play. The ability to prevent hits on balls in play appears to be as much of a skill as anything else."
There has also been some exciting discussions at Baseballprimer.com on the subject; one, in particular, has been nominated for a Primey (
http://www.baseballprimer.com/articl...-02-05_0.shtml -- 10. Best Thread category (DIPS analysis)).
The following is an excerpt:
"So, can we say that when a starter has 700 BIP, the influence on those BIP as a group can be broken down by:
luck : 44%
pitch: 28%
field: 17%
park : 11%
??
"I have to admit that I've recently said, though I don't remember where, that I thought the split would be 40/30/20/10 with the order being luck,fielding,pitching,park.
"What we are saying here is that pitching and not fielding is the larger determinant between the two. And perhaps before I read about DIPS I might have had the correct order.
"I think it's still important that yes we need to separate the components (HR.BB,K) from the BIP, as Voros does. But, the conclusions drawn from that does not stand based on the reasoning.
"I think our best conclusions would be the follows:
1 - pitching has more impact on BIP than does fielding
2 - luck has more impact than anything, over 700 BIP
3 - BABIP is not a good enough measure for the pitcher's skill"
Markus is on the right track, but I'd hate to see "poise" become a "Runs Allowed" rating, simply by another name.