Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Run Prevention: cuz it works, bitches!

Bill Petti has an interesting piece at Beyond the Boxscore. In short, it says that if you want to be good, be good at run prevention rather than run production. We certainly saw the Giants do that last season. When you are 17th in the majors in runs scored, and win the World Series, it is obviously about pitching (and defense). I never thought it was possible to build an "unbalanced" winning team, but I was wrong. Obsessive Giants Compulsive chips in a comment on Mr. Petti's post that's worth reading as well. OGC has been saying much the same thing for quite some time now, and knows his numbers. Of course my mate JC has been hammering me with "it's all about the pitching" long before I was ready to believe it.

Here's a snippet from the article (emphasis mine):
As we've seen, run prevention can provide more of an edge to teams than run scoring. Add that to the fact that elite run preventing teams had the same probability of making the playoffs during the decade as run scoring teams (63%) and run preventing teams had a higher probability of winning the World Series (7% to 4%), and the Giants don't look quite so lucky--they just look good.
It's a great time to be a Giants fan.

--M.C.

1 comment:

BilliamFloyd said...

Defense, Defense, Defense. Gotta love Bochy's use of our bench in Defensive substitution opportunities. I'd hate to think losing Schierholtz or Ishikawa in order to accomodate our roster limitations would effect our late-game Defense.