TTOP

AZ 7  SF 0
There is this thing called the "Times Through the Order Penalty." It is a favorite topic among the saberistas. There is a fellow by the name of Mitchel Lichtman who is very smart and writes exhaustive analyses of baseball situations and he says this:

As you can see, the “times through the order” penalty is a significant effect that should be incorporated into a manager’s decision about when to remove a starting pitcher. In fact, it would behoove managers and pitching coaches to be much more mindful of a starter’s “times through the order” than his pitch count.

Obviously you have to read the whole piece to catch his drift. (I italicized the first sentence.) I remember being in a computer science lecture decades ago where the prof really got into some deep shit and lost half the class and then whipped out "as you can clearly see" before launching into a new arcane tangent. Even among that nerdy bunch there were chortles of derision. That's how I feel about some of this saber-stuff. But they are on to something. I'm not saying Boch should have pulled Smardj after five, but it's worth thinking about. I suspect Boch knows more than me about baseball, so I'm not complaining, just noticing that the game is always changing and I'm learning new things all the time. Here's more from Lichtman:

In an article I wrote two years ago about the benefit of “quick hooks,” I showed that a typical NL team could add from a half to a full win per season simply by removing a starting pitcher who is not an ace whenever he comes to bat in a high-leverage situation after pitching at least five innings, even if his replacement is a league-average reliever.

In the end, the players gotta play better and the coaches gotta coach better, and well, the goddamn owners gotta own better! (Thank you, George Scott.)

MadBum goes tomorrow. Go Giants!

--M.C.