The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed by J.C. Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page A

direction of the catcher’s throwing arm. For a right-hander the ball will tail toward a runner stealing a base, and for the lefty it will tail away.
    • The “framing” of pitches—so that the umpire is more likely to call borderline pitches strikes—is harder for lefties.
    • The limited availability of left-handed catcher’s mitts prevents left-handed players from learning the position as they grow up.
    The first two explanations involve skills that are too minor to explain the complete exclusion of lefty catchers. All baseball players can throw hard and straight without much fading. Framing pitches is more about acting than the positioning of the catcher and offers no obvious advantage to catchers of either handedness. The last explanation doesn’t fit with what we know about players learning new skills at the major-league level. Many players learn new positions and skills that they never played or used before. If a lefty could play catcher, the fielding instructors would be able to teach him how to do it.
    The answer most commonly given, and the one I’ve found most convincing, is that left-handed catchers have a harder time throwing out runners at third base on steal attempts. The way the catcher positions himself to receive the pitch creates a difficult throwing angle for left-handers. A lefty must pivot and possibly throw behind a right-handed batter. This is similar to the difficulty that a left-handed shortstop faces when throwing to first. It’s possible that the difficulty in throwing to third base allows runners at second a greater opportunity to reach third on a steal. Problems solved, right? I’m not so sure.
    Is this really that much of a problem? Right-handed catchers don’t seem to have too much of a problem firing pickoff throws to first base (the equivalent of left-handed catchers throwing to third base). Just ask Manny Ramirez, whom right-handed catcher Javy Lopez picked off first base at a crucial time during the 1995 World Series. To examine the potential advantage that right-handers have at preventing opposing runners from producing runs by stealing third, we need to know how valuable it is to keep runners on second base from getting to third base.

What Is Third Base Worth?
    We can gauge the value of third base by quantifying the change in the runs a team is expected to score in a given base/out situation. The farther a runner is around the bases, the more likely it is that a runner will score. Additionally, each subsequent out in the inning lowers the number of runs we expect a team to score in an inning, because each out limits the opportunities for a team to knock in runners on base.
    Thankfully, the tools we need to measure the trade-off are available and were first presented by George Lindsey in 1963. At the time, Lindsey was an Operations Research Scholar for the Canadian Department of Defence, who had an interest in baseball. With the help of his father, Lindsey tracked the individual plays of baseball games to gather the frequency of different events in baseball. 17 There are eight possible runner configurations (empty, first only, first and second, etc.), three out situations (zero, one, or two), for a total of twenty-four possible states in an inning. From his data, Lindsey calculated the frequency of and the expected runs to be scored from every base/out situation. Lindsey’s chart is a helpful tool, because baseball games produce a multitude of outcomes from the same initial starting state. The chart is simply a compilation of the average of all of the run outcomes at the end of the inning in which the state occurred. For example, with a runner on first with no outs, the expected number of runs to be scored from this situation

is .813; however, a runner on second with one out can be expected to produce .671 runs in that inning (that’s right, on average —not in all instances—sacrificing an out for a base in this situation lowers the expected number of runs scored in the