Game Two: Post Game Thread

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jim
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Post by jim »

Kyle wrote:Fair enough. When you elaborated it was much, much more level-headed. Admittedly, part of it was my fault because yes, I did make a lot of assumptions based on just a couple of short comments you made.

That said, I do think he's made adjustments. I can remember a handful of times right off the bat where he has taken the ball to opposite field (yesterday's hit in the 8th I believe, the bases loaded double in Game 2, etc), and that's not giving it any thought... those immediately come to mind; this isn't your typical ground-ball-to-short Molina, he seems to be making solid contact and going with the pitch -- both signs of someone who is going well.

And also: what type of message does it send to a player when he's hitting .325 in the playoffs and you lift him late in the game? I know he's a big boy and should be able to handle it, but I think you're taking the bat out of a hot hitter's hand and you're risking messing with him psychologically.
Well there is something we can definitely agree on. He makes more adjustments than anyone I know.

I understand your position, you are saying you see something different, which is completely different than saying "He was 7 for 20" and hit that really clutch homerun", or something like that. Fair enough.

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Post by Suicide_Squeeze »

jim wrote:
Kyle wrote:Fair enough. When you elaborated it was much, much more level-headed. Admittedly, part of it was my fault because yes, I did make a lot of assumptions based on just a couple of short comments you made.

That said, I do think he's made adjustments. I can remember a handful of times right off the bat where he has taken the ball to opposite field (yesterday's hit in the 8th I believe, the bases loaded double in Game 2, etc), and that's not giving it any thought... those immediately come to mind; this isn't your typical ground-ball-to-short Molina, he seems to be making solid contact and going with the pitch -- both signs of someone who is going well.

And also: what type of message does it send to a player when he's hitting .325 in the playoffs and you lift him late in the game? I know he's a big boy and should be able to handle it, but I think you're taking the bat out of a hot hitter's hand and you're risking messing with him psychologically.
Well there is something we can definitely agree on. He makes more adjustments than anyone I know.

I understand your position, you are saying you see something different, which is completely different than saying "He was 7 for 20" and hit that really clutch homerun", or something like that. Fair enough.
Alright, I think we've made some excellent progress today. Let's go eat a burder. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Everyone feel better!?!? :D

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Post by EastonBlues22 »

Michael wrote: Let's say you have a 10 sided die with 3 sides that have an "H" (hit) and 7 sides with an "O" (out). Now if you throw that dice 600 times I'm sure at certain times you'll roll a bunch of "H's" together. Are you are hot during those times? I'd say no.

I'm sure most of you will point out these are human beings so my example is nonsense. However unless there is an injury I believe your camp is giving meaning to randomness.
Let's completely ignore the human element for a minute to focus only on the numbers:

Molina is a career .238/.291/.342 hitter with a 1.60 GB:FB, .68 BB:K, and a 18.7/46.5/34.8 LD/GB/FB. Over the past two months his numbers are .257/.311/.389 with a 1.125 BB/K ratio. This year he's got a 1.14 G:F and a 18.5/42.5/39.1 LD/GB/FB. What's more, over the last two months he's been on his way to hitting about 18/35/47...something he's done for the first time in his career. Here's the graph:

Image

His BABIP is, if anything, unusually low even for even him this year, and it has not spiked upward during this two month hot streak:

Image

While the positive increase in results is certainly small...only about a two hit difference and a .070 OPS increase in the last one and two-thirds month, there is little doubt that Molina has been a different hitter over those last two months in ways that seem very un-random to me...and, even in some ways over this entire last year. Now, if you want to chalk his BB:K, G:F, and LD/GB/FB to luck as well...well, I can't stop you. But the fact remains that there are significant differences in those areas from his career norms, and they aren't nearly as affected by "luck" as something like a ball in play is.

Continuing with only numbers (and noting that JRod only has 30 ABs in this span):
Wilson is ~135 OPS points under his career avg since Sept 1st. Encarnacion ~135, Duncan ~205, and JRod ~265...these are all differences that are at least twice as significant as Molina's...if not more. All of them, except Encarnacion, have seen their BB:K ratios decrease. Encarnacion's BABIP has steadily decreased for the last two-thirds of the season...now it's down in the .270 range. Bad luck? Or symptomatic of the fact that went from a 20/40/40 LD/GB/FB hitter to a 20/53/27 hitter over that span? Coincidently, Encarnacion has been a terrible postseason hitter over his career...and his career postseason LD/GB/FB is 18.2/49.1/32.7. Since 2002 he's a 21/42/37 hitter. He obviously hits his best when his GB:FB is almost 1:1...and, lately, he's nowhere near that. He's much closer to where he is when he's batting his worst...he's hitting on top of almost everything. How many of his outs this postseason on balls in play have been weak ground balls? His career postseason G:F is 1.5...career 1.13...last two months it has been in the 1.70 range.

I could go on, but I think you see what I'm getting at. Players aren't automatons with static abilities...their abilities change depending on a variety of factors. There's a lot of statistical data that can be used to show that the extended "slumps" and "hot streaks" that various players are in aren't just random occurances...in many cases where the streak has become an extended trend, they're the product of tangible differences in the execution of the players. Now, you can claim that those differences in execution are random as well if you want...but I don't buy that things like BB:K and LD/GB/FB are random events. They may see fluctuation, but they are largely representative of how well a player is seeing the ball and centering the bat on the ball.

[FWIW, Duncan (~310) and JRod (~335) each have about half a full season's worth of ABs in their major league career...so, the numbers we have for them aren't necessarily set in stone as being representative of their true abilities anyway.]
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Post by EastonBlues22 »

Arthur Dent wrote:
EastonBlues22 wrote:Anyway, I'm not trying to argue that Molina was by far and away the best choice...I'm just trying to say that there were no choices that were far and away better than letting him hit for himself. Just alternatives that were roughly enough equivalent that there was no clear advantage in a one AB situation to having them hit.
I know very little about the stock market, but I remeber reading about some studies that showed that people who attempted to time the market tended to do worse than those who just buy and hold. Short term trends may look like information, but that may or may not be true.
That is true...over the long run. There are plenty of people who jump in low, and hope that it will go high...only it keeps going lower. Or, they're holding while it's going high...waiting for it to peak, and then they miss the peak and have to sell when it's on it's way back down again. Timing the market to maximize gain is difficult, but it can be done if you read the market trends accurately, and use those trends wisely.

But in reality, we're talking about what the market will do on one specific day...not what it's going to do over two weeks, or a month, or a year. If it's been going down for four months, it's most likely to go down again tomorrow barring some radical outside influence...but, with a 15 year trend of it going up every year, by the end of the next twelve months the safest bet is that it's going to eventually get back to positive at some point due to some outside factors. You don't know when that's going to happen...only that it will likely happen eventually. To assume that it's going to happen tomorrow without any prior indications is silly...you wait for some evidence that it's going to start trending upwards before you make that assumption.

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Post by EastonBlues22 »

jim wrote:
EastonBlues22 wrote:
jim wrote: And every piece of objective data say the opposite for hitters - they don't matter.

I PH for Molina there.
The objective data tells you who's most likely to do what in a vacuum situation...or over a long period of time when anomalies have a chance to even themselves out.

In a very specific situation, you can either treat it like a vacuum situation and do what the stats say...figuring you'll come out ahead in the long run if the stats are accurate predictors.

Or, if there is no long run, you can augment the stats with the other things you know about the situation in order to try to come up with the best choice. This is where watching closely how people have been performing recently (or something else) can help you make a judgement about the situation. It's not ignoring the stats, it's understanding that raw data that's gathered over a long period of time and over a wide variety of situations isn't necessarily the best predictor for what will happen in one very specific one at a specific point in time.

Players get hurt and it alters their swing. They're in a slump so they start to press and it alters their approach at the plate. A lot of things happen that can mitigate what the stats might otherwise say.
I agree, but I guess I just assumed that like me, you don't really see anything different about Molina to suggest he's become a good hitter. I assumed you were just going on recent trends.

So you think Yadi has become a good hitter, at least for a short stretch? Do you think he's different than the hitter we saw all summer long?
Yes, I do...for some reasons that I posted in a response to Michael above. Whether it will carry over into next year or not, I have no idea. It's very hard for me to carry over the mechanics of my golf swing from one summer to the next...I imagine it must also be very hard to stay 100% on top of your hitting stroke during an offseason.

Will he keep batting like a .300 hitter from here on out this postseason? I don't know...but I definitely don't think he's going to revert to Mendoza Molina either for these last few games.

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Post by EastonBlues22 »

jim wrote: I'm saying you can't take the stats from 20 AB's or so and make any sort of predictive statement about a hitter, other than the hitter will in general regress to his mean. Tango showed in his book that hitters hot streaks and cold streaks don't exist in general. Hitters who go on a tear for a five game stretch tend to pretty much hit their norm on game six. Hitters don't go on streaks, hot or cold, of any significance. Period. It's a fact.

And since we know that the general case says that hitters "streaks" are not predictive of future results, that tells me that I can't look at the stats from the last 20 AB's and make a conclusion - other than hitters regress back to their mean.


Since the numbers don't tell us anything about streaks, then it comes to deciding whether what we saw with Molina is different. Has he closed a hole in his swing, or done something mechanical that gave him those results? Well, he has changed something mechanical, in fact I find it hard to remember a week during the season where he didn't change something mechanically. Is that the reason, do I see something in those 20 AB's that suggest that he has fixed something, or done something different that will allow him to hit, at least for a short time, like he did during the NLCS?
I would agree with all that, if he had been hitting well for only 20 ABs or so...but he's been hitting much better for 120+ ABs now...in the neighborhood of 35 games. That's not a short little streak, it's a trend. The same goes for the other hitters (JRod excepting). Trends can obviously be reversed, but they are also more significant than a 5 game sample size...and, they are also more likely to be due to something other than random luck.

Mechanically, the current Molina is not the same Molina that we've seen for the better part of the last two years...and there's evidence (above in another post) that backs that up beyond "that which has been observed" by some people. Neither is the current Encarnacion the same mechanically as "normal" Encarnacion. I can't tell you what circumstanes about them prompted the change in their mechanics...but I can present evidence that the change has taken place and has been ongoing for some time now.

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Post by skmsw »

I would agree with all that, if he had been hitting well for only 20 ABs or so...but he's been hitting much better for 120+ ABs now...in the neighborhood of 35 games. That's not a short little streak, it's a trend. The same goes for the other hitters (JRod excepting). Trends can obviously be reversed, but they are also more significant than a 5 game sample size...and, they are also more likely to be due to something other than random luck.
Statistically, Easton is incorrect.

We already know that "hot streaks" are not predictive, and that the best estimate of what a player will do next is his overall career performance. Jim is quite right, and apparently there is no debating this, as Easton has agreed too.

So what, then, of a "trend" instead of a "hot streak" ???

Well, really, I already gave away the answer in the first sentence of my post.

Statistically, 120 AB is not a very meaningful sample. For a player like Yadi, who has 900 major league plate appearances and 2,000 professional at-bats, 120 AB does not tell us very much. We would expect an error rate of some +/- 100 points in a 120 AB sample, just because of luck, and random variation. SO we'd expect that once in awhile, a .240 hitter will go 120 AB and hit .325 (or .150). It just happens, without even being an outlier performance.

But do allow me to qualify that response. By looking at the numbers, there is nothing suggesting that yadi has become a different hitter. Statistically, his "hot streak" and "trend" is not reflective of a new level of performance yet. BUT, we could theoretically watch him hit and decide that the recent statistics can be explained by something we see. For instance, I have observed myself that he does indeed appear to be swinging differently (a change), not merely swinging the same but getting different results (random variation, luck). He has changed his stance. He is more upright and less crouched, he is more closed, he has shortened his stroke and gets the bat around sooner and more quickly.

Sometimes people make these changes unintentionally. Or they make them intentionally but cannot maintain them (like Easton mentioned about his golf swing, a lament I share by the way). Other times, they figure something out and it results in a permenent change in performance. The 120-AB sample is too early to decide which of those it is, but the point is, sometimes there is a legitimate reason to use the more recent info even though it is genuinely less statistically valid.

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Post by EastonBlues22 »

skmsw wrote:
I would agree with all that, if he had been hitting well for only 20 ABs or so...but he's been hitting much better for 120+ ABs now...in the neighborhood of 35 games. That's not a short little streak, it's a trend. The same goes for the other hitters (JRod excepting). Trends can obviously be reversed, but they are also more significant than a 5 game sample size...and, they are also more likely to be due to something other than random luck.
Statistically, Easton is incorrect.
You are correct, my phrasing was poor...I should have added the qualifiers that other significant trends should be obviously present (as in the cases of Molina and Encarnacion), and it certainly helps if those trends have either presented themselves before in a career, or if the career is too young to conclude that what data we have is really representative of what we should be expecting from here on out.

In Molina's case those 120+ ABs do represent almost 13% of his career total. It's not like there's mountains of ABs to use as our baseline of Molina at this point (he's not even 25 and he has just two full years under his belt).

It should also be noted that Yadi had a G:F ratio that was close to even earlier in the year for a multiple month stretch that corresponded with a horrendous BABIP (avg about .175). If you adjust his average up by adjusting his BABIP back to his average BABIP this season (which is significantly lower than even his career BABIP)...and you have a guy who's hitting ~.262 over 329 ABs this season. That's about 71% of his total on the season and about 35% of his career total. Would that be significant enough? [Note: at no point over his previous season were his GB:FB ratios ever even close for an extended period of time.]

The changing LD/GB/FB also really strikes me. Regardless of how much a hitter is randomly doing this or that...very, very rarely do you see an extended periods where their typical LD/GB/FB trends reorder themselves so dramatically (unless there is something drastic like an injury involved).

Toss in the fact that his G:F of 1.14 is also well below his "career average" of 1.60 and I think there's a lot of room for argument that something more than a random variation is going on here.

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Post by skmsw »

In Molina's case those 120+ ABs do represent almost 13% of his career total. It's not like there's mountains of ABs to use as our baseline of Molina at this point (he's not even 25 and he has just two full years under his belt).
It doesn't matter if it is 100% of his career total. It still is only 120 AB, and the amount of error is so high that we can conclude little from them.
If you adjust his average up by adjusting his BABIP back to his average BABIP this season (which is significantly lower than even his career BABIP)...and you have a guy who's hitting ~.262 over 329 ABs this season.
You can't really do that. A portion of what you are trying to do makes sense -- BABIP has a very high random component, so regressing it to the mean towards his true talent isn't too far off the mark. But you're taking a bit too much liberty. You can't assume that it ALL is random. Yadi hit the ball extremely poorly for lengthy stretches this season -- not in bad luck without finding holes, but weak pop-ups and feeble tappers. We can't just regress it all away as if he was hitting the ball right at people for ALL of that stretch. He simply wasn't.

And his batted ball types are useful info, but again, statistically we cannot tell yet if the shift you're describing is because of something different, or just random variation.

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Post by EastonBlues22 »

skmsw wrote:
In Molina's case those 120+ ABs do represent almost 13% of his career total. It's not like there's mountains of ABs to use as our baseline of Molina at this point (he's not even 25 and he has just two full years under his belt).
It doesn't matter if it is 100% of his career total. It still is only 120 AB, and the amount of error is so high that we can conclude little from them.
Duncan only has about 330 career ABs...yet we make comments on his splits and abilities. Those ABs might not be 100% statistically reliable indicators of his performance next year, but right now they're the only ML numbers that we have to work with.

If we can't make the call on Duncan vs Molina in Game Two of the World Series because the numbers behind what we've watched for the last few months are "statistically insignificant"...then what exactly do we make those judgements on? We have to make the call based on something...do we just ignore numbers completely and go with "the gut?" At some point we have to combine what numbers we do have (regardless of sample size issues) with what trends we've witnessed and make the best decision we can.
If you adjust his average up by adjusting his BABIP back to his average BABIP this season (which is significantly lower than even his career BABIP)...and you have a guy who's hitting ~.262 over 329 ABs this season.
You can't really do that. A portion of what you are trying to do makes sense -- BABIP has a very high random component, so regressing it to the mean towards his true talent isn't too far off the mark. But you're taking a bit too much liberty. You can't assume that it ALL is random. Yadi hit the ball extremely poorly for lengthy stretches this season -- not in bad luck without finding holes, but weak pop-ups and feeble tappers. We can't just regress it all away as if he was hitting the ball right at people for ALL of that stretch. He simply wasn't.

And his batted ball types are useful info, but again, statistically we cannot tell yet if the shift you're describing is because of something different, or just random variation.
In spite of how "poorly" we believe Molina was hitting the ball earlier in the year...his LD% was actually higher back then (about 22-23%) than it was at any other point this year. Since line drives are the prime engine for his BABIP (considering GBs are usually outs with his speed and FBs are much less likely to drop for hits)...his batted ball data suggests that he should actually have had his highest average and BABIP early in the year.

Yet, that's not what we find when we examine the data. His BABIP was below his LD% by about .045 for an extended stretch during that period. That's unheard of...and way out of character for even Molina's own data. BABIP is normally about .100 over the LD%, and about .062 over Molina's LD% for his career. Thus, based upon his batted ball data, we were expecting to find a BABIP around .280-.290 and an average of about .270-.280 over that span...we find instead a BABIP of about .180 and an average of about .170.

That's pretty much the poster situation for "extreme freakish unluckiness" and it's just begging for regression even if we're not considering his most recent ABs.

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