The Tug of War

Discussing the quantifiable aspects of the ebb and flow of baseball strategy

I seem to be on this trend of taking column ideas from the previous week’s comments at the moment. After looking for “the next Bill James” last week, I had the grand total of one person nominated for that post. Now, those who argued the SAT analogy “Babe Ruth:baseball players::Bill James:sabermetrics” are plenty right in so many ways, so I mean no disrespect to Mr. James and his mammoth imprint on what I try to do.

Meanwhile, the one name mentioned was Tango. No, not the dance, but Tom M. Tango of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball and his blogosphere moniker of Tangotiger. His site is linked to along the sidebar under “Sabermetrics”.

The basic idea is presented in Ron Howard’s movie A Beautiful Mind, the biopic of game theory’s founding father, John Forbes Nash. I figure this clip explains it better than I could. If you haven’t seen the clip, watch it. And if you have, watch it again because it rocks.

Anyway, what’s this have to do with baseball? Well, take a look at David Pinto’s piece today on the Sporting News.

Baseball researchers called Sabermetricians take some heat for discouraging the stolen base. That’s not quite fair. Sabermetricians like the stolen base, they just hate the caught stealing. They encourage stealing above the break-even level.

This “break-even” level is found using game theory. And if you ask me, there’s more that can be done in this area of research.

I’m sure Tango would agree. He, Lichtman, and Dolphin in the aforementioned tome do some analysis into this very subject in their last chapter, which you can preview here. Since sabermetricians love quantifying things, I think it’d be great to see a break-even percentage table for certain strategies, such as the stolen base, pitch out, hit and run, etc. If some of this information is buried somewhere in the depths of cyberspace, feel free to enlighten this occasionally ignorant author.