MGL notes that the performance of a starter through six innings has little bearing on how he’ll do in the seventh inning. As much as I hate managers taking out someone who is pitching well, it is a good strategy to go to a fresher pitcher.
MGL notes that the performance of a starter through six innings has little bearing on how he’ll do in the seventh inning. As much as I hate managers taking out someone who is pitching well, it is a good strategy to go to a fresher pitcher.
Its a good strategy if you have a good bullpen and are not worried about burning your pen. I would say in the playoffs, you should always have your 7th inning guy warming up and ready to go in the 7th, with the SP’er on a short leash. In the regular season, you might sometimes want to try and stretch out the SP’er to save your pen, especially if you dont have a reliable 7th inning guy.
One of the most puzzling things to me about baseball is that people who study it from both within and out with the game seem to be totally insistent on viewing it as a totally separate entity.
There are hundreds of studies on the effect of muscular fatigue available, or even on fatigue and it’s affects on psychological aspects of performance such as concentration and confidence.
I’m pretty sure everyone in baseball knows about the factors of ‘fortune’ (the swing that is biomechanically poor, but is fortune to be at exactly the right time and angle to pop the ball up just high enough to go over the pitchers head but drop in front of the SS) and small sample size that are so clearly an issue in validating that study.
Instead of wasting time attempting to answer a ‘baseball-specific’ question that the author admits in the intro that they actually cannot answer (“Keep in mind that one thing we are not able to look at is how a poorly performing pitcher might perform if he were left in a game, even though he was removed. In other words, we can’t do the controlled experiment we would like”) – why not apply some well-tested and scientifically valid principles of Sports Performance to analyse strategy.