Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
April 09, 2006
What are the Odds?

Albert Pujols came into the night hitless in this series. The broadcast mentioned that he's gone hitless in a three game series or more only twice in his career. Pujols did get a hit in the fifth inning, driving in two and taking back the lead for the Cardinals.

But I wondered, how often should Pujols go hitless in a series? Albert is a .332 career hitter. That's the probability of his getting hit if you know nothing else about the situation. If he gets 12 at bats in a three-game series, the probability of Albert getting at least one hit is .992. So if Albert plays 1000 three game series, we'd expect him to go hitless in about 8 of those. Now, Pujols likely plays about 50 series a year of at least three games. In five years, that's 250 series. Since 250 is 1/4 of 1000, we'd expect that he would go hitless in about two series. Just right.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:43 PM | Statistics | TrackBack (0)
Comments

That's not the big news. The fact is the Joe Morgan just said something that was totally SABR. They were talking about bringing Isringhousen in for the eighth inning, and Joe Morgan said, "In this kind of situation, when the offense is threatening, you want to bring in your best pitcher. It doesn't matter if it's the eighth, this is a save situation."

It doesn't look like it's working out for the Cardinals, but it's crazy hearing something straight out of Bill James coming from Morgan's mouth.

Posted by: Hunter at April 9, 2006 10:47 PM

But that's the rare occasion where SABR agrees that the way they did things in Joe Morgan's time was correct.

Posted by: Chris Marcil at April 10, 2006 01:48 AM

Always nice to see statistics in action, even if they're simple binomial probabilities :-)

Posted by: Jason at April 10, 2006 08:55 AM

I always find it funny that Joe Morgan should bash so many SABR principles when his own baseball card reads like a SABR fairy tale. His 1975 season is so outrageous: 67 stolen bases to 10 caught (SABR: Happy!), 132 BB to 52 K (egad!), a batting line of .327/.466/.508! Just unbelievable. His career numbers are really worth checking out if you haven't in a while. His six-year stretch from 72-77 is jaw-dropping. It makes you realize just how incredible the Big Red Machine was back then.

Posted by: Dave S. at April 10, 2006 09:45 AM
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