Attention to Detail – Shooter Orientation in Rebound Games

25-09-2022

Under a microscope, all of baseball boils down to the mechanics of the at-bat. Is the pitcher/hitter left-handed or right-handed? What is the pitch count of the starting pitcher? What are the balls and strikes for the current batter? Are there runners on base and in scoring position? We can go on and on.

Some teams do well against right-handed pitchers and others do well against left-handed pitchers. In some rare circumstances you get a team that hits both equally, they’re usually called World Series champions at the end of the season, like the White Sox in 2005.

The natural thing to do when you lose a game in baseball is to analyze the loss to see how to improve in the next game. It also makes you more likely to work on the count in your next game. All of this seems to suggest that if you lose a game to a right-handed shooter, you’ll want to face a right-handed shooter in your next game. By keeping the pitcher’s orientation the same, your hitters have a better chance of getting comfortable. By changing orientation, your hitters have to readjust.

We looked at teams that lost and found that when they face a starting pitcher with the same shooting orientation, they have about 5% more value against the odds than if the shooting orientation changed.

This little tidbit of information is a very good nugget of information that I like to use to add to my systems. Of all the managers I’ve seen over the years, Bobby Cox of the Atlanta Braves is the brains behind the pitching-hitting dynamic. He puts his pitchers in positions to win. He watch for the release changes from him before game time.

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