1) The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball (great for beginners to follow)
2) http://www.fangraphs.com

I found out about both of them from visiting USSMariner. Careful though. Reading these works may cause one to never again view WINS, SV, ERA, AVG, RBI, or ‘Clutch’ in the same way.

My question, once more: has any brand of statistical analysis connected performance in any particular statistic to team results?

Yes.

Want an example? OPS+ correlates much better with team win loss than BA.

Want more examples? Do some research. Lots of great web sites and books out there. You could start with some of the links in the reference material section to the left.

As a statistician, I really liked Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics and the Role of Chance in the Game, by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett. But that is just one of many fine books on the topic.

You might also check the web site Fangraphs for some wonderful articles, quite a few of which were written by Dave.

Definitely. But to what extent does this base of knowledge predict team performance?

Another example to add to Graham’s post: Modern statistical analysis has radically changed the philosophy and structure of almost every organization – not because it’s a fad, but because it is a better indicator of future performance than traditional statistical analysis.

I accept that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from pitchers of all levels that catcher defence has a large impact on the way that they pitch. I also accept that this makes sense.

What’s confusing about this though is that we haven’t found evidence of a positive/negative effect of catchers on pitchers at the major league level. If it’s important, shouldn’t it have shown up by now?

We called the Rays being great last year and the Mariners being bad when every traditional talking head had the teams flipped.

There are more hits I could mention, and plenty of misses, too, but generally we’re better at predictions (sometimes significantly more so) than traditionalists. You can actually do better than most of the ESPN analysts’ picks by predicting that every team will play .500 ball for the season.

The gushing over him has always been about how he handles a staff.

The problem, of course, is that no one really has any idea if that actually matters or not, and if it does, how much so

As a former pitcher, I’d say that there is definitely some effect in this regard. I primarily just pitched to two catchers. The first, who was around for my sophomore and the start of my junior year, basically sucked. Poor defensive catcher (I know, not the point, but bear with me), and when things went sideways, he refused to do anything more than shrug.

My out pitch was a forkball, and the next best was a hard slider, so his defensive shortcomings sapped my confidence in being able to use those pitched without getting myself in trouble with runners on. And since he, again, refused to do much more to inspire confidence than shrug, I had to rely on my (well) below-average fastball to get people out, which meant I got knocked around alot.

Then he got hurt (got hurt in a car accident I think?), and we got a new catcher. This guy… I liked him. Always kept the ball in front of him (I know, again, not the point, but still!), and always, ALWAYS, made sure he and his pitcher were on the same page. If something wasn’t right, he immediately popped up and came running up to see what was up.

First game we were paired up, I got knocked around some in the first. After a couple of hits and a walk, he came running up and asked, rather bluntly, “where the fuck is that forkball?” I told him I’d had issues with it getting past the old guy. He smacked me upside the head and told me to throw it anyways, if he missed it it’d be his fault, not mine. So I started throwing the forkball, and got through the next couple of innings with only a walk, then started throwing my slider and struck out all but two of the remaining batters.

The rest of that season was like that (didn’t play my senior year because I blew up my shoulder playing football), and with the work that the new catcher did with me and our other pitchers, we wound up winning our conference and making State. That catcher, and the confidence he helped instill in our pitching staff, was the #1 thing that put us there.

On a side note…

Yes, but your opinion is not automatically irrefutable simply because you hold it.

God, I used to mod an NFL board and we just about had to fly to Detroit to beat that concept into a guy’s head a few years back…

Any word on Sweeney? I was first baseline last night and he looked pretty bad on that swing he hurt himself on. Back? Oblique, maybe?

Strained back, from what I heard. Not in the lineup today.