Scoring question

[Greenmonsters]

You might be right. I tend to be a pretty stern taskmaster when it come to this stuff. THTH doesn’t happen a whole lot in my book, and when it does, believe me, the average fielder wouldn’t have made the play. What happens much more often is a bad hop on a routinely hit ball.

IMO/IME there is more "time" pressure on the IFs in FP SB to make a play than there is in BB because of the shorter distances. Also less reaction time on hard hit balls. I am assuming, but I think its highly likely that there are significantly more ROEs in FP than in BB so a fast batter or a hard hitter who blows up IFers can "create" ROEs.

 

[SoCal_Dad]

If those are the only times a FC is allowed to be scored, those rules stink.

The triple-dot punctuation mark (...) indicates I didn't include all the rules.

 

[canyonjoe]

Why would anyone want to crucify you because of your opinion? I’d just ask what do you want the ROE to give you that would make it more valuable? Sounds to me as though you’re looking for another way to give a batter credit for something in the form of a QAB on an error. Just out of curiosity, just how common are ROEs in SB?

Our HSV BB team had 326 ROEs in 7,685 PAs for a rate of 4%. The batter who had the most in 8 years had 17 in 303 PAs for a rate of 5.6%. Had ever single one been scored a hit his BA over that time would have gone from .329 to .357. Some would say WOW! That’s reason enough to try to break them out, but I say it’s silly. Why? Because while the ROEs would be broken out making the hitter look better, but changing only one side of the equation isn’t a very good way to prove anything. How about we break out all his IF hits, Bunt hits, Bloop hits and every other hit where he got “lucky”?

What I’m getting at is, unless the number of ROEs is freakishly high, there will be offsetting things that make it irrelevant. To me it makes much more sense to just look at the kinds of balls in play.

I just checked from our last team that I did the scoring for. It was 4.7 percent, but one kid had 8 in 99 at bats. It's not a make or break decision but it's just one more piece of information that would be nice to have. I understand your point about having to many things like lucky hits, but in the age of computers, a little extra time on the input allows you to look at things different. It's more useful in fewer at bats to get an idea of how things are going.

 

[CoogansBluff]

I just checked from our last team that I did the scoring for. It was 4.7 percent, but one kid had 8 in 99 at bats. It's not a make or break decision but it's just one more piece of information that would be nice to have. I understand your point about having to many things like lucky hits, but in the age of computers, a little extra time on the input allows you to look at things different. It's more useful in fewer at bats to get an idea of how things are going.

If the team average is 4.7 ROE per 100, and you have 10 kids w/ 100 at-bats, and the team leader has only 8, then that is good evidence that luck is a very big factor and that it should be discounted, IMO.

But that's just an assumption. The math can be done on this, and I used to be smart enough to do it ... But in that scenario, I'd bet the odds are greater than 50-50 that the team leader after 100 at-bats would have at least 8 ROE even if it were totally random. If there were more skill involved in this, I'd expect a wider range of outcomes over 100 trails.

 

[Scorekeeper]

IMO/IME there is more "time" pressure on the IFs in FP SB to make a play than there is in BB because of the shorter distances. Also less reaction time on hard hit balls. I am assuming, but I think its highly likely that there are significantly more ROEs in FP than in BB so a fast batter or a hard hitter who blows up IFers can "create" ROEs.

I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t, and don’t even have an opinion because I’ve never scored a FPSB game. I also don’t know for sure how all the different SB scoring rules tell scorers to differentiate between errors and non-errors.

What I can express an opinion on is that I doubt female SB hitters in general hit the ball with as much velocity as male BB hitters, that female fielders generally throw with the same velocities as male fielders, or that female runners generally run at the same velocities as male runners. The reason I say that is to say the games are equally difficult based on the equipment and the players.

If there are significantly more ROE’s in FPSB, the scoring rules must be very different. Here’s the definition of ordinary effort in OBR.

ORDINARY EFFORT is the effort that a fielder of average skill at a position in that league or classification of leagues should exhibit on a play, with due consideration given to the condition of the field and weather conditions.{/b}
Rule 2.00 (Ordinary Effort) Comment: This standard, called for several times in the Official Scoring Rules (e.g., Rules 10.05(a)(3), 10.05(a)(4), 10.05(a)(6), 10.05(b)(3) (Base Hits); 10.08(b) (Sacrifices); 10.12(a)(1) Comment, 10.12(d)(2) (Errors); and 10.13(a), 10.13(b) (Wild Pitches and Passed Balls)) and in the Official Baseball Rules (e.g., Rule 2.00 (Infield Fly)), is an objective standard in regard to any particular fielder. In other words, even if a fielder makes his best effort, if that effort falls short of what an average fielder at that position in that league would have made in a situation, the official scorer should charge that fielder with an error.

Using that standard, the average fielder wouldn’t be making a lot of those players, thus the number of ROEs would decline. Of course as I’ve said many times, I do not know the SB scoring rules. So if they have no ordinary effort definition or have a different one, it very well could be that we’re talking apples and oranges here, where an ROE in your sport is not the same as in mine.

I do believe a fast player in either sport can hurry defense into errors. What’s a shame is, many times the errors come because the fielder is trying to accomplish something far above average, and if they simply held the ball there the team would be better off. Or as my friend has also said many times that he constantly told his ML pitchers. “Sometimes the best throw you can make, is one you don’t let go of.”

 

[Scorekeeper]

The triple-dot punctuation mark (...) indicates I didn't include all the rules.

I’m not a dolt, so I assumed that. However, I don’t keep copies of all the different SB rules, so I can only evaluate what I see.

But the point is, you said an ROE was only an option in that one specific situation, and I’m saying that isn’t true, at least in BB and in my experience. In BB the scorer doesn’t have to be CONVINCED of anything before scoring something. Judgment is supposed to be used, and sometimes judgment isn’t black and white.

 

[Scorekeeper]

I just checked from our last team that I did the scoring for. It was 4.7 percent, but one kid had 8 in 99 at bats. It's not a make or break decision but it's just one more piece of information that would be nice to have. I understand your point about having to many things like lucky hits, but in the age of computers, a little extra time on the input allows you to look at things different. It's more useful in fewer at bats to get an idea of how things are going.

Heck, I’m one of those nutcases who believes every piece of information is not only nice to have, but has potential to become something powerful.

I have absolutely no problem with anyone trying to glean more information out of scoring a game. the only question I had was that it seemed to me as though the information was going to be used the same way QABs often are, i.e. to make hitters feel good about not getting credit for a hit.

If you want to try to categorize or classify the different ways a hitter reached on an error, I’m in your corner! In fact, if you can come up with good definitions for each category that can be programmed to be automatically generated, I might even make it part of my program. But for many scorers like myself who are already manually tracking many different things, throwing another into the mix just compromises what’s already there. 

What I get a kick out of is people who use computers to store and collate baseball data, don’t often have validation routines to make sure the data going in is even “reasonable”.

 

[FP26]

I have absolutely no problem with anyone trying to glean more information out of scoring a game. the only question I had was that it seemed to me as though the information was going to be used the same way QABs often are, i.e. to make hitters feel good about not getting credit for a hit.

I agree that QABs can often be used in the way you are stating. But I also think they offer some value in reviewing player performance until sample size is sufficiently large. As I may have mentioned before, I am a statistics fan. But statistics with a small sample size are not very useful to me because they can be very erratic. For example, if you are two weeks into the season, it is possible that one of your best hitters is low on the team in batting average. It is also possible that this hitter has hit several lasers that happened to be right at defenders. While we are early in the season, I will count that as a QAB, making the assumption that if this hitter can continue hitting the ball like that, holes will be found and his/her batting average will improve. As the sample size increases, I will focus on QABs less. Sorry for being off topic, but I wanted to state that I find QABs useful in certain cases.

 

[CoogansBluff]

I just checked from our last team that I did the scoring for. It was 4.7 percent, but one kid had 8 in 99 at bats. It's not a make or break decision but it's just one more piece of information that would be nice to have.

OK, I got someone to do the math for me.

If every player on the team had a 4.7 percent chance of ROE per AB, then there would be a 9.9 percent chance that she would get 8 in 99 at-bats.

If you had 10 players with 99 at bats, then there's a 64.7 percent chance AT LEAST one player will have AT LEAST 8 ROE.

We can make of that data what we like. My point is simply to say that in evaluating stats, I think we should consider what might be produced by skill, and what might be produced by luck. Not always easy to determine that.

That becomes important when evaluating a player who's hitting .400 and one that's hitting .300. At what point do we decide it's just luck, and at what point do we decide the .400 hitter really has a better chance of getting a hit going forward?

 

[Scorekeeper]

I agree that QABs can often be used in the way you are stating. But I also think they offer some value in reviewing player performance until sample size is sufficiently large. As I may have mentioned before, I am a statistics fan. But statistics with a small sample size are not very useful to me because they can be very erratic. For example, if you are two weeks into the season, it is possible that one of your best hitters is low on the team in batting average. It is also possible that this hitter has hit several lasers that happened to be right at defenders. While we are early in the season, I will count that as a QAB, making the assumption that if this hitter can continue hitting the ball like that, holes will be found and his/her batting average will improve. As the sample size increases, I will focus on QABs less. Sorry for being off topic, but I wanted to state that I find QABs useful in certain cases.

I don’t think you’re off topic all that far.

I appreciate what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why if they’re really valid for small samples, why they wouldn’t be even more valid for larger samples? But then again, I’m not a big believer in using only a few different metrics to try to figure out what’s taking place.