Million Dollar Musings: Monday, June 3rd

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2019-06-03 18:48:32 Premium Content Part of the product SimLabs+

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Monday, June 3rd

Happy Monday and Happy June! We have flown through two months of this baseball season in a hurry. And with summer just around the corner, get ready to see even more of an offensive explosion in the coming months. Since we have just three games on the slate tonight, there isn’t too much to talk about. I’ll run through them quickly, but there are only so many ways to go on this small of a slate. We’ll spend most of our time today on some bigger picture issues.

We’re going to call this opening segment ‘Deep Thoughts With Cheese’, but mostly just so I have an excuse to start out with some Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey!

I wish my name was Todd, because then I could say, “Yes, my name’s Todd. Todd Blankenship.” Oh, also I wish my last name was Blankenship.

Probably the earliest fly swatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.

And now, back to Deep Thoughts With Cheese:

I wanted to start out by circling back to the sample size discussion that I started a few weeks ago. We have reached the point in the season where I am mostly going to start referencing 2019 stats. Up to this point, I have been using 2018-2019 combined numbers as a starting point, but now that we’re a dozen or so starts in for most pitchers and 200-250 PA for most batters, I am going to focus on the 2019 numbers. However, that DOES NOT mean that I am not still looking at longer term skills and stats. This especially true as it relates to surface stats like ERA, Batting Average, and any basic counting stats like Home Runs, RBI, etc.

The one place I will still be referencing 2018-2019 data is with individual batters facing left-handed pitchers. There are so many more right-handed pitchers in the game, that the majority of AB come against righties. We are still down around 50-60 AB for most everyday players against left-handed pitching this season, and that is not enough for any stat to have stabilized. If you missed my earlier article on sample size, here are the key paragraphs from that article as a reference point:

The first thing to stabilize within a season is strikeouts and walks. This is part of the reason I focus so much on them in my research. Everything that happens after a ball is hit has a lot of variance involved, but strikeouts and walks are what they are. There is not an absolute correct answer on a lot of the metrics, but generally speaking, according to a study on fangraphs, strikeout rate begins to stabilize after 60 PA for hitters and 70 batters faced for pitchers. Walks around 120 PA and 170 batters faced.