Archive for the 'Event Finders' Category

How many times has a pitcher been involved in fielding the last out of a series-winning post-season game?

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I believe this is the list in question:

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(Thanks to reader Kahuna Tuna who sent in this idea.)

Just about all baseball fans over the age of 30 will remember Kirk Gibson's home run in the 1988 World Series. It was quite an unlikely walkoff job, thanks in large part to Gibson's injury and Dennis Eckersley's dominance. Nevertheless, it happened. Turns out there might have been a little magic at work.

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We chatted about intentional walk rates on a recent thread, so I thought I'd look into the numbers a bit more.

What I've found is that the National League has always had more intentional walks than the American League, even before the advent of the designated hitter.

Click through for more.

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Ultimate Grand Slams - Baseball-Reference.com.

We've been having some issues relating to the Play Index performance which has caused some previously working queries to now fail.  We've implemented a performance tweak that will has sped things up about 30-45% in my tests.  The basic search I always try is running the event finder for every plate appearance for a season.  This no longer times out and returns the correct response.

Please keep in mind we are searching massive datasets and there are lots of people doing it at the same time.  Sometimes on the event finder you can get to a result in a roundabout way.  The link above is all walk-off grand slams with two ours and the home team down 3 runs since 1950.

The easiest way to get to this result is to search a team year for home runs and then select 2-out grand slam home runs.  Next change the teams to all teams for a year and search again.  Next select, all two outs and game-ending.  Next select the years 1950-2010 and then select ones with a margin of 3 runs.  With a few intermediate steps you can build up to the query you want.

There is an old axiom  in sports that you play for the tie at home, while on the road you play for the win.   I was curious if this strategy was actually implemented in baseball, so I decided to use the "Batting Event Finder" to select one opportunity to play for a tie  and compare the results at home and on the road.  Teams which trail by one run with no outs in the ninth and a runner on first will only sacrifice the runner over if they are "playing for the tie."  Here are the percentages of such plate appearances which result in sacrifice bunts at home and on the road. (Keeping in mind that the years prior to 1973 may not be 100% complete.)

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Following up on my earlier post about HBP rates, let's take a look at the split in HBP rates by league...

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One of the nice new features of the PI event finders is the ability to search multiple years when the sample is small enough. Here are the career leaders in Walk-Off  Home Runs since 1950. (Due to the addition of the new "OR" feature, the search for walk-offs has changed. You now need to select "Go Ahead", "Home", Inning "9" and Inning "10+")
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Some fun with Play Index's Post-Season Event Finder - 57 batters with "High Leverage" 2-out game-ending RBI in post-season games.

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Along with the sitewide updates I just posted on, I also added some upgrades to the Play Index.

After you get the summary table of information from an event finder search, selecting two or more headings of the same type (click on the red text) will now cause the search to perform an or on those two options. So you can now answer questions like show me all the hits by Derek Jeter In Fenway or Rogers or Camden or Tropicana all bunched together.

The summary options now show more complete data like all opponents not just the top 10 or so.

In batter vs. pitcher you can now select ranges of years.

and on the event finder you can now columns for WPA, li and Re24 and summaries for pulled/opposite field, ahead and behind in the count, and leverage level (low, medium, high), so you can ask how many of Ryan Howard's Home Runs were high, low or medium leverage.

I've also updated and attempted to make the looks of each of the tools much more consistent. There was an astounding amount of redundant code in the original Play Index code and the code is now at most half the size of the previous code.

More importantly is that the Play Index code is now integrated with the standards of the rest of the site and I'm free to do new Play Index tool development. Before I knew I was going to have to do a massive rewrite and it kept me from doing anything new. Now I can go ahead and do that new work.