Most of the conversations in regards to the Dan Haren trade boil down to how an individual feels about pitcher evaluation. There can be obviously however a whole lot of people that plainly believe that no matter what takes place is definitely the pitcher’s responsibility, so if he gives up a bunch of hits and some home runs, he’s doing something wrong and that should be held against him. High BABIP or HRFB rates are evidence of throwing too lots of hittable pitches, or that his stuff has deteriorated, or that his command isn’t as high-quality as it was, or some other explanation that we haven’t yet figured out. But,
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These opinions are generally held because from the outright refusal to accept randomness. The idea that something could happen repeatedly, without cause, is very hard to for a great deal of individuals to swallow. But it’s true, and it’s a very important concept to buy into when trying to project the future performance of baseball players. Random takes place.
For instance, did you know that the NFC has won 14 consecutive coin-tosses in the Super Bowl? Since 1997, the AFC has been on the losing side with the flip every single time. The odds of that happening are 1 in 16,384, and yet,
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I’d imagine that a majority of us agree that it’s the latter. Because a coin has no ability to control what side it lands on, we are willing to agree that the results of what takes place when it is flipped is random. In spite of this, as a culture, we don’t like to apply that same belief to many people. They can make choices, adapt, and do things that affect the outcomes they are involved in, and so a lot of us assume that nothing that transpires to a person is ever random.
Haren’s BABIP has been abnormally high in four of the last five months, dating back to last September. For various everyday people, that’s enough to say that there’s a pattern that rules out any kind of randomness,
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Using binomial distribution, we can see that the odds of a pitcher with a true talent level BABIP of .300 randomly posting a .350+ BABIP in any given month (of 115 BIP) is about 10 percent. Thus,
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Given the number of potential different five month stretches we could look at across 350 pitchers using selective endpoints, it’s not a surprise at all that we can find a guy who has performed in a way that looks to be a rarity. The sheer quantity of players in the game, and the amount of games they play, means that we will always see performances that had little chance of happening. On its own, it is not evidence that randomness might be ruled out.
Maybe Haren is doing something wrong. Maybe there is certainly a reason for all these no-hitters. Maybe there’s an explanation for Brady Anderson‘s 1996 season. We don’t know enough to conclusively say in any of these cases, but neither can you rule out that it may well just be randomness at work. If you’re not willing to accept that, you’re going to see a great deal of patterns where they don’t exist,
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