What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

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What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by allenciox » Sat Mar 13, 2021 11:15 am

Well, on Monday I reported on pitcher effectiveness in BBA . Today I will report on batting. My plan is for the next posting to be on defense, then one on running and stealing (based on BsR), and finally one on WAR, which will tie everything together.

There might be other reports coming from the data, for instance on ballpark effects, etc. but we will see.

First, here is the executive summary: Except for GAP and AvoidK, all the ratings turn out to do pretty much what you expect them to do. For predicting wOBA, CON and AvoidK together account for about half the total effect. In an MLB-average situation, AvoidK should come out "in the wash", but in BBA that is not the case: in fact, it is almost as important as POW or EYE, which are of approximately equal importance. GAP is less than half as important as POW or EYE. Surprisingly, left-handed batters have an advantage above and beyond just looking at their vR ratings.

So the data I used was exclusively the vL and vR split data. For the vL splits data, I set all the ratings to their _vL version, for the _vR splits, I set them to their vR version.

So one thing many of you know, but some may not, is that in the player editor, for most hitting and pitching ratings, there is a cutoff at 100 (or 5, using 1 to 10 ratings). The effect, according to the player editor, for ratings below 100 is pretty much linear for all ratings (except for extremely low values of AvoidK). And they are also linear above 100. But the "slope" of the line for each are different. Based on the results of 2045, a cutoff at each rating=5 seemed to match up to the data, and the "slopes" of the lines were close to what the player editor shows. The following table shows what the player editor shows, and also what I calculated the relative slopes (for below 100 compared to above 100) to be for BBA 2045 (I set them to be same as player editor if they were not significantly different than player editor, but if they were significantly different I rounded to the est. slope for BBA 2045 stats):
RatingEffectPlayer EditorBBA Est.
CONAvgx2x2
GAPebh/ABx1x1.5
POWhr/ABx.5x.5
EYEbb/pax.5x.7
AvKk/ABx1.5x1.5
Once again, since we are dealing with predictions that are "piecewise linear", I can convert the ratings easily (as I did on the pitcher side). I subtract 5 from the given rating, then, if it is less than zero, I multiply it by the BBA est. slope in the table above. So, for example, a POW of 7 becomes 2, a POW of 3 becomes -1, while a CON of 7 becomes 2 and a CON of 3 becomes -4.

Since these are piecewise linear, a stepwise regression on the result should generate useful results. So I did such a stepwise regression (look back to the pitcher effectiveness post if you want to see how a stepwise regression works), adding several other potential predictors:

1. batadv corresponds to when a lefty batter is going against a righty pitcher, or where a righty batter is going against a lefty pitcher.
2. b_S is set to 1 if the batter is a switch-hitter, b_R is set to 1 if a batter is a righty (we don't need b_L to be included because that is indicated when both other variables are 0).
3. I also added SPE since that is supposed to affect percentage of extra base hits that are triples.
4. I set alpha to .006 to try to focus on getting the most clear results.
5. As with pitchers, I did a "weighted" stepwise regression, weighting by number of plate appearances for each vL, vR split. Only players that had more than 25 PAs for the given split were included in the analysis.
_DEPVAR__TYPE__RSQ_InterceptbatadvCONGAPPOWEYEAvKb_Sb_RSPE
AVGPARMS0.550160.19622.0.018371...0.007718.-.009767527.
AVGSTDERR.0.00265.0.000890...0.000862.0.002196009.
bb/paPARMS0.686320.072490.008064...0.022982....
bb/paSTDERR.0.001040.001377...0.000513....
ebh/abPARMS0.379140.03239...007265693-.001734033-0.0012170.002195...
ebh/abSTDERR.0.00137...0004002950.0002901490.0004250.000385...
hr/abPARMS0.678680.018930.003364..0.009564971.....
hr/abSTDERR.0.000760.000930..0.000217765.....
so/abPARMS0.785220.34976-0.012657-0.006011.0.0024012710.002931-0.042131...
so/abSTDERR.0.003060.0027150.001239.0.0007356080.0010280.001161...
wOBAPARMS0.564380.24563.0.014478.0031337320.0087263200.0081830.006116.-.008491819.
wOBASTDERR.0.00348.0.001326.0010287860.0007158920.0009640.001106.0.002446564
We would expect batadv to be significant whenever it is based on a stat that is affected by one of the three pitcher stats (since most pitchers have better ratings where the batter does "not" have an advantage), and that is exactly what we find. As to individual results:

Batting average has a nicely high r-square value (55%) and is affected by three of the ratings: CON, AvK, and b_R (in a negative direction). Why it is affected negatively by being a right-handed batter is not clear to me, but, essentially, right-handed batters as opposed to left-handed or a switch hitter results in about a ten point drop in average. The other interesting result is that AvoidK contributes above and beyond CON alone. As most of you know, the CON rating is a calculated rating by the engine, based on the batter's BABIP rating, POW rating, and AvK rating. The CON rating is calculated so as to be a perfect predictor, all by itself, of avg. The fact that AvK contributes to it, above and beyond CON itself is not entirely surprising, however. This result seems to occur whenever a league has particularly high STU pitchers, relative to MBA "normal", which would seem to characterize BBA. A way of thinking about this overall is that a player with a 5 CON, 5 AvK would be expected to get a .196 average (the intercept value) in the BBA if they are left-handed or a switch-hitter, but only a .186 average if they are a righty. It would be about .026 higher for a 6 CON, 6 AvK batter.

bb/pa , as expected, is closely related to EYE. Every additional point in EYE increases walk rate by about 2.3%, and having a batting advantage against the pitcher adds another 0.8%. The r-square of 68.6% indicates that more than 2/3 of the variance of all walk rates can be accounted for by the rounded EYE value.

ebh/ab is not as simple as just looking at GAP, which replicates the finding I have had for every single analysis I have done in OOTP. First of all, the r-square is by far the lowest of all of these, at around 38%. Secondly, it appears to be affected negatively to some extent by POW and EYE, and positively to some extent by AvK.

hr/ab IS however as simple as looking at POW and batadv. A POW 5 hitter will hit, on average, about ten home runs a year, plus another 5 for each point in POW above 5. The r-square here is about the same as it is for bb/ab, at about 68%

so/ab is also more complicated than expected. Although the r-square is the highest of any of the measures here at almost 79%, it appears to be affected not just by batadv and AvK, but also by POW and EYE (high values leading to more strike outs), and by CON (higher values leading to fewer strike outs). Somebody with a 5 rating across the board here would be expected to get strike outs in about 35% of their at bats when they don't have the advantage against the pitcher, or about 33.7% when they do.

wOBA is the stat everybody has been waiting for, of course. Considering that this is a complicated stat with many predictors, getting an r-square of 56.4% is impressive, I think. All the stats come into play here, except SPE and batadv. SPE might show up once we have more data, but I am a bit surprised that batadv does NOT show an effect, since walks, strike outs, and home runs all do show an effect with it. Perhaps it is being masked by b_R, which shows a similar affect that it does with BA, and that more data will show that effect. Here, a righty with ratings of 5 across the board would only be expected to get a .237 wOBA (.246 for lefty or switch-hitter). The rest of the results are summarized in the executive summary above.

Thoughts? Is this close to what you all expected or quite different? Is there anything you find somewhat surprising?

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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by allenciox » Sat Mar 13, 2021 11:40 am

One thing I just noticed looking at this is that across the three measures that include batadv, that batadv is worth about 1/3 of a point in the primary stat: i.e. a batter with an EYE of exactly 6 will be equivalent to about 6.166 with a batting advantage, and 5.833 without.

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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by shoeless.db » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:01 pm

It would be interesting to know how a secondary rating such as speed affects the outcomes for Con and Gap.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Sun Mar 14, 2021 4:23 pm

Interesting stuff, of course. A few comments:

Batting average: The discrepancy in batting average between RHB and LHB/SHB is most likely related to the fact that ballparks in the BBA are more disadvantageous to RHB for AVG. There could also be an affect of LHB/speedy often carrying slightly better BABIP on hitter creation because they are closer to first base.

Gap: Doubles (and triples) will probably also be affected by speed.

Strikeouts: It is almost certainly true that AVK, POW, and EYE ratings are created (upon player creation) with certain correlations that relate to real stat distributions. At least I was involved in changing them to be so back in the day. It would be surprising if that were different now, but stranger things have happened. I'm not smart enough yet, or haven't thought about it enough, to be sure how that should affect your study. That said, I can be pretty certain the the K-rate in the league will be controlled by the application of Log5 equation using pitcher stuff, batter Eye, and League Totals.

A couple big elements of uncertainty here are (1) the affect of the home field advantage, which I believe (but don't know), is related to Ks and Walks, and (2) The influence of variable catcher ability, which I'm pretty much certain will influence both Ks and walks to some degree. This last could be a fairly big influence. I just don't know.

Finally, there is some ordering of events that I believe will warp the world when it comes to Ks and batting average since, as you note, the environment has more high-stuff pitchers in it that expected. If you perform the same study next year, it will be interesting to see if a lower strikeout environment will make the data cleaner.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Sun Mar 14, 2021 6:54 pm

The overall influence on wOBA is interesting, too, simply because it opens the question of how OOTP calculates wOBA--meaning how is it weighting events in the run environment itself? None of that should be causes of huge variations, but there's still something there to think about.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by CTBrewCrew » Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:07 pm

shoeless.db wrote:
Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:01 pm
It would be interesting to know how a secondary rating such as speed affects the outcomes for Con and Gap.
If only that young lad in the HS state hoops championship had more speed....he might have tipped that ball... 😜
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by allenciox » Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:08 pm

Referencing the comments about Speed from shoeless and Ronco, I don't know if you noticed, but if you scroll to the right, SPE was checked but did not enter into any of the predictions, including ebh/ab. Of course, it might be the case that it does affect it but the effect is small enough that it didn't show up with only one season worth of data.

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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:56 am

Yes, I saw that earlier. I would guess the issue is the use of EBH/AB rather than EBH/1B. I'd guess that EBH/AB would eventually find a connection if the data set was quite large, but I could of course be wrong. Much like the real life phrase that "you can't steal first base" means something, I'd not that you can't stretch a single to a double or a double to a triple unless you can first hit one or the other.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by CTBrewCrew » Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:26 pm

RonCo wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:56 am
Yes, I saw that earlier. I would guess the issue is the use of EBH/AB rather than EBH/1B. I'd guess that EBH/AB would eventually find a connection if the data set was quite large, but I could of course be wrong. Much like the real life phrase that "you can't steal first base" means something, I'd not that you can't stretch a single to a double or a double to a triple unless you can first hit one or the other.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by allenciox » Tue Mar 16, 2021 7:01 pm

RonCo wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 10:56 am
Yes, I saw that earlier. I would guess the issue is the use of EBH/AB rather than EBH/1B. I'd guess that EBH/AB would eventually find a connection if the data set was quite large, but I could of course be wrong. Much like the real life phrase that "you can't steal first base" means something, I'd not that you can't stretch a single to a double or a double to a triple unless you can first hit one or the other.
Thanks for the suggestion! It could certainly be true that that is the case. If you look at the player editor, changing gap changes the proportion of non-HR "hits" that go to singles vs. doubles and triples. Of course, that is holding everything else constant.

So I looked at what you suggested, predicting EBH/1B. However, the results were horrible, an r-square of only 13%, much worse than the 38% doing it off of abs.

But I tried several other things (ebh/bip, ebh/(ab-hr), ebh/(ab-hr-1B), some others) and, bingo! ebh/(ab-hr-1B) generated the best result by far, with an r-square of .43. However, it still had all the same parameters as significant in the model.

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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Tue Mar 16, 2021 11:03 pm

Well, I'm not sure what to say.

I grabbed BBA data for the sim before tonight's then calculated the EBH rates per hits that were not HR ([2B+3B]/[H-HR]) Here is the chart that results:

GAP-vs-EBH.PNG
GAP-vs-EBH.PNG (9.16 KiB) Viewed 1175 times
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Tue Mar 16, 2021 11:06 pm

Obviously, I get the exact same shape for EBH/1B.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by allenciox » Wed Mar 17, 2021 9:14 am

So I ran stepwise regressions for the various measures:

ebh=b2+b3
bip=ab-hr-so+sf

b3_ratio=b3/ebh
ebh_1B=ebh/b1
ebh_ab=ebh/ab
ebh_bip=ebh/bip
ebh_bip_no1B=ebh/(bip-b1)
ebh_hits_nohr=ebh/(h-hr)
ebh_no_other=ebh/(ab-hr-b1)
ebh_nonHR=ebh/(h-hr)

Here are the results using only players with more than 25 PA and weighting by PA, using alpha=.005: (I removed b_R and b_S from the list because they were not significant for anything):
_DEPVAR__TYPE__RSQ_InterceptbatadvCONGAPPOWEYEK_sSPE
b3_ratioPARMS0.165490.00796......0.012635
b3_ratioSTDERR.0.00635......0.000912
ebh_1BPARMS0.134920.28956.-0.0379720.057609....
ebh_1BSTDERR.0.01335.0.0048020.004692....
ebh_abPARMS0.377340.03392..0.007065-.001797828-.001340622.002070305.
ebh_abSTDERR.0.00137..0.0004000.0002884020.000422362.000383078.
ebh_bipPARMS0.246390.05332.-0.0020490.009346....
ebh_bipSTDERR.0.00174.0.0006270.000613....
ebh_bip_no1BPARMS0.269960.07204..0.011555-.002264669..-0.000808
ebh_bip_no1BSTDERR.0.00278..0.0006220.000492780..0.000280
ebh_hits_nohrPARMS0.215860.21079.-0.0175250.030386....
ebh_hits_nohrSTDERR.0.00534.0.0019220.001879....
ebh_no_otherPARMS0.431930.03797..0.009129-.001768469-.001530442.003944467.
ebh_no_otherSTDERR.0.00171..0.0004980.0003592110.000526061.000477133.
ebh_nonHRPARMS0.381640.03397..0.007412-.001283520-.001330901.002159142.
ebh_nonHRSTDERR.0.00143..0.0004150.0002993280.000438363.000397592.

So I am unclear what you are plotting in the curves above? Are those means for each gap value? Is that based on vL, vR splits? Thanks! It does look nice.

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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by shoeless.db » Wed Mar 17, 2021 11:04 am

Any chance you can run a stepdumb regression for guys like me to understand?
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:33 pm

I'm plotting a data set that is created by:

1) Take a view with GAP rating and various stats, then ...
2) Do a pivot table on Gap with each stat, then ...
3) Calculate EBH/(H-HR) for each Gap rating
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by RonCo » Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:39 pm

Here's the data after last sim...
GAP-EBH-H-HR.PNG
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by jleddy » Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:55 pm

Wait a minute...you mean to tell me the higher the GAP rating, the higher results of extra-base hits?!?! This changes everything.
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Re: What affects batting results? The third report from 2045 BBA Season Stats

Post by Dington » Thu Mar 18, 2021 3:37 pm

jleddy wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:55 pm
Wait a minute...you mean to tell me the higher the GAP rating, the higher results of extra-base hits?!?! This changes everything.
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