History of Pitchers as Position Players

The various projection systems are the closest we can come to predicting future. I was thinking of what they currently lack, and the first thing that came to mind was pitchers as batters. I then checked how each team did with their pitchers last season. It turns out that the spread from the best team, the Dodgers, to the worst team, the Pirates, is less than three wins. The true talent level is much narrower than that, and there does not seem to be much advantage gained by including pitcher batting in projections. Instead, I decided to look at the history of pitchers as position players.

Brett Gardner and Positional Adjustment: CF vs COF

Brett Gardner is the typical center fielder, with speed and range in the field. The New York Yankees just signed him for a four-year extension of 52 million dollars, but to play left field alongside Jacoby Ellsbury instead of center field. There are concerns that Gardner’s bat may not play in a corner outfield spot, that his value would be lower at LF than at CF. This is the effect of the positional adjustment. As a player’s fielding contribution is compared to other players of the same position, we have to adjust our evaluation of a player based on where he plays in the field. The established positional adjustment has a CF getting a boost of +2.5 runs over a full season while a LF or RF gets a penalty of -7.5 runs. In theory, a CF moving to LF would gain 10 runs in the field to make up the difference, as they are now compared to worse fielders. I will be testing whether this statement holds true in reality.

Predicting LOB%

In my article last week, I developed xLOB% as a descriptive statistic to estimate a pitcher’s LOB%. In this article, I will attempt to predict LOB% of a pitcher using his statistics from the previous season. Despite its fairly weak predictive results, pLOB% explains 12.7% of the variation in a pitcher’s LOB% in the following season, better than Steamer’s projection and kLOB%.