Saturday 24 October 2015

Palmer on DiPS

Pete Palmer was interviewed in April of this year, and was asked about Voros McCracken's Defence-Independent Pitching Statistics. Palmer is arguably the most important sabermetrician OF ALL TIME. Certainly his only rival is going to be Bill James, so reading Palmer's comments on DiPS theory, which James himself regarded as important, makes an interesting comparison and contrast.

James referred to McCracken's work in the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (p 885):

3. This knowledge is significant, very useful. 4. I feel stupid for not having realised this thirty years ago.
Palmer, however, has a very different take on the matter.
I didn’t have a lot of faith in [DiPS]....[McCracken] said there wasn’t a great amount of correlation from season to season. But as I said, the variations due to chance and everything in sports, baseball in particular, is a lot higher than people think. Your average could drop 60 points from one year to the next, and it’s not really statistically significant because 500 at-bats isn’t that many at-bats to verify what your current batting average should be.
Whether this opinion is rooted in statistical analysis or not, it does conform somewhat with the analysis provided in "Solving DiPS", a compilation of an on-line discussion which you can find a copy of here. One key solution in "Solving DiPS" is that, given 700 Balls in Play, some 44 per cent of the outcomes are a consequence of random variance, the single largest factor. (Pitchers were assigned 28 per cent, fielding 17 per cent. Hold that thought for a moment.)

I have seen it suggested that Palmer does not understand DiPS, which has become a tool for projecting a pitcher's future. But from the perspective of evaluating a pitcher's season, Palmer's lack of "faith" makes more sense. BABIP's variance is irrelevant, because it is in the nature of the game. What is important is to convert extra-base hits into singles, and singles into outs.

When you don’t look at walks and strikeouts and home runs, you’re actually minimizing a difference between a good pitcher and a bad pitcher. And therefore, the gap in that category is going to be artificially low because some of the factors that would make it higher are not counted.
In other words, we shouldn't be surprised that pitchers appear to have limited or no control over the outcomes of balls in play. That has never been where the difference has been visible in the small sample size of a single season.

Finally, to return to those percentages from "Solving DiPS", what might be surprising from the traditional reception of DiPS is that pitchers have more control over the outcome than fielders. So, again, perhaps we should be a bit more sceptical, like Pete Palmer, of those making grandiose claims for DiPS. Insofar as anything has control over the outcome of the batted ball, it is the pitcher. Random variance in its nature is uncontrolled.

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