How much does admiring one's homers hurt a team?
4 Comments Published by Colin Wyers on Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 2:14 PM.
I'll admit that I don't know, but I'm going to try to find out. Hopefully the fans at BCB (who, I'll admit, generally pay more attention to how much someone hustles than I do) will help me track this as well as possible.
I'm also going to throw this open to fans of other teams - if you're willing to keep track of this with enough data for me to track the data at season's end, I'll go ahead and look at it for you as well. If a bunch of Red Sox fans want to know how much it hurts to have Manny being Manny, let me know how often he does it and I'll figure it out for you.
Labels: Alfonso Soriano, Aramis Ramirez, Baseball, Chicago Cubs
I don't get it. Are you going to assign a base lost each time someone is not hustling out of the box and, honestly, what's the point? I must assume it has to do with the media's mention of Ramirez's reaction to his double yesterday, but who cares? There's going to be less than 10 times each season that a player does this and maybe once or twice it costs them an extra base.
People who want to complain about Ramirez can just look at the fact that he's hit 8 triples the last 2 seasons. He has 15 in his career, 24 if you include his minor league career. Over half his triples have come in the last 2 seasons at the big league level. He's not exactly hitting in a park that's conducive to hitting triples either.
I guess I just don't see any real impact from this and if not hustling out of the box keeps Ramirez on the field for 150 games, he can walk out of the box on balls he thinks are gone for all I care. You can't quantify the value the of hustle, if that's what you're trying to do, without taking into consideration injuries that result from it.
The numbers of runs/wins/etc. are going to be so minuscule as to have no negative impact whatsoever and possible these few times they aren't hustling keeps them healthier.
Sorry, I don't mean to poo-poo on the idea, but I fail to see any significance in doing what Ramirez did last night or any significance in what you may find. If it's just to "prove" to big believers in hustle that it's not that meaningful, they aren't going to like your methods of calculating the runs/wins anyway. Do you think Paul Sullivan sees things in this game in terms of linear weights? No. He believes that Ramirez not hustling has an impact on the batters after him and the fact that Sullivan even mentioned it in his article today was to lead readers to believe that it was a turning point in the game.
Last season, triples by hustling, scrappy Theriot: 2, in 537 AB
Triples by non-Caucasoid, lazy, long-drive admirer: 4, in 506 AB.
That's right, Rammy doubled up Scrappy-Doo in 3B in 31 fewer AB's. Imagine if he "hustled."
Triples aren't only a product of speed. Didn't Ron Santo lead the National League one year? By golly, Baseball-Reference.com says he did with 13 in 1964. Even at the young age of 24 Ron was not exactly fleet of feet.
In the case of Theriot v. Ramirez, the number of triples can be related, I think, to the ability of the respective parties to hit a baseball for distance. It's a skill that lacks the romance of 'hustle' but is a hell of a lot more important when it comes to winning ballgames...