Relativity and Hit Batsmen

A follow-up, hopefully brief, to my previous post about my desired redefinition of the at-bat. In that piece I suggested a new statistic, Alternate At-Bats or AB', with AB' = AB + BB - IBB + SF. Alternate Batting Average, or AVG', then becomes (H + BB - IBB)/AB' = (H + BB - IBB)/(AB + BB - IBB + SF), which looks eerily similar to the current definition of On-Base Percentage except that it excludes intentional walks and hit-by-pitches. But then, at the end of my piece, I suggested that I would like to see hit batsmen given more inclusion in pitching stats, and in particular treated like walks for the sake of statistics such as WHIP (Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched) or BB/9 (Walks per 9 Innings). Why the difference? The answer is that a batter hit by a pitch looks very different depending on your point of view: it's all relative.

In evaluating players' skill levels in the context of a one-against-one competition such as baseball's battle between batter and pitcher (and yes, other people have non-zero influence, but those two are the primary combatants), it seems to me that we should care about their success rate in those situations when they are genuinely trying to win the confrontation and their antagonist is giving them a legitimate opportunity to succeed or to fail. This is important, because if you aren't given an opportunity to fail then your success doesn't say anything about how good you are. Likewise, if you aren't genuinely trying to succeed, then your failure isn't really about how good you are or aren't, either, it's about the fact that you were pursuing an unorthodox strategy. (Of course, deliberately making outs via the sacrifice bunt is painfully orthodox at this point, but in principle it's a deviation from the ordinary norms of what batters are trying to do, namely to reach as many bases safely as possible.)

But note the asymmetry here. You have to be genuinely trying to succeed. Your antagonist doesn't. They simply have to be giving you an opportunity to fail. Because we're not evaluating them, we're evaluating you. Now, oftentimes one party's lack of interest in succeeding will inherently deny the other party the opportunity to fail, as in the intentional walk or the sacrifice bunt. But other times it won't. When a pitcher pitches around a fearsome hitter in a tight spot, rather than giving them an outright intentional walk, the batter could decide to swing at the pitches out of the strike zone, and get himself out. It works the other way, too: your antagonist can be genuinely trying to beat you, but still fail to give you an actual opportunity to lose the battle. This typically happens through incompetence. On some level we recognize that a batter facing a meltdown-Rick Ankiel type, who's just lost all ability to throw the ball within three feet of home plate, isn't really demonstrating any skill in drawing a walk: it was handed to them.

Of course, these nuances within the category "unintentional walk" are sufficiently difficult to discern that there's no point trying to distinguish them statistically. You wouldn't want to try to label certain pitch-around walks as IBBs, and while it's true that any idiot could have drawn a walk against Rick Ankiel during his melt-down, that doesn't mean they wouldn't get credit for it. But hit batsmen are different. When the pitch is thrown that eventually hits a batter, the pitcher is presumably trying to succeed at getting the hitter out. The hitter is presumably trying to succeed at reaching base safely. And the batter is giving the pitcher a meaningful chance to fail, because if they threw the pitch over the middle of the plate it might get hit hard. But, as it turned out, the pitcher didn't give the batter a meaningful chance to fail. The plate appearance ended due to something (presumptively, if not actually) outside the batter's control. The pitcher had a chance to make a genuine competition out of that pitch, or that plate appearance, and blew it: that is a failure. But because the pitcher's failure was a failure to create a genuine competition, and that failure occurs before the batter would have any causal input on anything, we can't truly say that it was a success for the hitter. It was, in terms of the result, but it's success by default, success because the other person didn't really show up to the battlefield. So the hit-by-pitch is meaningful or meaningless, depending on whether you're watching from the mound or watching the ball slam into you.


Oh, and also, though I forgot to say this in my closing lines of the previous piece, I'd like to see WHIP' and BB/9' excluding intentional walks, as well as including hit batsmen, for the obvious reason that an intentional walk is not an actual demonstration of wildness but rather a strategic calculation on most likely the manager's part.