Sunday, April 24, 2005
Situational hitting leading to early success
Despite being 22nd in baseball in OPS, the White Sox are 14th in runs scored. What is the cause of this success? Situational hitting.
Now in the past, I've been one to downplay its importance, but the results have shown that it has been, in fact, vital to the White Sox success this year.
Two stats that demonstrate this are the number of times the Sox have rolled into a double play and the number of team Sac. Flies. The White Sox are the only team in baseball that has more sacrifice flies (12) than double plays (7). That's quite a large difference. They also lead the majors in most sac. flies and fewest double plays. Juan Uribe and Carl Everett are 1-2 in the majors with 5 and 4 sacrifice flies respectively. The major league leader in this category in 2004 was Mark Lorretta with 16. Uribe's nearly a third of the way there through about one ninth of the season.
These numbers have led to the White Sox being able to score runs, even when the hits are not falling and have contributed greatly to the team's early success.
Now in the past, I've been one to downplay its importance, but the results have shown that it has been, in fact, vital to the White Sox success this year.
Two stats that demonstrate this are the number of times the Sox have rolled into a double play and the number of team Sac. Flies. The White Sox are the only team in baseball that has more sacrifice flies (12) than double plays (7). That's quite a large difference. They also lead the majors in most sac. flies and fewest double plays. Juan Uribe and Carl Everett are 1-2 in the majors with 5 and 4 sacrifice flies respectively. The major league leader in this category in 2004 was Mark Lorretta with 16. Uribe's nearly a third of the way there through about one ninth of the season.
These numbers have led to the White Sox being able to score runs, even when the hits are not falling and have contributed greatly to the team's early success.
# posted by Karno : 10:46 AM
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Nice. But it begs the question - what happens when the situational hitting stops? What can we expect when the luck runs out? We know that these types of stats exhibit regression to the mean. I just hope the fall isn't too hard.
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