Tony Gwynn's Strikeout Rate

This morning a friend emailed me Tony Gwynn's career stats. He had highlighted some of his single season strikeout totals, which were ridiculously low considering the number of at bats. So I did a little research, and found this article which graphs Gwynn's strikeout rate throughout his career versus the league average.

Gwynn had a tremendously low strikeout rate throughout his career. Just as interesting, however, is what happened to the major league rate at the same time. It trended steadily up. As I’m sure you remember, these were the days of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Everyone was swinging harder, trying to hit the ball over the fence. But not Tony Gwynn. He resisted the trend and still wound up in the Hall of Fame.

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Research: NBA Scores Consistent with Occasional Point Shaving

With the NBA point shaving scandal front and center in the news, a senior thesis paper by Jonathan Gibbs of Stanford is getting a lot of attention. In his thesis, Gibbs found that the betting line does seem to have an effect on the final margin in games with large point spreads. And if you are going to fix a game, the easiest way to do it is to make sure the heavily favored team fails to beat a large spread.

Gibbs found that teams beat the Las Vegas sportsbooks' spread almost exactly fifty percent of the time over the 16,000 games in the study (7,802 compared to 7,855). But in the games where point shaving would seem to be most likely, where the spreads were 12.5 points or more, the betting lines were not accurate.

Gibbs and others have looked just at the games where point shaving would seem to be most likely -- the games with spreads of 12.5 points or more -- and a really weird thing became clear. Suddenly the betting lines were not accurate. Favorites fell way short of the spread at a normal rate, and beat it by a long shot at a normal rate. But if the score was close to the spread -- in short, if it was a game that would be easy to shave points in the final minutes -- then the favorite fell short of the spread more often than they beat it at a significant rate.

That means that if the spread closed at, say, 13, the favorite tended to win by something like 11 or 12 more often than they won by 14 or 15."

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"The Cheater's Guide to Baseball," and Bonds/Steroids Evidence?

This article is a review of Derek Zumsteg's book, "The Cheater's Guide to Baseball." Zumsteg discusses some of the more famous incidents of cheating in baseball, such as the steroid scandal, the 1919 Black Sox , Pete Rose's betting, and the Twins experiment with the Metrodome ventilation system, getting air currents to blow out when the Twins were batting, and blowing in when the opposition was at bat. Also included are lesser known tactics, such as the Indians watering down the infield when they had a a ground-ball pitcher on the mound, so that opposition balls would die in the infield.

Zumsteg quotes various sources who estimate the number of games won as a result of their cheating.

-- Lou Boudreau said "I wouldn't be surprised if [Bossard's groundskeeping] helped us win as many as ten games a year."

-- Earl Weaver argues that groundskeeping increased the Orioles' batting average by "more than 30 points."

-- Zumsteg himself argues that exceptional grounds crews "might be worth a few games a year."

-- And George Steinbrenner argued that Earl Weaver gained "eight or ten games a year" through intimidation of umpires.

Zumsteg also includes a study that he claims proves when Barry Bonds was on steroids. Phil Birnbaum of Sabermetric Research, runs his own simulations which he claims disproves Zumsteg's argument.

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Take me out to the ball game: Is there a real "home field advantage?"

by Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope

Dear Cecil:
Everyone's always talking about how great home-field advantage is in sports, but how important is it really? The mindless stats everyone repeats about how NFL teams with home-field advantage do better in the playoffs drive me crazy — the teams earned home-field advantage because they're better already! Also, are the home-field advantages different in different sports? — Doc, via e-mail

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Sabremetricians have made some very interesting discoveries about sports over the last 20 years or so. This is not one of them. Anyone that has played sports competively aleady knows that home field advantage is real. Sabremetricians have just proved this is correct.