Can You Feel It? - How does one pitcher affect the other?

Baseball games frequently develop a “feel.” A slugfest feels much different to watch than does a pitching duel. If we’ve watched enough baseball games, we feel like we can sense the type of game we’re watching while it’s in progress and get a general sense of where it’s going to go.

Is this a very subtle sense that a baseball fan can develop, or is it just an illusion? Do we just think a given game has a given familiar feel, when in reality it’s just a randomly ordered set of random events?

Statheads will typically call this an illusion. The events of a baseball game are overwhelmingly unaffected by one another. This is a necessary and fairly accurate assumption to make. If we say each event is independent, then each event is suitable for analysis, as it is not all tied up in the context of its game and season.

If each event is independent, games can have no feel. Or at least, the feel is only experienced by the viewer and is not actually part of the game.

To begin to investigate this, I looked at a type of game that most certainly has a feel: a no-hitter. In many of the no-hitters I know about, the winning team (the team not being no-hit) also had a poor offensive showing. That is to say, while its pitcher was dominating the opposition and not allowing hits, the team’s offense was also sputtering. This would be evidence of a feel.

Since 1957 (an arbitrary year, dictated by available data), 128 games have completed 9 innings with one team not accumulating any hits (some got hits in extra innings). In those games, the other team (the one getting hits) averaged a paltry 3.9688 runs per game. Over that span of time, Major League teams averaged 4.3849 r/g. So, in those no-hit games, the other team’s offense was suppressed by 9.4912%.

Though that certainly suggests that no-hitters have a feel that spreads to both offenses, the 128 game sample size is too small to be certain. Let’s take a step back from the rare no-hitter and look at the much more common shutout, a game of any length in which one team does not score.

To do this, I looked at data from the 1996 season through the 2006 season. According to my research, there were 26,389 regular season game played in that span, 2,573 of which were shutouts. The following is the data about the shutouts separated by season. ShoR is r/g for the winning team in the shutouts, ShoG is the number of shutouts, NormR is r/g/team in all games, and NormG is the total number of games played.

	96	97	98	99	00	01	02	03	04	05	06
ShoR	4.9077	4.3886	4.5861	4.6963	4.5862	4.5286	4.6145	4.3774	4.8964	4.5423	4.6834
ShoG	195	211	244	191	203	227	275	257	251	260	259
NormR	5.0377	4.767	4.7936	5.0846	5.1423	4.7756	4.6183	4.7299	4.8138	4.5936	4.8578
NormG	2266	2266	2430	2428	2428	2429	2426	2429	2428	2430	2429

In each season except 2004, the winning team in a shutout averaged fewer runs than an average team that season. In 2000 in particular, the difference is pronounced.

Between 1996-2006, the winning team in a shutout averaged 4.6152 r/g, while teams averaged 4.8368 r/g overall. That means that in this rather large sample size, the pitching staff shutting the opponent out got 4.5821% less support from its team’s offense than it would have expected.

The 2,573 shutouts provide a little over ½ a season’s worth of data (a current MLB season has 2430 games, but the shutouts were only providing data for one of the two teams). The 4.8368 r/g overall is extremely offensive, evidence of the era of offense that sandwiched the millennium, due to steroids, smaller parks, smaller strike zones or whatever. The 4.6152 r/g in the shutouts is much more moderate, though it is still offensive in a larger historical context.

Is this evidence of a game’s feel?

It is clear that suppressed offense on one side indicates a likelihood of suppressed offense on the other side. “Why,” however, is still unclear. Undeniably, some of it is due to a shared environment. A shutout is more likely to occur in Networks Associates Coliseum in Oakland with the wind blowing in than in an average environment. The difficult hitting environment that is helping one pitcher toss a shutout is also holding back his team’s offense. Or perhaps, the umpire has a large strike zone, causing the same effect as the difficult ballpark.

On the other hand, there is reason to think these games should snowball into blowouts. If a team is carrying a lead into the later innings, as a team throwing a shutout almost always will be, their last few at-bats will always come against their opponent’s middle relief, the weak spot of a team’s pitching staff. If events in the game are truly unrelated, we would then be more likely to see a 2-0 lead turn into a 4-0 lead, a 5-0 lead to turn into an 8-0 lead, and a 12-0 lead to balloon to a 16-0 lead. In a typical game, on the other hand, a team has less than a 50% chance of being ahead late, so thus less than a 50% chance of getting to bat against the weak pitching. From this point of view, we would expect runs to be held down more effectively in the non-shutouts, but this is not the case.

I think it is safe to say that games undoubtedly develop a feel. I did the same type of analysis for instances when a team scores 10 or more runs in a game (from 1996 to 2006). The opponents of a team that scored 10+ runs averaged 5.2618 r/g, an 8.7865% increase from the expected 4.8368 r/g overall.

What we cannot know (or at least, what I can’t tell you) is how much of that feel is created by the shared suppressive environment and how much is created by the intangible factors we might suspect. I do think, though, that there is some extent to which an opposing pitching staff will raise its game to try to meet the challenge set by a dominating opposing pitcher. Also, it is very possible that a team’s offense relaxes a little once it gets a lead and sees that its pitcher is dominating. On the other hand, when a pitcher is given a big lead by his team, he may try to throw lots of strikes, surrendering runs in the hopes of avoiding walks and big innings. Or perhaps, he just relaxes too much when spotted a lead.

Let’s look at one last thing. We know that a team in a nondescript game (from 1996-2006) averaged 4.8368 r/g. Over that span, a team on the right end of a shutout averaged 4.6152 r/g. Since 1957, a team whose pitchers gave up no hits through 9 innings averaged 4.3849 r/g. The more extreme the lack of offense on one side becomes, the less the other side scores.

So what about perfect games? Nineteen times in history has a pitcher completed 9 innings without allowing a baserunner. In that set, the team not being completely shut down has scored just 2.5789 r/g. The sample size is so small that this number is basically meaningless, but it still makes you think…