MGL at the book blog tries to determine if Ryan Howard’s true platoon split against lefties. Mitchel makes the following salient points to argue that Howard shouldn’t be platooned.
- He’s a superb hitter against righties.
- He doesn’t face lefties that much.
The two points, taken together could mean that Ryan’s poor batting against lefty pitchers is a fluke. His split is out of whack with other lefties.
First we’ll estimate his overall true OPS. In his career, it is .966. We’ll regress that and call it .930, which is a typical projection for him. Now we have to take his observed platoon ratio (I like to use ratio – some people use a differential) and regress that. His observed platoon ratio for those 4 years is 1.052/.719, or 1.46. For the average lefty, it is 1.20 and we just don’t see that much variation among players in their true platoon splits. IOW, that 1.46 is likely very (but not completely) flukey. We might regress that 1.46 80% toward the league average of 1.20, to get 1.25. That is Howard’s “true” estimated platoon split.
Now we simply apply that to his overall estimated true OPS of .930 and the fact that he faced 62% RHP. That gives us an OPS of .805 versus LHP and 1.006 versus RHP.
.805 is a far cry from .719.
All well and good, but I have one criticism of the post, and that’s the direction of Howard’s OPS.
| Season | OPS |
|---|---|
| 2006 | .922 |
| 2007 | .826 |
| 2008 | .745 |
| 2009 | .654 |
One might interpret those numbers as more and more lefties figuring out Howard’s weakness against lefties and exploiting it. I would guess if Howard’s OPS recovers against lefties next season it will be closer to .719 than .805.
Posted by David Pinto at 11:07 am | Players, Statistics | Permalink | 1 Comment
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October 28th, 2009 @ 12:32 pm
Interesting. A few days ago I read on Keith Olbermann’s blog about this subject and it made me look up how Howard hits against every lefty he’s faced (I love BR’s Play index!)