Relief or Reflux? An Analysis of Major League Replacement Pitching
Rich Charnigo
Statistics, CWRU
Refreshments: 3:30 - 4:00 p.m. Friday,
November 19, at 327 Yost
Talk: 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. Friday, November 19, at 327 Yost.
A manager in major league baseball has the often-difficult task of deciding
when and how often to switch pitchers during the course of a game. Looking
at the simultaneous decline in pitching performance and increase in the use
of relief pitching (and perhaps with a few contests from last season in
mind), one wonders if relief pitching is being overused past the point of
optimal effectiveness. We will consider how the use of relief pitching has
changed over the last thirty-nine years and formulate two linear models
which will relate the earned run average (a primary measure of pitching
performance) to the proportion of complete games (a proxy for the amount of
relief pitching). By considering a statistic designed to assess the quality
of a pitching change and the proportion of pitching substitutions in 1999
contests which exceed a certain threshold value of this statistic, we will
assess the overall effectiveness of relief pitching. With this finding and
the results from the two aforementioned linear models, we will argue that in
fact relief pitching is now contributing to the very problem which it is
designed to circumvent: high scoring by the opposition.
Questions? Nidhan Choudhuri