Lindbergh: Fans think their teams can’t hit rookie pitchers; is that true?
From SABR member Ben Lindbergh at Baseball Prospectus on September 4, 2013:
Earlier this year, I wrote an article about internet commenters’ attempts to concoct trades for Giancarlo Stanton. The Marlins right fielder had reportedly been put on the block, and while the price in prospects was believed to be steep, not even fans of the organizations with the worst farm systems were willing to concede that their team couldn’t get a deal done. Every fan base, it turned out, had at least one blogging, tweeting, or commenting member who didn’t see any problem putting a persuasive package together. “Ultimately,” I concluded, “we’re all convinced that we’re above-average drivers, and that we’re better looking than we actually are, and that our teams would have no trouble trading for Stanton.” In reality, of course, we can’t all be above average at anything, and most of the proposed trades were preposterous. Stanton is still in Miami.
Rooting for baseball teams isn’t a totally rational activity, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the people who do it are laboring under a different delusion. This one, almost as widespread as Stantonitis, pertains to what Cliff Corcoran once dubbed “getting URPed”—shut down or beaten by an Unfamiliar Rookie Pitcher. Over the past nine-plus seasons, rookie starters, in close to 40,000 innings, have posted a 4.76 ERA. Non-rookie starters, in over 240,000 innings, have recorded a collective 4.30. Veterans have outperformed rookies in every season from 2004 through 2013, so clearly someone has to be hitting rookie pitchers. But you can find a fan of (almost) every team who’ll tell you that it must be someone else.
What follows is an effort to catalog the internet’s belief in the inability of any team to touch rookie pitchers.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21711
Originally published: September 4, 2013. Last Updated: September 4, 2013.