Schechter: The most important pitching study ever done
From SABR member Gabriel Schechter at Seamheads.com on April 5, 2015:
For many years, I’ve been toiling on the statistical fringes of the eternal baseball question: what is the best way to handle pitching? My aim has been to put together a baseball equivalent of a “grand unified theory” which would account for the key changes in the way pitching staffs have been deployed over the years. The time has come to let my findings see the light of day.
Thanks to Dave Smith and www.retrosheet.org, I have compiled literally millions of data points covering many aspects of pitching usage and performance from 1950-2014. I looked at every box score since 1950 for the big starting pitcher study which I’ll be presenting here in a series of articles. Here is the way I’ve mapped the articles:
1. Overview: earliest ten seasons vs. most recent ten seasons
2. The 1950s
3. The 1960s
4. The 1970s
5. 1980-1984
6. 1985-1989
7. 1990-1994
8. 1995-1999
9. 2000-2004
10. 2005-2009
11. Probably a separate article for each of the past five seasons.In my scouring of box scores, I looked for a specific situation which I felt would represent the clearest changes in the varying ways in which managers have used pitchers in the past 65 seasons.
Read the full article here: http://seamheads.com/2015/04/05/the-most-important-pitching-study-ever-done-an-overview/
Originally published: April 5, 2015. Last Updated: April 5, 2015.