Stats are funny. As anyone who has ever written about, watched, or even just thought about sports can tell you, statistics can paint whatever picture you want them to based on how you present them. This is, of course, not just limited to sports. As the old saying goes, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” With Colby Lewis set to take the mound for the Texas Rangers in Game 6 of what has been an incredibly compelling World Series in which even the blowout treated us to an individual performance for the ages by Albert Pujols, I am intrigued by the superlative playoff statistics compiled by Lewis over the past two seasons and their power to comfort or antagonize Rangers fans, Cardinals fans, and objective bystanders alike. It just depends on how you look at them.
Image credit: AP Photo/Brian Snyder via Colby Lewis’ Playoff Dominance For Rangers fans, or those like me who predicted that the Rangers would win the series in 6 games, all they need to see to have confidence in Lewis taking the bump Wednesday night is this: a 4-1 record in 44 postseason innings over the last two years with a 2.22 ERA and a 1.075 WHIP. The Rangers are 5-2 in Lewis’ seven playoff starts in 2010 and 2011. With stats like that, how can anyone expect anything other than Schilling-like greatness from Lewis in Game 6? I certainly am. In fact, Lewis is the reason I picked the Rangers to win the series in 6 games. Based on his playoff track record, I felt certain that he would outduel young Jaime Garcia in their two starts. For the same reason, I felt that Chris Carpenter and his solid playoff track record would outduel C.J.
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Wilson and his shaky playoff history. If all went according to my master plan, that meant Texas would take one of the two opening games in St. Louis (they did), and that St. Louis would win at least one in Texas (they did), and that if Texas could take two out of three at home (which they did), the series would go back to St. Louis with the Rangers up 3-2 and Lewis on the hill.
I got the sequence a bit wrong, as the Rangers were able to win Carpenter’s start last night after dropping Game 3, but the end result and current circumstance is what I anticipated. And now it’s up to Colby Lewis, who we should expect greatness from based on his clear emergence as a “big game pitcher”right? Again, it’s all in how you look at the stats. “Regression To The Mean” and Sample Size I am no advanced statistics buff, as you’ll soon see from the rudimentary (but still telling) statistical analysis I’m about to present.
I do understand the basics though, and I know all about the irresistible power of regression toward the mean. Regression toward the mean is thusly: Reversion to the mean, also called regression to the mean, is the statistical phenomenon stating that the greater the deviation of a random variate from its mean, the greater the probability that the next measured variate will deviate less far.
In other words, an extreme event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event. To put this in rudimentary baseball terms that even Joe Morgan could understand, consider the following example: Gordon Beckham is a lifetime.249 hitter after three seasons and 1,485 major league at bats. That means that, on average, we would expect Beckham to get roughly one hit every four at bats. That is his established track record over a relatively large sample size at the major league level. During the 2011 season, Beckham had six games in which he got three hits, either in four at bats or five depending on the game. His batting average in those extremely small sample sizes was.750 (if 3-4) or.600 (if 3-5).
These are outliers. White Sox fans would love it if Beckham could do that every game, but no baseball player could. 100+ years of data collection has told us that a player hitting just.300 over any statistically significant sample size is outstanding. Hitting.600 or.750 is impossible.
Even hitting.300 for Beckham over the course of a full season would be seen as a large and unexpected deviation from his already established average. This is a very important concept to understand when it comes to discussing the playoffs, especially the notion of a “big game pitcher” or “big game player.” The problem with playoff stats is sample size. As any fantasy baseball player knows, anyone in the Bigs can get hot for a week.
Who has had their fantasy team carried by Garrett Jones for one monster week? Who parlayed Brent Morel’s hot September into playoff wins down the stretch? Did you know that Javier Vazquez went 5-0 with a 0.71 ERA and a 0.63 WHIP in five September starts this season?
In small sample sizes, anything is possible depending on who’s hot and who’s not. Especially in baseball, you cannot declare a player “clutch” or a “choker” just because he does or does not perform well in a single baseball playoff series. Billy Hatcher hit.750 in the 1990 World Series en route to being named the MVP. Talk about clutch, right? He had 9 hits, four of them doubles, in 15 at bats. But how statistically significant was Hatcher’s series? It was impressive, yes; but Hatcher was a career.264 hitter who caught lightning in a bottle.
Just because he was magical over four October nights in 1990, would you rather have he or Alex Rodriguez (and his career.277 playoff batting average) up in a key spot in the Fall Classic needing a base hit? Say what you will about ARod, but in general I’ll take the guy who has hit.302 and mashed 629 HRs over close to 10,000 career at bats as opposed to the guy who hit.264 over 4,000+ at bats. Because baseball history has shown us that as playoff sample sizes increase, a player’s playoff stats tend to closely resemble his regular season stats. Regression to the mean. Look at Derek Jeter, who is renowned for rising to the occasion in October.
In 1996, as a 22-year old, Jeter got 22 hits in 61 playoff at bats. That’s a.360 batting average, 0.44 points higher than he hit during the regular season. The Yankees won the World Series and Jeter was hailed as Mr. Clutch for his performance on the grand stage. In his next playoff appearance, in 1997, Jeter hit.333 (after hitting just.291 in the regular season) as the Yankees lost to the Indians. In 1998, with the Yankees back in the World Series, Captain Clutch came through again in crunch time, hitting.353 (after a.324 regular season) against the Padres to help deliver another title to the Bronx. But an interesting thing has happened over time as Jeter has accumulated more and more playoff at bats (623 in 152 games, to be exact): playoff Jeter has started to look a lot like regular season Jeter.
Jeter’s career batting average is.313. His playoff average is.307. His OBP is a little higher during the regular season and his SLG is a little higher in the postseason.
What does this mean? It means that Jeter isn’t necessarily “clutch” come playoff time. He’s justJeter, a very, very good player who is really no better or worse in “big” spots than he is in “little” spots.
In the playoffs Jeter tends to do what we’ve come to expect from him in the regular season. Taken in isolation, there are small playoff sample sizes that are great as well as some that are bad (.118 BA in the 2001 ALCS,.176 in the.2007 ALDS). We’ve had the luxury of seeing the playoff highs and lows of Jeter smoothed out over time because he’s had so many opportunities. And the conclusion we can draw is that Jeter is no better or no worse in the playoffs. He’s played nearly a full season’s worth of playoff games and his overall playoff numbers (.307/.374/.465, 20 HR, 107 R, 18 SB) are pretty close to what we’d expect from a normal Jeter regular season.
This is a long, roundabout way to illustrate this, using Jeter as a general example: whether he starts off well or poorly, the more playoff games a player plays, the closer he tends to look like his regular season self. Said another way: the larger the sample size, the more a player regresses towards his mean. So what does this mean for Colby Lewis and the Rangers Wednesday? It might not mean a damn thing. Colby Lewis vs History As I said, anything can happen in the small sample size of a 9 inning baseball game. Colby Lewis could fail to record an out and he could throw a no-hitter, and everything in between. No one person in the world can state with any certainty what will happen.
We can, however, use statistical trends to deduce what is likely to happen. And this is where looking at Colby Lewis in particular becomes so damn intriguing as it relates to Game 6.
As I mentioned above, Lewis has come to acquire the label of “big game pitcher” because of his 4-1 record and 2.22 ERA in the playoffs, and rightfully so. Legends are made/born in October, and there is something to be said for a guy who performs at his best when the stakes are the highest. But the question that must be answered for anyone trying to predict what will happen Wednesday night is this: how long can playoff Colby Lewis continue to so thoroughly outperform regular season Colby Lewis?
If we are to put our trust in the concept of regression toward the mean, the answer to that question is not one that will comfort Rangers fans. Since he returned from Japan in 2010, Lewis has taken the mound 64 times for the Rangers during the regular season. In those 64 starts he has logged 401.1 innings and delivered a record of 26-23 with an ERA of 4.059 and a WHIP of 1.201. Those are decent but not great numbers, certainly nowhere near as dominant as his playoff numbers of 4-1, 2.22, and 1.075. What I wondered, though, thinking back to guys like Curt Schilling and David Wells and Andy Pettitte, all legendary for being “clutch” in the playoffs, is just how unprecedented this chasm between Lewis’ regular season stats and his postseason stats may or may not be. Because certainly we should reasonably expect Lewis’ playoff numbers over time to revert closer to his personal career mean, but Rangers fans and people who predicted the Rangers in 6 don’t want to hear that. They want to keep thinking that Lewis really is a “big game pitcher” and that his outstanding playoff stats are not simply a statistical anomaly.
So I prepared the chart below, which shows the top 11 pitchers all-time for career playoff wins, compared to Colby Lewis and with Chris Carpenter thrown in just for fun. I chose these 11 pitchers to compare Lewis against because the all-time leaders in ERA were all relievers or pitchers from long, long ago whose numbers are skewed by the era in which they pitched. This list of 11 includes some of the greatest hurlers of the past three decades, all of whom have larger playoff sample sizes than pitchers from the era before them thanks to introduction of the wild card. What I want you to focus your attention on, and what I used this chart to illustrate for myself, is the difference between these pitchers’ playoff performances and their regular season performance as compared to that of Colby Lewis. Let’s break down the findings. What this chart shows us is that, on average, the 11 pitchers with the most wins in MLB history (a sample size that encompasses 1,862 innings) had ERAs nearly a half run better than their regular season ERA (the -0.473 figure) and WHIPs that were 0.057 lower in the playoffs as compared to the regular season.
In general, we can make the following statement based on this data: the winningest playoff pitchers tended to perform a half earned run and a half baserunner better in the playoffs than in the regular season. Compare that with Colby Lewis’ career playoff stats.
Playoff Colby is performing nearly two earned runs better per nine innings (1.839) and 1.26 baserunners per inning better than Regular Season Colby. Of all the pitchers on this chart, Lewis is the outlier. The closest comparables in terms of ERA are El Duque (-1.580 ERA), Dave Stewart (-1.180), and Curt Schilling (-1.230).
In WHIP, three pitchers actually have bigger differences than Lewis (Schilling, Stewart, and Wells), but Lewis still obliterates the average. It’s clear from this chart there are pitchers like Lewis who have been just okay in the regular season but who have, compared to their own track record, risen to the occasion in the playoffs. And they are names you might expect to hear if you asked a random assortment of 1,000 baseball fans to name the best postseason pitchers of the last 25 years: El Duque, Schilling, Wells, Stewart, and John Smoltz. It’s also clear that there are incredible pitchers, sure-fire Hall of Famers, who pitched below their established norms come playoff time. Again, they are names a grizzled baseball fan would expect to be such a list: Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, both somewhat ignominious for not quite living up to postseason expectations. And then there are guys who proved to be pretty much the same pitcher in the playoffs as they were in the regular season: Andy Pettitte, Tom Glavine, Whitey Ford, and Catfish Hunter. So to bring it all back full circle, here is what this chart and the concept of regression towards the mean suggests is in store for Colby Lewis: simply put, it suggests that the more playoff innings that Lewis logs, the closer his current playoff ERA (2.22) will come to resemble his regular season ERA (4.059).
If Colby Lewis truly is a “big game pitcher” in the sense that he can surpass even his own expected limits in pressure situations, then he might be able to continue to pitch better than a 4.059 clip, but more than likely the 2.22 is due to rise. But a regression, perhaps even an extreme one (unless Lewis himself proves extreme) is in order. Math dictates it., and 1,862 innings pitched by some of the best pitchers in baseball history suggests it. – Granted, an alternate argument could be made that Lewis’ true mean is closer to 2.22 and that his regular season ERA will someday regress towards that figure, but such an argument would be trusting a 44 inning sample over a 401.1 inning sample, so it’s not very reasonable and thus dismissed for our purposes here. Colby Lewis and Game 6 When his career is over, it is unlikely that Colby Lewis will be considered on par with any of the pitchers in the table above.
The late-blooming righty is already 31 years old and has recorded just 38 wins in his major league career, so he probably doesn’t have time to accumulate the regular season numbers all of those guys possess. But that old cliche is a cliche for a reason: legends are made in October. With a winning start on Wednesday night, Colby Lewis certainly becomes a legend in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex.
Depending on how dominant it is, he just may start to inch his way into the bottom rungs of conversations about the best playoff pitchers in MLB history, though he’d certainly need at least another 30-40 innings to legitimize his incredible first 45+ as a playoff pitcher. I’ll restate the obvious – anything can happen in the small sample size of a 9 inning baseball game – before asking the only obvious follow-up question to this long and winding post: what is the most likely outcome of Colby Lewis’ start Wednesday night? The answer is that, most likely, Lewis will regress towards his mean by putting up a stat line equivalent to some point in between his 2.22 playoff ERA and his 4.059 regular season era. This suggests a 5 inning/2 run outing (3.60), a 6 inning/2 run outing (3.00), a 7 inning/2 run outing (2.57), a 7 inning/3 run outing (3.86), or an 8 inning/3 run outing (3.38).
Each of those possibilities is a quality start and each would, theoretically, give the Rangers a chance to win by keeping the scoring at a reasonable level before turning it over to fearsome foursome of Feldman, Ogando, Adams, and Feliz. Of course, the Rangers scored just two runs in each of the two games in St. Louis to start the series, so unless the bats pick up that pace, none of these hypothetical Lewis stat lines would be winners. Then again, the Rangers scored 855 runs during the regular season, good for a 5.27 per game clip. In this World Series, they are averaging just 3.8 runs per game.
So if the Rangers progress from 3.8 runs towards their mean of 5.27, while Colby Lewis regresses from 2.22 runs towards his mean of 4.057, then we can reasonably expect a baseball game. We can expect a 9-inning baseball game, full of twists, and turns, and events that cannot be predicted or even explained. (And yes, that GIF represents my head exploding, which I felt about to happen the further I dizzied myself with stats, and means, and blah blah blah.) One of the aspects I love so much about baseball is that statistics are fun to juggle and jostle, and we can gain plenty of insight into players and teams from trends over time, and we can even make predictions that prove out over large sample sizes; but at the end of the day it all comes down to what the players do on the field in those 9 isolated innings that determine the winner and loser of a single game. In this case, Game 6 just happens to hold the potential to crown a World Series champion. I think it will. Statistically Insignificant World Series Game 6 Prediction Rangers win 4-3.
Colby Lewis pitches 7 innings of 3-run ball before ceding the mound to Mike Adams and Neftali Feliz. And Ron Washington can jiggle the jig of a champion. What is your pick?
I appreciate the visit and comment. Here is the great thing: there is NO certainty that any type of regression happens over the next 9 innings of baseball. That's the beauty of baseball. Each 9 innings is its own entity. Only when taken in aggregate can we find means and trends and yada yada. Heck, Lewis could go out and throw a shutout tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised – and we could all point to his playoff excellence as the reason.
And if he struggles, we can point to this necessary regression as the reason. So now that we've pointed out both sides of the statistically suggested possibilities, we are free to just watch the game without expectation and enjoy it. That's one reason I wrote this post. I wanted to get this out there so I'd stop thinking about it and can just enjoy 9 innings tomorrow. Jerod- I thoroughly enjoyed your article – great read, good explanations of stats.
Being a Rangers fan (but a sane and objective fan), the only thing that crossed my mind is this: for roughly half of Colby Lewis' regular season starts, he has had to pitch in the hitter's paradise that is RBIA while over the past 2 post-seasons (or at least this one for sure), Ron Washington has tried his best to only pitch Colby on the road where his greatest flaw – a propensity to give up the long ball – is lessened. Although I am well aware that his biggest victories (2010 game 6 ALCS and 2010 World Series game 3) were at home It would be interesting to see his career regular season ERA and WHIP at home vs. Road games and how those translate to the playoffs.
It probably wouldn't be very different, but perhaps the margin wouldn't be.as. great as above. Then again, it might be greater. I don't know.
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But like I said, great article and keep up the good work. Thanks for the kind words Jeffrey! I appreciate it. You make a GREAT point about Lewis having to pitch in the Arlington bandbox for half of his starts. And in fact, his home ERA this year was 5.54. His road ERA was 3.43.
One of my frustrations in writing articles like this is knowing while writing it that the statistical analysis is woefully incomplete. There is always yet another layer of the onion to unpeel, then another, and another, to the point that you can get totally lost in the sea of stats. When you only have a few hours in your afternoon and nothing more sophisticated than a blank Excel sheet and baseball-ref.com, you have to simplify!:-) But yes, the stats at least from this year seem to bear out your point that Colby should less likely to see some crazy reversion to the mean in Game 6 because of his propensity to perform better on the road than at home. And I wasn't suggesting you wereso we're all good! I'd been thinking about adding a disclaimer to the post that I realize every single statistical hole in my 'argument' so people don't need to feel the need to point them out in the comment section. (I've written enough of these and seen enough of them to see how that usually goes) One of the points of the article anyway is that you can dig and dig and dig through the stats all you want, but it's not all that relevant if all you're doing is trying to project one 9-inning game. The beauty of sports and small sizes!
I should have trusted our awesome readers (and you all ARE awesome) to not get bogged down in the minutiae and understand the broader point without nitpicking, while simultaneously adding value to the argumentas you did. Lesson learned! How great was Holland in Game 4?
But he did throw four shutouts during the regular season, so one of his playoff starts being lights out actually isn't all that surprising. As for Colby, as my final prediction suggests, I do think he'll be solid.
Maybe not lights out dominant, but he'll give Texas a chance to win, and when you're up 3-2 on the road in the World Series and have a great bullpen, what more can you ask for? As for Garcia, one interesting note I heard on The Ticket tonight is that he is much better at home than on the road, which makes his slot as the #2 starter brilliant planning by La Russa. In fact, Garcia's home ERA is almost a full 2 runs better at home than away. So the Ranger bats better be ready! Not that they don't know that after Game 2. Google the 1994 Ford Taurus and you'll see it is unmistakably a product of early 90s design – Definitely boxy like all its sedan predecessor from the previous 2-3 decadesGoogle the 1996 Ford Taurus which was a radical departure in design from 94 and 95It's sleek and ovaly and while you might recognize it as being from the 90s, it's really not that far off from cars released today. Perhaps aided by advanced CAD and software, but somewhere in the 90s we turned a page in aesthetics and never looked back.
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George Rutler, the very opposite of an alarmist or historical light weight, often makes the excellent point that this is not the age for amateur Catholics, where all Catholics rightly should feel a serious threat to themselves and to their very faith. This lays the burden all the more squarely on them, on us, on me, to get our facts straight from reputable authorities.
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Esec pe linie, nu e de mirare ca Ungureanu a speculat ca il va bate pe Crin la prezidentiale. Da, Crin a iesit cu cea mai mare pierdere dupa referendum. That a president of 150 million Nigerian has no shame,please spear me that dont say it again because i am proud of Mr President.However,someone told you that come 2013 will be far better than this year based on what he has achieved so far, so why cant you wait and see than saying all that.Anyway,for those of you that has not started reading between the line should start doing so as soon as possible and fine a better thing to do to better your life.leave the president alone because he has been trying.Ajibo.
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