## Fire Up The Hot StoveNovember 2, 2010

Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.
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Although I’m usually fairly heavy on the statistical content, I can’t help but mention a few impressions from Game 5 of the World Series last night.

• If I didn’t have Baseball-Reference.com to tell me different, I’d have assumed Aubrey Huff wasn’t an everyday first baseman from the way he played last night. He was competent and made some nice picks, but he didn’t seem to have the ankle-preservation instinct that most everyday 1Bs do. He seemed to have his heels back quite far on the bag most of the time.
• The rumors about the Yankees pursuing Cliff Lee strike me as cartoonish supervillainy. “If I cannot defeat you, I will simply BUY you!”
• Game 3 was the Lee vs. Tim Lincecum gem that we all assumed Game 1 would be.
• Somewhere, Bengie Molina is secretly pouring champagne all over himself.
• If the postseason came before voting, Buster Posey would be a lock for Rookie of the

## Mariano’s Walk-Off BeanballSeptember 12, 2010

Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.
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Mariano Rivera did something strange tonight: He plunked in the winning run. He hit Jeff Francoeur of the Texas Rangers to force in Nelson Cruz for the winning run in extra innings. It was his fourth hit batsman of the year and only his third loss.

A walk-off beaning requires an extraordinary set of circumstances. First of all, like all walk-off plays, it requires the home team to be at bat in the bottom of the inning. In this case, it was in extra innings rather than the bottom of the 9th. It additionally requires a tied game in the bottom of said inning. Finally, it requires the bases to be loaded when the plunking occurs.

This is all magnified by the face that Rivera does not ordinarily load the bases. Assuming his 2010 OBP against (.214) held, the probability the bases being loaded with two outs or fewer is:

$p(bases loaded, 0 outs) + p(bases loaded, 1 out) + p(bases loaded, 2 outs) = (.214^3) + (.214^3 \times .786) + (.214^3 \times .706^2) = .0098 + .0077 + .0061 = .0236$

Then, if that situation occurs, we still have to deal with the unlikely event of Mariano hitting a player with a pitch. Before this evening, Mo had hit three batters in 196 plate appearances, for a rate of about .0153. Thus, the probability of Mariano Rivera hitting a batter with a pitch after having loaded the bases is

$.0236 \times .0153 \approx .0004$

That means that in 10,000 innings, we would expect that to occur about 4 times, assuming that Mariano wasn’t removed after having walked the bases (which would obviously introduce some bias).

Oddly, the last walk-off hit by pitch also involved the Yankees, albeit on the other side, way back on July 19 of 2008. That night, the A’s’ Lenny DiNardo hit Jose Molina with a pitch to force in Derek Jeter, again in extra innings. David Robertson grabbed the win that night.

## At the other end…June 22, 2010

Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.
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