Batting Facts

Looking at the teams' batting statistics is a different beast than the pitching. Whereas a good starter will maybe put in 35 starts, a good hitter will easily clear 500 plate appearances. The sheer weight of the data is enough to change the tilt of the Earth I say! The tilt! To start off, let's just look at a few interesting facts from last year:

-Kemporer Mattpaltene (that is would be Matt Kemp) was not only an integral cog in his fantasy machines last year, but to his real life team as well. Matt Kemp had the greatest part of his total team's offense in the league last year accounting for 18.4% of his team's runs and fully 21% of his team's RBIs last year. To give you an idea of how large a proportion of the team's offense was centered around this one guy, the next largest proportion of runs on a team came from Curtis Granderson who put up only 15.7% of the Yankees many many runs. That means that the Kemporer contributed 20% more runs to his team than the next guy down the line. Alternately, compare it to Prince Fielder, who accounted for the second highest proportion of his team's RBIs with but 17.7% of his team's total RBI. On the low end theory of these metrics are the Giants, whose leading scorer was the Kung Fu Panda who accounted for just under 10% of his team's runs, and to the Metropolitans, whose leading rbi-guy was Carlos Beltran with just under 10% of his team's RBIs.

-The entire premise of Moneyball was that despite normal metrics used to assess baseball, Jonah Hill is better when he is fat. Also, getting on base is the most important thing, regardless of how you do it. With this in mind, I looked at which teams were most effective in converting men on base into men without pants, hubba hubba! The Rangers bring fully 40.5% of the runners they send out to the bases back home, a healthy 854 runs from 2109 men on base (hits+walks+hbp). They were followed by the Yankees, who brought home 40.2% of their runners (867 runs, 2152 men on base). This was surprising as it always seemed like the Yankees couldn't get guys in when they most needed it, but perhaps it was simply that they scored so often that the times when they didn't were glaring or, more as I remember it, heart rending, soul crushing, and making one believe in anything anymore impossible. The team that stranded the most men on the base paths was the sad Giants, who brought in only 31.2% of their runners.

-For pitchers and their fantasy managers, the unearned run is something to be pleased with. For batters and their fantasy managers, the exact opposite is true. These two are diametrically opposed to what their real life teams feel, interestingly. The team who had to earn highest percentage of the runs that they scored was the Brewers who had to earn 97.3% of their runs. They were followed by the Orioles, who had to earn 96.9% of their runs. The Twinkies had to earn only 92.2% of their runs, the lowest in the league. It is interesting that these numbers did not at all mesh with the number of stolen bases that a team has. I had always thought that one of the best things about the speedsters is that they distract the pitcher and cause confusion among the infielders leading to errors on the basepaths and more unearned runs. This is not the case however, as the teams with the greatest number of stolen bases, the Rays and the 'Dres (155 and 162, respectively), had middling percentages of unearned runs (both 95.2%).