Monday, September 3, 2012

Most Entertaining.

How about determining the entertainment value of a player by how quickly he accomplishes something positive?

The games are excruciatingly boring because there's so much dead time.  The worst of that dead time is between pitches when players, primarily the batter and pitcher jerk around for no good reason.  The batter steps out to contemplate his situation, which is almost exactly the same as it was a second before.   Blah, blah, blah.

What makes a batter entertaining is his ability to get a hit in very little time.  It's not even the number of pitches, it's the number of seconds.  Given all the jerking around I'm guessing that very few at bats produce a hit in less than 60 seconds.  For that to happen the batter would need to get a hit on the first or second pitch.  Same applies to the pitcher who probably retires very few batters in less than a minute.

On the Yankees the batters who seem to waste the most time between pitches are Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter.  They seem to take at least 30 seconds between each pitch.  This season Jeter has had 87 3-2 counts in 603 plate appearances.  In those 87 PA Jeter has had 69 AB with 28 hits.  If those AB averaged six pitches then Jeter's AB took at least three minutes or 180 seconds.  We can multiply Jeter's 87 AB by 180 seconds and divide by 28 hits to find how long it took him get hits on a 3-2 count ... on average.  Hits per second.

Hits per second can be calculated for each player and then we can start to establish an entertainment value per player.  You see, it's not just what they accomplish.  It's how quickly they accomplish it.

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