Follow the Walks

I've made an interesting discovery. I clicked open Grady Sizemore's Game Log this morning and saw the following:

Sizemore started the season hot but has been in a slump the last couple of weeks. If you look at the chart, you can see exactly what's happening. He hit 4 home runs in the span of eight days from April 16-23, probably thought he was all of the sudden Babe Ruth, and since has been swinging at every pitch he sees. You know that because of the walks. He had 11 walks in the bottom 12 games on the chart and only 4 in the most recent 12 games.

It strikes me that players probably score more points in games they draw walks than in games they don't - that walks are a leading indicator of success. But it doesn't take Einstein to figure that out. That's not unlike saying that players score more points in games they hit home runs than in game they don't. Duh.

So I did a little study to see if I was right. I pulled the game logs for all of the batters so far this year into Excel. I kept the games in which the batter had at least 3 plate appearances. I split them into two piles: games in which the batter had no walks and games in which he had at least one walk. There were 4,523 games in the first pile and 2,342 games in the second pile. Then I averaged the FNFT Points (FP) for each of the two piles of games, except in the "walks" pile I subtracted the number of walks from the point total - I wanted to only consider other plate appearances in those games; the ones where the batter didn't walk.

The "no-walks" group averages 3.43 points per game. They average 4.18 plate appearances per game for a ratio of 0.82 points per plate appearance.

The "walks" group averages 3.67 points per game (again, excluding the points from walks) in 3.25 non-walking plate appearances per game - a ratio of 1.13 points per plate appearance.

So, even eliminating the points from walks, batters score more FNFT points in games they draw walks than in games they don't. In fact, the average number of points per non-walk plate appearance is 38% higher in "walks" games than in "no-walks" games. That's a lot bigger gap than I was expecting.

(Running late - gotta get ready for work...)