Regrettably, this post will have nothing to do with the St. Louis Cardinals, though, tangentially, it does touch upon Sabermetrics. Let us explain: We lost a bet.

First, we rarely bet on anything, other than filling out an NCAA tournament bracket, and when we do, it generally doesn’t involve cash. And we almost always bet on things we know — or think we know (though we suppose we’re hardly unique on that score). Such was the case when we confidently entered into a wager with our co-worker, Dan King, who, in the course of lamenting that our office fantasy league used walks instead of stolen bases expressed concern about the contextual component of walks. While he conceded our point that batters are mostly solely responsible for their walks, he pointed out that the eighth-place hitter in any NL lineup relies heavily on his lineup context for his walks. We conceded that those punch-and-judys may benefit with a few extra undeserved intentional bases on balls but not significantly enough that it matters. In turn, we brashly countered that leadoff men have much higher walk rates than #8 hitters. Dan King then formalized the claim into a bet — that #8 hitters in the National League have higher walk rates than American League leadoff hitters.

That we have named the name of this Dan King thrice already is proof that we lost the bet, since, in lieu of the initial wager — that the loser buy lunch (Dan’s choice was to be Lee’s Chicken) — Dan King would gladly accept as payment a public retelling of our bet along with ample credit, to be read by Fungoes’ modest internet audience. To the winner go the spoils, indeed.

The results were surprisingly close — so close, in fact, that we couldn’t simply rely on a single season’s worth of data (we figured it would be no contest). So we determined the BB/PA for the respective groups from the last three years, and here’s what we found:

So: Let it hereby be known that we don’t know everything about baseball (this of course will come as little shock to anyone who reads this blog) and that Dan King was right: NL #8 hitters have better walk rates than AL leadoff men (if anyone can spend some time looking into more seasons to prove us right, please contact us immediately).

Now whether Dan King can win our office fantasy league is another question entirely.

This entry was posted by Pip on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 9:49 pm and is filed under announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.