Concerning OBP and run scoring

Ok,

I started out looking for stats concerning LOB for teams in the past ten years and I could not find an easy way on Baseball-Reference and I didn’t want to work a lot harder than that.  So I decided to use some of the stats readily available to me on the before motioned site and perhaps, draw some interesting inferences from those stats.

Here is what I compiled

Hopefully that fits on the screen.

Moving on.  It seems that I constantly hear complaining/agonizing that we are leaving too many people on base.  I wanted to put some numbers together to get a better idea about our situation.  The above numbers have flaws. There are many variables, slg% etc. that I did not take into account; however there are some trends that I feel would give away why we are seeing so many men left on.  It would also be very helpful to see how many men these teams left on but like I said I cant find it.  The record of the teams is also relevant but you can look that up easily, and for the most part I think they are playoff teams with a few exceptions.

As you can see a high OBP usually = leading the league in runs.  However, our Cardinals are in 4th and they are a long way off the pace of teams like the Cubs.  With the exception of the 2004 cardinals and the 1999 d-backs (two teams that won over 100 games) a high OBP is necessary to score a lot of runs.  This is common sense, but why aren’t WE scoring the runs. 

Our ratio of hits to walks is very low compared to the other teams that have had high OBP.  Out of the other nine teams on this list, the range of on STDEV for that ratio is from 2.38-2.96 and we are at 1.90.  I know that this conclusion has been reached before on the message boards but I just wanted to see it in the numbers.  We just aren’t getting enough hits.  The walks are fine, but if no one can get a hit, a walk amounts to nothing.  I know that some people have said that in their book, a walk=a base hit, but when it comes to getting a run across the plate, walks don’t do much with a man on second.

The trend however, is that an OBP that ranks 1st or 2nd in the league is usually accompanied, over the course of the year with a better hit/walk ratio.  I think the cardinals will begin to find that ratio as the season progresses and the sample size increases.  It will manifest itself in clutch hits, as well as a decrease in the amount of walks taken.  I base that on my feeling that the team will hit better and the inevitability that out OBP will not stay at .374 but will decrease towards the league average. This will decrease the number of men that get on but increase the % of the runners who do get on that score. (last column in the table)

There is also another way to look at it.  If the punchless bats in our lineup, Izturis, Kennedy, Miles, and even Yadi to some extent don’t punish pitchers for putting people on base, then our walks will continuously go to the more dangerous hitters. This will allow opposing teams to take the bat out of the hands of the good hitters and get the outs where the threat of a hit is less.  We would then have the MLB’s version of Hack a Shaq in Pitch around Pujols.

I don’t see that happening but it is up for you to debate.  I just thought this was a fun little number crunching activity, you thoughts?