Interested to get the forum's views on one of the oldest debates around: Batting vs. Pitching. Which is more important? You hear stuff like "Baseball is 90% pitching" all the time but what does that statement really mean?
I believe that batting is more important than pitching ni baseball and here's why: The outcome of a plate appearance is more dependant on the skill of the batter than of the pitcher. To see this, take a look at the extreme ends of just about any statistic: Home Runs, Walks, Strikeouts, Hits ... you see that batters who lead or trail in these categories have much higher/lower numbers than the pitchers do. For example, no one pitcher gives up home runs as often as Barry Bonds hits them. Some hitters never hit a home run in a year but you'll never get a pitcher who doesn't give any up. No pitcher gives up walks as often as Bonds gets them. No pitcher gets as few strikeouts as Wade Boggs used to make. (Too lazy to look up the numbers right now, sorry.)
For this reason, I think a superstar hitter is worth more to a team than a superstar starting pitcher (since both of them give you about the same plate appearances/batters faced in a given season). Also for this reason I think you have to give more weight to the hitting abilities of a team than its pitching abilities when handicapping a game.
Thoughts?
I believe that batting is more important than pitching ni baseball and here's why: The outcome of a plate appearance is more dependant on the skill of the batter than of the pitcher. To see this, take a look at the extreme ends of just about any statistic: Home Runs, Walks, Strikeouts, Hits ... you see that batters who lead or trail in these categories have much higher/lower numbers than the pitchers do. For example, no one pitcher gives up home runs as often as Barry Bonds hits them. Some hitters never hit a home run in a year but you'll never get a pitcher who doesn't give any up. No pitcher gives up walks as often as Bonds gets them. No pitcher gets as few strikeouts as Wade Boggs used to make. (Too lazy to look up the numbers right now, sorry.)
For this reason, I think a superstar hitter is worth more to a team than a superstar starting pitcher (since both of them give you about the same plate appearances/batters faced in a given season). Also for this reason I think you have to give more weight to the hitting abilities of a team than its pitching abilities when handicapping a game.
Thoughts?
