I can't say that I like seeing us play for the single run instead of the crooked number early on, especially when taking the bat out of the hands of our best hitters.

We did it last night in the top of the first, and are doing it again tonight.

i like manufacturing runs.. it has works very well over the last 3 years

One straight number nearly every inning wins baseball most of the time...

If they have a big inning, we go for more than 1...

...Simple

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One straight number nearly every inning wins baseball most of the time...

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The likelihood of getting that is small.

Giving up outs unless you need exactly one run isn't smart.

Giving up outs for runs.....in the big leagues is a bit of a gamble but in college it is beneficial

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Check out "Texas A&M & Baseball In No Particular Order"
at tamu-and-baseball.com

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Giving up outs for runs.....in the big leagues is a bit of a gamble but in college it is beneficial

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In the big leagues it's a poor bet. Expected values drop dramatically.

If you have statistics for college, I'd love to see them.

keegan,
i dont think Ryan needs stats to prove this. college baseball and major league baseball are two totally different games, any fan knows this. small ball is extremely common in college baseball. check augie garridos "stats" if you need to see any.

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i dont think Ryan needs stats to prove this. college baseball and major league baseball are two totally different games, any fan knows this.

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Huh? He doesn't need any proof to prove his claim? Just a blind assertion?

Different games or not, I'd still like to see expected values.

Quite frankly, I'd be shocked if the ordering of the EVs was inverted from what the sabermetricians have observed in the major leagues.


[This message has been edited by Keegan99 (edited 3/17/2009 8:11p).]

they may not be inverted but i can assure you they arent the same. college baseball =/= MLB. good luck finding your expected values

[This message has been edited by OptionRead (edited 3/17/2009 8:16p).]

They're not the same. I wouldn't expect them to be.

However, if you're going to assert that the college game is so fundamentally different that the scoring potential of different situations is wildly different from MLB, then evidence would be appreciated.

There's a classic baseball adage that either supports or defends the...to bunt or not to bunt strategy:

"The winning team scores more runs in 1 inning than the losing team scores in the entire game"

Let's check the adage (i.e. play for the big inning) for the Ags first 19 games:

In 9 of the 19 games the adage has held.

Now checking the corollary:

"The winning team scores more (or the same number of) runs in 1 inning than the losing team scores in the entire game"

In 12 of 19 games the corollary has held.

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But perhaps counter-intuitive, according to the Ags first 19 games, the appropriate strategy appears to be to play for the big inning on Fridays and Saturdays, because in most of those games the corollary holds. (See the Utah series, Wright State series, UC-Irvine, Rice, Baylor-Saturday). So when you expect to get good starting pitching, go for the big inning knock out and that will probably be all the runs you need to win.

And it's the Sunday games and series finales (the slugfests) where the corollary fails most often. So that would mean that you should play for 1 run per inning (i.e. sac bunt) in games were the pitching is expected to be poor. In other words, make sure you score at least one run in every inning as opposed to waiting for the 3-run homer and hitting into rally-killing double plays.

Of course maybe the adage is wrong to begin with and that's why the 2 above paragraphs might seem to be reverse logic.

but hold on, more data:

in the longhorns 17 games this year, the adage has proven true in 14 of 17 games. And the corollary proven true in 15 of 17 games.

Thanks for the research W.

One thing to think about that may taint the data is that we have not been as effective in our execution of small ball (1 run per inning) then in past years.

Decided to hijack a thread to post some mid season observations:
- Weekend pitching is as good as, if not better than advertised. Unless they are having an off night, these guys will make us competitive in every weekend series, which bodes well for the Big 12 campaign.
- Relief pitching is not as good as advertised. Unless T Star gets back to his previous form, relief pitching will be a little nervous at best and a liability at worst. No additional late inning lock down pitcher has emerged. See effect on above comment on being competitive in weekend series.
- Week day pitching is a larger drop off from weekend pitching than expected. It’s not clear the returners are showing significant improvement from last year, and the new guys are still finding their way with no evidence yet there is a Raley or Loux in the bunch. Good start by Chad Sherman last night though, and we could see this area get a lot better as the season wears on.
- Defense all in all is pretty good. Duran was huge at short last year, but overall the defense seems pretty comparable, with some great plays mixed in with occasional costly errors.
- The offense doesn’t look as good as last year. Each player has shown spurts, and if they all got it together at the same time it could be very good. The hitting last year was very clutch through most of the Big 12 stretch, the capability may be there again but we’ll just have to wait and see. The coaches have commented on the approach by the Fullerton and New Mexico hitters – aggressive approach, but with two strikes, fouling off pitches for a good pitch and then putting it in play. By and large don’t see that from our hitters. Team speed also appears to be down from last year, but it’s still above average and can put pressure on opposing defenses.
- Overall, pitching for a series is outstanding but we will need the hitting and 2nd tier pitching to come around to make a serious run past where we’ve been the last couple of years.

Are you really going to start questioning a coach that has a pretty good run the past few years? It is the way he plays it and I like the aggressiveness of it. Being a high school baseball coach it is nice to see someone still using the bunt.

I have full faith in RC, but I have to say that I have thought the same thing as the OP many times this season. Having a guy batting .400 bunt a runner over just doesn't seem like great strategy to me in many situations that we employ it in.

But I fully admit that it's possible that RC knows something I don't.

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Are you really going to start questioning a coach that has a pretty good run the past few years?

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That something works does not make it optimal.

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It is the way he plays it and I like the aggressiveness of it.

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Playing for scoring more than one run is aggressive. Giving up an out - especially from your #3 hitter, who should be the best hitter on your team - to try to scratch something out is the antitheses of that.

Moreover, now first base is open and they can pitch more carefully to your #4 hitter. You've essentially given up an out and all but taken the bat out of the hands of your top two hitters.

[This message has been edited by Keegan99 (edited 3/18/2009 3:52p).]

I love small ball, but our 'bad' hitters should be the one bunting and sacrificing. If the opportunity doesn't arise then we let our 'good' batters swing away and we play to our strengths...unfortunately that may not be working out too well for us right now.

Brodie's injury is going to push the Ags more towards the big inning now

Along with Raley, he was the best bunter on the team, and provided speed at the top of the order. Team speed was already down considerably from last year and now it's even worse.

Small ball is how you win games in high school in college. No college team has the sticks to go out and score a guy from first consistently. More often then not I bet the team will kill any chance and hit into a DP. Small ball you put a guy in scoring position so now all you need is one hit to score him and you put pressure on the D because any mistake will allow a run.

Clip27 - That's an interesting theory. Do you have any statistics to support that?

[This message has been edited by Keegan99 (edited 3/19/2009 2:29a).]

The effectiveness of small ball, as a general philosophy, totally depends on the strength of your pitching staff. If you don't have pitchers who can limit your opponents' runs, small ball is likely not going to win you a lot of games. Texas did not play as much small ball last year because they didn't have the pitching to support it. This year they do, so they're using the sac bunt more often.

On an inning to inning basis, it's better to use small ball in early innings when you don't have a specific number of runs to score. It puts the defense on its heels early, it gets the pitcher thinking about fielding and not just throwing the ball, it gives you a psychological advantage if you score early, etc. But it's not as likely to be successful later in the game if you are down a significant number of runs. For instance, the odds of small ball scoring 4 or 5 runs in 2 innings are not great. So in that situation, you're going to start trying to make up most of that deficit the normal way and then go to small ball if you still have outs on your side.

But the reason Augie has been so successful with it is that he doesn't just sacrifice his worst hitters. He will sacrifice any hitter in his lineup if the situation calls for it. If it's going to be a major part of your approach, then every hitter on your team has to be willing and able to execute a sac bunt, and as a coach, you have to be willing to ask a guy batting .400 to do it when all the indicators suggest that you'll get a run from it.

Small ball obviously works best on a team that has great pitching AND big bats because you don't see a lot of runs scored on safety squeezes. You have to have guys to drive in the runs that sac bunts are putting in scoring position. But if you have both of those things (good pitching and solid hitting), small ball is a highly effective method of putting runs on the board. It exactly how Texas dominated Florida, a quintessential SEC gorilla ball team, in the championship series in Omaha in 2005, even though Texas only scored 10 runs over 2 games in that series.

No Keegan I am not gonna spend the hours to look that up. It is basic baseball. Pro Baseball is not the same as college baseball. I am just gonna say that Augie lives off of small ball and has won more games than any coach ever. The only really successful coach that utilized gorilla ball was Bertman from LSU. The only player I have ever seen Augie consistenly let swing with 0 out and a runner on 1st is Kyle Russell when he is hot. Not many teams have a guy like Kyle Russell that can consistenly hit the longball. Small ball is not the best for every team but it is the best for a large majority of them

keegan and his damn statistics

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keegan and his damn statistics

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Yea, gosh forbid someone have evidence to support their dogmatic view.

Augie's small ball primarily works when he has a dynamite closer (see Huston Street and Cox for one year)

His postseason track record at Texas without those 2 closers is rather pedestrian.

The closer's have almost nothing to do with Texas' success in small ball. And Austin Wood has been a damn good closer. The closer's have not lost games for them the rest of the team has never put them in position to win. The team has to be leading for a closer to matter and they have not been leading many in the postseason recently