NUMBERS DON’T LIE: If Manuel’s decision Wednesday night to use Fernando Tatis as a pinch-runner and Alex Cora as a pinch-hitter in the 10th inning seemed curious, statistics and history backed him up: Cora is simply a better pinch-hitter.
In 88 pinch-hit at-bats, Cora has 25 hits and one home run, for a .291 average. Tatis is 19-for-79 (.241), with two homers.
– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.
Yeah, I know the whole “small-sample size” thing is bandied about a whole lot at this point of the season, but I’m going to to ahead and invoke that clause here. Tatis has a lifetime .788 OPS in 3417 plate appearances.
Cora has a lifetime .657 OPS in 3484 plate appearances.
Perhaps Tatis is every bit as unclutch as Mets fans seem to believe he is and he would have locked up in that spot, and maybe Cora can actually will himself to first base in pinch-hitting situations in way he somehow can’t in most other at-bats, but I refuse to accept that Cora is “simply a better pinch-hitter” than Tatis, who is simply a better hitter.
Tedquarters 
Ted,
I think you are more arguing wether pinch hitting is a different skill than normal hitting.
If you but into the fact that pinch hitting is somewhat of and entirely different skill, which Manuel and Martino obvioulsy buy into, then the numbers support it. Thats a decent enough sample size for PHing, around 80 abs for each.
Its just like LH/RH splits. Everyone buy into those. Say a team brings in a tough LH pitcher, do you send up the better overall hitter, who may be LH not hit LH picthing well, or the RH batter who hits well against lefties?
This is a case where the entire baseball watching free world believes that the LH/RH matchup matters. Where in terms of PH, not everyone considers it much different than normal hitting.
But at least with LH/RH you’re talking about much larger sample sizes, since you can take an aggregate of every lefty vs lefty PA and every righty vs righty plate appearances in a season, or over multiple seasons, and compare them with league averages to determine whether there’s enough evidence for a split. Where as to say one bench player is a better pinch hitter than the other you’re looking at a drastically smaller sample size since you can only look at those players specific plate appearances to make the determination.
I’m not saying either way is right, i’m just clarifyingthe arguement. If you believe that pinch hitting differes that much from normla hitting, which many people in baseball do, then you should look at the pinch hitting numbers on thier own, as thier own sample, the same way LH/RH splits are looked at.
If you dont think its that different (which I personally dont), then there shouldnt be as much weight put on the PHing stats.
But non of us here have every pllayed in anything close to a ML baseball game, so for you or i to sit here and try to say wether its that much different is kind of ridiculous, because we would have no clue about that.
It’s actually not a large enough sample to pick up a difference. If you crunch the numbers on this the p-value for their difference in Avg is .246, which is to say that there’s a one-in-four chance that we would see these results even if Tatis were a superior hitter. Moving instead to OBP, where the difference is a rounding error, we have little reason to think that Cora is so much better a pinch-hitter that it would make up for Tatis’s obvious superiority as a hitter in general.
Well, not exactly. I mean, for one, we have no idea whether the lifetime pinch-hitting numbers had anything to do with Manuel’s decision. I tend to doubt they did. And if they did, I’d wonder why he’s carrying Tatis as his primary right-handed bench bat if he’s got reservations about his ability to pinch hit.
And platoon splits decidedly exist, because we can see over a pretty larger sample the severe difference in how a guy like Mike Jacobs hits lefties versus how he hits righties.
It’s tougher to tell with pinch hitting because few batters ever get enough pinch-hitting opportunities to make up a reasonable sample, but the ones that do usually end up approximating their career lines pretty closely. If you look up guys known as great pinch-hitters who managed to get at least 300 pinch-hit at-bats or so — Rusty Staub, Lenny Harris, John Vanderwal, Manny Mota — you’ll see that their career pinch-hit lines actually wound up pretty similar to their career batting lines. There are fluctuations, for sure, but nothing to suggest it’s a wildly different skill than hitting in any other situation.
I agree with you Ted, and I was just saying that this is really the true arguement here, which is wether there is really a difference between pinch hitting and regular hiting, not sample sizes.
I think there is to an extent, but I think its limited to certain select players, like there are always a handful of guys good at pinch hiting, and another small group who admittedly hate and have trouble comming of the bench etc.
But if you were so inclined to believe that there is a true split there, then if the samples are big enough (I say 80 abs is decent) then by all means maybe factor it in to the decision.
Andy, Andy, Andy. I had such high hopes for you. Columbia J school, you were even a teacher in NYC for a while.
So it’s disappointing to me that you’re writing like Kevin Kernan.
I just assumed that after Jerry exhaled and coughed, he spotted Tatis through the haze, and sent him out to run for Jacobs, without any consideration as to who should pinch-hit.
Good God. GMJ and Jacobs both in lineup tonight.
Well, there is a righty on the mound, so we have to match up with the switch-hitting GMJ instead of the switch-hitting Pagan. Get with the program.
Naturally. And that “long look” Pagan was going to get last all of 3 days. That’s awesome.
Maybe the reason he’s been inconsistent at the plate is because he’s getting yanked in and out of the lineup Jerry, you stupid, stupid man.
Like Murphy last year.
(Oliver Perez +Pujols, Holliday) /(GMjr & Bay in the outfield)= Gina’s watching hockey tonight
Holliday is out of the lineup for some undisclosed illness.
disclosed illness =he saw ollie was the opposing pitcher and couldn’t take the pressure.