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Batter Protection

• The basic idea of protection is that a great hitter will allow the hitter in front of him to see more pitches to hit and so that batter will do better than otherwise expected.

• Doug Drinen and JC Bradbury of Sewanee University studied this.

• They took over one million batter/pitcher interactions from the Retrosheet game files.

• They then considered a variety of variables like game situation, pitcher quality, batter quality, pitcher and batter handedness, and also the quality of the on-deck batter.

• They found that the better the on-deck batter the worse the current batter did. It was a statistically significant difference, but it was small, around 5 points of batting average.

• They speculated that pitchers exerted extra effort to retire this batter prior to the star batter's at bat.

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