Previously on "Beacon Stats".....

The Beacon has featured many articles pertaining to the Range Ratings given by Strat.

For the most part, we have promoted the importance of defense and that using players with better Range

Ratings is more important than those players with better offense but lesser defense. The idea has been that

a 2 range will take away more hits than a better hitting 3 range will add to the offense.

RECENT EVENTS - RANGE RATINGS & PERCENTAGES

When taking a look at the actual percentages for various results on the cards I found some interesting numbers. For each At Bat, the dice are rolled and these possible results (of 216) occur:

Batter Card  50%    Pitcher Card   36.1%   Defense X-Play  13.9%

The Defense X-Plays only appear on the pitcher card which accounts for the pitcher card sharing it's results with the X-Plays. 

We are well aware of the number of X play chances appearing on each pitcher's card. 

They are the same for all pitchers.

P  2     C  3     1B  2     2B  6     3B  3     SS  7     LF  2     CF  3     RF  2

What sorta dampened my strong support of defense recently was looking at the percentages that these numbers actually represent.

P/1B/LF/RF represent only 0.93%....that's less than 1 percent of coming up on the first roll.

C/3B/CF represent 1.39%

2B represents 2.78% and the percentage for SS's 7 numbers is 3.24%.

None of these sound like they would have much chance of coming up with each pitcher-batter roll.

So maybe fielding ratings aren't as important as I thought?

Still, I checked the Dairymen's Strat Fielding stats (USPBL's 2024 season) and see I had 935 X plays.

So even with these miniscule percentages, there were 5.6 X plays per game. I guess there's just a lot more rolls throughout the game than I imagined

Here's another observation never made before.

WIS used 3 Shortstops. Arias, a 2 range. Reyes, a 3 range, and Estrada, a 4 range.

Their X-play percentage and performance: Arias (.843) gave up 16 hits in 662 innings, about 2.4%.

Reyes (.609) gave up 18 hits in 371 innings about 4.9%.  Estrada (.500) gave up 18 hits in 335 innings, about 5.4%.  So the 2 Range SS took away twice as many hits as the 3 range, and about 2 1/2 times more hits as the 4 range. 

Noticeable is that the difference between the 2 and 3 is greater than the difference between the 3 and 4.

I checked another SS, Tovar, a 1 range from the Hammerheads for comparison. He gave up just 5 hits in 1309 innnings. That's 0.4%! That's like 6 times better than the 2 range and a whole bunch more times better than the 3 and 4 range SS. 

What I'm seeing then is that the 1 range is a lot better than the 2, while the 2 is a lot better than the 3, but the 3 isn't that much better than the 4. 

Might be worth considering when assigning your lineups.

Over the years I've found several articles regarding at what point does defense overcome the lack of offense from a particular player. Most involved very lengthy formulas and logarithms that I don't understand.

There was one by Strat's Glen Guzzo from over 20 years ago that I still like best. Summarizing in a very very basic manner, here's what we get. 

Point Difference for Defense (Range) over Offense (OPS). The low end is used going from a 4 to a 3, while the middle is used from a 3 to a 2, and the high end for going from a 2 to a 1. Thus the numbers are cumulative when looking at the differences spanning 2 to 3 range ratings better.

P/1B/LF/RF  About 0-20 less OPS pts for each level of improvement.   

3B/CF           About 10-30 pts for each level of improvement.

2B                 About 25-50 pts for each level of improvement.

SS                 About 40-70 pts for each level of improvement.

Catchers are not included as they don't have the same effect in preventing hits as do the other positions.

It's been assumed that a manager won't (or can't) voluntarily use a 5 range so they aren't included.

Example - at 2B  A 3 range could be 25 pts worse than the 4, a 2 range could be 35 pts worse than a 3,

and a 1 range could be 50 pts worse than a 2.  When comparing comparing to a range more than 1 better,

you add them up. So a 1 could be 110 pts worse than a 4 or 85 pts worse than a 3. Got it??? I barely do.

NON X-PLAY DEFENSE

Whenever we look into Strat's defense we're always looking at the Range Ratings. That makes sense since for the most part, the non-X-play results are the same regardless of the fielder's defense. A GBA (2B) is a double-play whether there's a 1 range or 4 range making the play. But there are positions where the defense is important without an X-play roll, namely Outfielder's and Catchers.

Outfielders have ARM ratings Catcher's have ARM, T and PB ratings. And sometimes the Range ratings

come up even without an X-play.

And OF's ARM is used when attempting to throw out advancing base runners. A Catcher's ARM is used to hold runners and throw out base stealers. Ranges come up for catcher's to "Block the Plate" and for outfielders when "Robbing Homeruns". 

And while LF and RF have the same 2 numbers coming up for X-plays, the stronger arm is needed in RF since the runner will gain 10% when advancing to Third. 

Taking these factors into account, while P and 1B have the same 2 X-play numbers as LF and RF, defensively, the need for better OF wold seem to merit more consideration than their infield counterparts.

BATTER CARD OUTS

Lastly, a look at the OUT on the BATTER Cards was examined.

Rather than show those charts, here's the summary.

The outs on the batter cards vary greatly from batter to batter. Even when comparing a LH hitter to another LH hitter with similar stats, the outs on their cards have little in common. The RH hitter cards tend to have their outs spread to all the positions as one would expect. The odd thing was that the LH hitters had very few outs to RF while having a lot to LF. The RH hitter's outs were spread evenly among the outfielders.

HOWEVER....since the fielder's range isn't used here, the only out results that would matter are those to the OF. And for all hitters, the outs seem to favor going to LF. 

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