What I did to examine this is I used the lineup calculator methodology that Baseball Musing uses for their calculator, and calculated what the difference between the average hitting pitcher and a borderline MLB hitter (I used Omar Vizquel’s hitting line for 2008 in my example).

For my example, I had an average pitcher (which I arbitrarily defined as 4.50 runs allowed) playing for an average scoring team (again 4.50 runs scored per game) with an average hitting pitcher. Then I upped his hitting to borderline MLB position hitter, and calculated the increase in runs scored for that lineup.

Using Pythagorean, he went from a .500 pitcher (as defined by the 4.50 RA/RS) or 16-16 pitcher (assuming 32 starts and decisions) to a roughly 17-15 pitcher. Thus, any good hitting pitcher can add one win to their team (in general) per season (which results in being two wins over .500) and generally the same to their career record, assuming the bullpen performs OK. Over 10 seasons, that is the difference between a 160-160 record and a 170-150 record for a starter. Over a full season for a team, a team of good hitting pitchers vs a team of average hitting pitchers, but both equal in pitching performance, the average team would be 81-81 while the better hitting pitchers’ team would be roughly 86-76.

The oddity is that many pitchers were also good hitters when they were in Little League and High School, so I would think there would be more average hitters among pitchers than there appear to be.

FYI, Livan Hernandez has always prided himself on his hitting and when he was with the Giants, he would create contests/bets with his fellow starters regarding their hitting. So he was like that before coming to the Mets.

What got me to think of it in this way was when I was examining the AL dominance over the NL in regular season play. What I realized was that while NL pitchers have little advantage over the AL pitchers in NL parks, when they played games in AL parks, the AL team would have a average to good MLB hitter at the DH while the NL team would put their best bench player there, which often is a replacement level (or nearly so) hitter. Using the lineup calculator, I found that (roughly) a large chunk of the AL advantage is probably related to the AL team’s advantage in the DH position. And thus this also applies to the World Series as well, in aggregate.

Then it was just a slight leap in intuition to wonder what would happen if an NL pitcher was at least as good as the worse hitting position player, which at that time was Omar Viquel on the Giants.

Is it possible that the 10% chance of getting a single is outweighed by simply making the pitcher throw two extra pitches in some situation? It seems unlikely that even a 10% chance at a hit is worth discarding just to make the pitcher throw a few more…but sometimes you have to wonder.

Fix’d.

“It’s probably the best approach for him at the plate to simply take 5-7 pitches every at-bat.”

The same could be said for Yuniesky Betancourt.