Oooh, oooh, are we gonna argue about whether it made sense to start Schourek in Game 4 again? That's always fun.It was very much like DIPS theory. I found it absurd when it told me there was no difference between Pedro Martinez and Pete Shourek on a ball in play.
I don't know what's more amazing, the fact that the game was 17 years ago, or that Bartolo Colon started it for the Indians and is still pitching.
If you think the estimates of how much framing a single strike can matter, just remember that the difference between starting 0-1 and 1-0 was 213 points of OPS for the AL in 2015 and consider that sevenish percent of those are going to come with the bases loaded. Sure, some of those are going to happen in blowouts, but those ABs are often the ones that decide games. You change ten of them over the course of a season with an extra strike, that might be the difference in winning several games, and we're in an environment now where if you're not winning your division, two or three games is a huge difference. Heck, if the Angels had won three more games, they'd have tied for the division lead instead of missing the playoffs entirely.
We talk a lot about how many runs or wins a player is worth, and they're all just theoretical models to assign some kind of logical value to a player's worth. Sometimes it's worth thinking about the actual baseball situations the players are going to find themselves in. The difference between an 0-1 count and a 1-0 count with the bases loaded and nobody out is huge. Sure, there are going to be a lot of times when that stolen strike comes in a relatively meaningless situation so it feels like it's nothing, but a handful of big situations make all the difference.