One thing I love about visiting with my friends on our baseball weekend is that I come back with some new ideas. One thing we thought we noticed was a disappearing platoon advantage. That is, we thought we noticed pitchers doing less well when they are facing a batter from the same side of the plate.
The Day by Day Database contains individual batting events back to 1974, with the handedness of the batter and the pitcher. This spreadsheet shows the batting average for the four platoon opportunities. The R and L indicate right and left handedness with the pitcher listed first. For example, AvgRL is the batting average when a right-handed pitcher faced a left-handed batter in the given season.
It turns out we were half right. The platoon advantage of a right-handed pitcher against the right-handed batter, compared to against a left-handed batter has steadily decline over time. For left-handed pitchers, there is a lot of volatility, but the trend slightly toward an increased platoon advantage for the pitchers. Note that the smaller difference is more due to a falloff of BA by left-handed batters against right-handed pitchers than by the increase in BR by righty-righty matchup. Basically, right-handed pitchers figured out how to limit hits by left-handed batters.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2vFuVd8
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