Tangotiger on leverage and reliever usage

From Tangotiger (AKA Tom M. Tango), a three-part article on leverage, which is the assessment of a situation’s impact on who wins the game. (Down 13-1 in the fifth has low leverage, but tied in the ninth with the bases loaded has very high leverage.)

Tom talks about four different ways to measure leverage and which one is best, and provides a chart of the leverage for every situation. The highest, if I read the chart correctly, occurs when down by a run, in the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded, two outs. That plate appearance has 10.9 times as much impact as average on who wins the game.

The idea, of course, is that you want to get a handle on these situations to help you save your best pitchers for situations with the highest leverage.

In Part 2, Tom suggests a change to my own “relative importance” number from a previous article in BTN (.pdf, see page 7). Tom is correct – his measure is better. But for the specifics of my BTN analysis, the two methods are almost identical.

Tangotiger’s own website is worth a look – there’s lots of other good stuff there, some of which I’ll get to here eventually.