How Do Offensive Splits Impact The Game?

Offensive stats tell you how offensive players perform in certain environments and situations. Sometimes, the offense's performance throughout a season can make or break the team's season. Some of these key splits that could have an impact are performance with Two Outs and a Runner in Scoring Position, Home and Away splits, and performance against teams above and below .500. Now there are many ways to quantify how teams perform in these situations but the all-encompassing statistic is OPS so we'll use that. So using OPS let's see if those three offensive stats truly have an impact.

This graph displays the relationship between Two Out Runner in Scoring Position (Runner on Second and/or Third) and a teams winning percentage and eventually how successful their season is. These Two Out RISP situations are important because the pitcher is about to escape their jam, so putting runs on the board against pitchers is back-breaking for the pitcher and potentially for the game. As the Two Out RISP increases so does the team's winning percentage. When looking at success most of the postseason teams are good at Two Out RISP but it's hard to conclude each level of success. One could look at the postseason stats to better see the correlation between the teams and their Two Out RISP OPS. While we do see a relationship between Winning Percentage and Two Outs RISP OPS it is more so a correlation than causation as we can't tell from this graph how many situations it occurred and when it actually had an impact.

This graph portrays the difference in teams' OPS when they play at home versus when they play on the road. Additionally, y-axis orders show the team's winning percentage increasingly. More than half of the teams perform better at home than on the road but there is no correlation between this and increasing winning percentage. Instead, the correlation is more due to how much your stadium benefits your hitters. The way to see the benefit to hitters is by looking at the dramatic differences in home and away OPS. In Colorado, Boston, Kansas City, and Texas there is a major difference towards the home ballparks indicating that these parks are hitter-friendly. This works the other way around with ballparks being pitcher-friendly like Seattle and Toronto. The friendliness of all these ballparks is not accurate for all the teams home ballpark as the friendliness is just based on how the team performs at home vs road. Some teams could just happen to perform better on the road or at home for a reason unrelated to the friendliness of the ballpark. This is demonstrated by teams like Houston, Miami, and Detroit. For Houston, you would expect the ballpark to be hitter-friendly. Meanwhile, for Miami and Detroit, you would expect pitcher-friendly parks. For the small difference in teams, there is no true conclusion that can be made about the ballparks as there is not enough separation. To get a better representation of the relationship between the home and away OPS and success you could use WRC+ which adjusts for park factor to get rid of the lurking variable.

This graph displays the relationship between winning percentage and the difference in OPS above and below .500. Additionally, the graph shows each team's success. The teams with positive differences have better OPS against teams below .500 while the negative difference is teams that have worse OPS against teams below .500. Only two teams have on the whole had OPS worse against teams under .500 though throughout the season good teams don't hit bad against bad teams which can be just as frustrating as allow Two Out RISP. From this, we can conclude that most teams have hit better against worse teams. The marginal difference in this varies but most of the teams are in a cluster of the same area. This indicates that there isn't so much a strong relationship between winning percentage and difference in OPS. The only thing you say from this graph is that all the non-red dots or postseason teams are higher on the graph but that's because postseason teams have higher winning percentages. This lack of relationships highlights the fact that OPS does not tell the full story when playing teams and that anything can happen in the postseason.

The results of most of the Offensive Splits outside of Two Out RISP fail to show any causation which reminds us that there are other factors at play. These factors in this case are the ballpark factor and the fact that there is more to baseball than hitting. While the ballpark factor is easy to deal with, pitchers having equal weight ain't easy to deal with. It may be more valuable to look at stats outside of OPS and Winning but at this point, that's kind of hard to tell. These difficulties in coming up with conclusions remind of why baseball is so great yet the same time so hard to predict.