Are pitching and defense REALLY 80% of the game?

Maybe the Cardinals really ARE different

Remember the old saw that “Pitching and defense are 80% of the game”? I believe this came to Cardinal lore as a Shannon-ism. I believe he, with his inexplicable talent, misappropriated a quote from Mickey Rivers that “Pitching is 80% of the game and the other half is hitting and defense”. For more background on this, take a gander at what might count as a deep dive into analytics in 1980 here.

What triggered this ancient memory was this graph that popped out as I was researching the various ways player acquisition (draft, trade, free agency) seems to affect team talent levels (in WAR) and/or team results (in Wins). That article appears here.

Full disclosure…the second closest factor is batting, with a .71 correlation. De minimus. But it got me thinking and digging.

As a side note: Out of curiosity, I removed defense league-wide and the correlation didn’t move. It appears that league-wide, defense is neutral to pitching’s correlation with Wins. I assume, without verifying, that improved defense likely trades off with decreased offense about 1:1, particularly when you factor in the FG positional adjustment. That is my assumption. A rabbit hole for another day.

Let’s look at how Cardinal pitching correlates to winning. In the same time frame, the Cardinal’s experience with pitching and its correlation to winning was different (R = .71 league wide, R = .63 in STL). And they won a lot, too. How mysterious.

I looked at this and went “huh?”. Isn’t the narrative that the good Cardinal teams of the past 10 years are built on good (or elite) defense and good pitching? Oh, wait. I forgot to add back in the defense. I left it out because it had no impact league wide. Let me whip that up really quick.

Aha! He exclaims. This is more like it. Throw in some defense, and the Cardinals start to look like the rest of the league, with a high correlation to wins. In fact, the correlation exceeds league-wide values by a bit. It appears that good defense matters more in STL than other places (at least other places that win). And look, that correlation factor of R = .78. sure seems to support the adage that pitching and defense are 80% of the game, at least in St. Louis, and at least from an outcome standpoint. I always like it when the numbers align, even if it doesn’t really prove anything.

Does defense matter more in St. Louis than it does across the league. Possibly true? If so, why?

Let me try an explanation. A theory, if you will. In a WAR sense, the style of Cardinal pitching over the last 2 decades is not one that is appreciated by fWAR, and it makes some sense that they would view Cardinal pitching in not the best light. fWAR values FIP, which in turn values maximizing K’s and limiting walks and HRs. fWAR also doesn’t appreciate the characteristics of Busch Stadium III, which suppresses both K’s and HRs, increasing the dependence on good defense. Don’t ask me why or how Busch III suppresses K’s. It just does.

Could it be small sample size errors? I mean, it is only 25 seasons of data. Let’s check for reasonableness. That 2023 point on the bottom left. That says a team with poor pitching and poor defense had a low number of wins. Check. Isn’t analytics fun in the way it tells you things you don’t know? Let’s go upper-right. 2004 and 2013. Lots of wins, lots of WAR. A good pitching and good fielding team (good hitting, too) won lots of games. Check.

So, the data, at first glance, seems reasonable (to me). Yet the data says that the Cardinals are less reliant on pitching than the rest of the league and more reliant on defense. Weird? A feature of the stadium and/or their chosen roster construction style? We are back to the chicken-and-egg question…

How about the offense? As noted earlier, league-wide the correlation factor between batter WAR and winning is R= .71. Pretty strong correlation. How about in St. Louis?

Well, the data says that hitting isn’t a variable that has a high correlation to winning (in St. Louis). Only a R factor of .12, less than the 20% the article title intimates might be the case. A very different outcome from the rest of the league, which experiences a high correlation between offense and wining (R=.71). Except for a few years (2003, 2004, 2022) when they could really bash the ball, offense hasn’t been key. In fact, for those of you that remember, that 2003 team could really hit, but missed the playoffs because they had atrocious pitching. That was the first off-season that the Cardinals realized it was “Pitching, Pitching, Pitching” and revamped the staff for 2004. What is it they say? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Let’s meander back through the data for a minute. Take a look at the Batter WAR graph. As frustrating as it was, the 2024 Cardinal offense was on par with 7-8 other Cardinal playoff teams. So, they’ve won before with offense like last year. And the Cardinals were only a tick below playoff teams Kansas City, Atlanta, and Detroit in 2024.

Then look at the Pitcher WAR graph. The 2024 Cardinal pitching was better than only a few prior Cardinal playoff teams and, visually at least, appears to sit below the needed pitching fWAR threshold for being a playoff contender (~18 fWAR). Yes, the 2024 pitching was way better than 2023, but it was just not quite good enough. But the real difference? Gander at the Pitching + Defense graph. The defense subtracted about 2 WAR from the pitching in 2024.

This is unusual for most Cardinal teams, enough that the Pitcher + Defense WAR value for 2024 was worse than all but one playoff team (2022) in the last 25 years, and that one year (2022) making the playoffs took the most prolific offense the Cardinals have experienced in the last 25 years. In other words, 2022 was the outlier (offensively).

Let me throw another theory at you. In St. Louis, for whatever reason, pitching + defense matter more than in many other places. The folklore reinforces that. It is the magic sauce. While the offense could use some improvement, I’d offer that it is the defense (and how it combines with pitching to give the Cardinals a unique edge) that needs to be improved the most.

Discuss.