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My dad used to talk a lot about guys he considered to be “cripple shooters”: guys who he thought feasted against lousy pitchers and struggled more than usual against good ones. One particularly common target was Roy Sievers, a slugging first baseman the White Sox acquired in 1960 for future All-Stars Earl Battey and Don Mincher. As to the veracity of my father’s accusations regarding Mr. Sievers, I really have no clue. And no I’m not about to pour through box score and play by play data from the early 1960s to find out. I will however post this related video:

I bring all of this up because Bill James makes a similar criticism of Craig Biggio in a new article on Slate. Biggio is said to not be able to “hit a good pitcher.” And that’s exactly what my dad was talking about with regards to Roy Sievers.

Several years ago I pondered a study based on the Log5 method of determining the outcome of an at bat giving a specific hitter and pitcher. The idea was if you extrapolated the formula to all standard outcomes of an at bat, you’d get an interesting result. I posted about this very briefly on usenet seven years ago. Since good pitchers tended to strike out significantly more hitters than bad ones, it was at least some theoretical construct in support of the idea of “cripple shooters.”

The necessary study to confirm the kind of outcome Log5 produces was never done by me (nor anyone else I believe), mostly because it was a lot of work with potentially zero payoff. But I also ran through some of the numbers assuming it was 100% accurate. The results I’ve long since forgotten (though I suppose I might find them on a hard drive somewhere), but general conclusion was that even in best case scenarios, the advantages to be gained here were extremely small.

In other words, most of the plate appearances a hitter gets are against guys not particularly close to either of the extremes, making what they do at the extremes a fairly small subset of total plate appearances. And while production against good pitchers tends to be more valuable in terms of wins (though likely not in runs) than against bad ones, the good performances against bad pitchers are not without value themselves. Sometimes your team matches up their bad pitcher with one of your own.

It could matter in the postseason where hitters face a non-representative sample of pitchers than in the regular season due to better teams and smaller pitching staffs. But looking at the actual numbers there, I similarly found little if any advantage being gained there.

In other words, even if there are such things as “cripple shooters,” the amount that it detracts from their value as players (relative to their overall numbers) is likely to be fairly minimal. When you consider actually proving a guy is one looks like a rather exhausting exercise, I’m not sure there’s much room to detract much from Craig Biggio’s career on this score.