The Relationship Between Hitting and Pitching Points in Ottoneu

Sometimes, you set out on a journey, not knowing the destination and you wind up, well…nowhere. I think that may be what happened to me this week, but as the saying goes, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” so maybe there are some interesting nuggets to be gleaned from this somewhat aimless wandering.

I set out to see if there had been any change in the relationship between hitting and pitching points in Ottoneu FanGraphs Points over the last 15 years. We know offense is down in baseball at the moment and I was curious if there was a matching trend in Ottoneu points scoring that could influence roster-building strategies.

To do this, I pulled MLB-wide hitting and pitching data from 2010-2024. I used that to calculate total hitting points, total pitching points, total points, hitting points per game (P/G), and pitching points per inning pitched (P/IP) for each season. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is for all game action over the course of each regular season. Yes, that means there are both pitchers and hitters included in this data that would never see a fantasy roster, let alone a fantasy lineup. Yes, it is possible that this is therefore hiding a trend (perhaps hitting points have become more concentrated in the best hitters, while pitching points have become more dispersed), but that will have to be a separate journey.

The first thing to note is that total points don’t move that much. The mean total points available across MLB since 2010 (excluding 2020, for obvious reasons), is 389,170, while the median is 389,421. The minimum is 383,979 total points in 2021, while the max is 393,964 in 2019, a range of just 9,985 points, or 2.6% of the mean.

By contrast, here is a table showing that same data, but including hitting and pitching points:

So while total points haven’t moved a ton, hitting and pitching points have (comparatively) moved quite a bit. This makes sense as Ottoneu FanGraphs Points scoring is something of a zero sum game. As an example, a batter hitting a HR gets 5.6 points for getting a hit, 9.4 points for that hit being a HR and loses 1 point for his AB, leaving him with a gain of 14 points. The pitcher who gave up that HR loses 2.6 points for giving up a hit and 12.3 more for that hit being a HR for a total of -14.9 points. When a hitter gets out, that AB is a -1 and the pitcher gets 2.8 for the 0.1 IP. So it is not EXACTLY a zero sum game, but it is close.

Increases in strikeouts will help pitching without hurting hitting. Pitchers get 2.8 for each 0.1 IP and 2.0 for each K, while hitters get just -1 for each AB. All else equal, more strikeouts will lead to more total points. More HR will actually lead to fewer total points, as the pitchers giving up the HR lose more than the hitters gain for hitting them. Non-HR XBH will lead to more total points, since hitters get credit for 2B and 3B, but pitchers don’t lose credit for them.

But, in general, anything that helps the hitters hurts the pitchers and vice versa, so total points across the league don’t vary much.

And if you look at hitting vs. pitching points over the years, you get a graph that looks like this:

Note: there is no data point for 2020 in here, so while the lines cross 2022 just under 210,000 hitting and just over 180,000 pitching points, you can ignore that.

The lines aren’t perfectly negatively correlated, but it’s close. When one goes up, the other comes down.

This was the graph I set out to view when I started on my journey. My hypothesis was that as pitching becomes more dominant in MLB, we’d see a trend towards pitching points being higher and hitting points being lower. And you can kind of see that, but not exactly.

Both hitting and pitching have bounced around and neither line has a clear upward or downward trend since 2010. However, pitching has been higher than hitting in only five of the 14 season (2013-15, 2022, and 2024) and two of those years are recent – 2022 and 2024. But even that isn’t unique – the last time pitching surpassed hitting, it stayed up for three straight seasons.

Instead, it looks like we have three “eras” of Ottoneu points: (1) 2010-2015, neither hitting nor pitching were dominant, with each having up and down years. (2) 2016-2021, when offense was king. (3) 2022-2024, which appears to be a return to that first era.

If there is a lesson here (and I am not sure there is), it’s that neither offense nor pitching are king, at least league-wide. Interestingly, yesterday Lucas Kelly shared a graph showing that higher-finishing teams have higher P/G relative to their P/IP than lower-finishing teams. This implies you are better off optimizing for P/G than P/IP, which tracks logically since you get 1,944 games played but just 1,500 IP to use to try to score points.

Remember when I said at the beginning that some journeys lead nowhere? Yeah, here we are. I do think we saw some interesting sites along the way. And maybe, just maybe, the real destination was the friends we made along the way.