rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

because i'm tired of all the outdated annual threads on this board. baseball prospectus has a new pitching metric, SIERA, and you can read all about it for free in these five articles:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10027

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10032

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10037

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10042

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10045

tom tango and matt swartz (one of the two guys who came up with this) have a LENGTHY exchange about it here that i'm still working my way through: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/siera/#comments

i am not even close to comprehending of a lot of the math involved but their explanation of the stat is pretty readable. if it works, it's probably some of the most interesting stuff bpro has done in a while.

I just heard about SIERA this week...

Sorry, just started a new annual thread a minute ago; guess the specific book issues can go in there.

yeah i was thinking we could use this one for any interesting statistical stuff no matter what the source

Adam (Minneapolis)
Could you ever see a team going completely by the numbers? That is to say, being an "every day player" would be meaningless because the team would play the statistical matchups every day no matter what in an effort to maximize output.

Rob Neyer (12:52 PM)
You mean like Casey Stengel in the 1950s? No, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Too many relievers on the roster, too many guys who would be unhappy with irregular playing time.

(You guys have read about how Stengel used to use pitchers? Today's MSM would have a collective stroke.)

i always figured no one will actually do closer by committee these days because guys come up with the expectation of having a set role.

u got a link i can read?

yeah, you'd have to insert a fatigue factor as well... haha, this sounds like MLB THE SHOW (nb: Dr. Morbius, this is a videogame).

yes, I HEARD OF IT

cad, read the Robert Creamer bio of Stengel (or for the pre-Yankee years, S. Goldman's)

I belong to the "Your role is to pitch when you're needed" school.

it'd be interesting to see an org try to adopt it from the low minors on up. you'd still have issues with outside guys though.

dudes with dreams of a 10 figure contract to rack up saves would take umbrage with such a system

huh - i was thinking about this last night.
i think all it will take is a team with morbs' (superior) "Your role is to pitch when you're needed" system to win the ws and we might see the floodgates open.

aka the "bullpen by committee"

zmg since when were high-leverage innings a Morbius creation!?!

didn't bobby cox have a 'platooned' closer last year with soriano and gonzalez

sort of -- it was like 70% Soriano/30% Gonzalez

not really SABR but interesting stat:

Through the first 1/3 of the 2010 season, the AL East has four of the best five records in the league.

If the season were to end today, there would be 2 teams in the AL East NOT advancing to the playoffs despite better records than all but one other team in the league.

Tampa, Yanquis, Toronto and Boston are all on pace for 90-win seasons.

more small sample size fun: 12 of the 16 starting catchers in the NL currently have an above average batting line by OPS+

49 years later, Roger Maris wins AL runs scored title:

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/4513/the-truth-is-always-being-rewritten

I'll post this here, even though it has partly to do with some back-and-forth on the Pujols thread. Bear with me--and when you jump all over me, please remember that I bought my first Zander Hollander guide in 1970. I've been there and back, and back again.

There's a blogger in San Francisco I read, Steve Rubio (a Prospectus writer when it was still fairly new, I think), and the other day he linked to the following from Jennifer Doyle, who seems to mostly write about soccer. I love what she says, and she captures some of my own feelings when I get into old-vs.-new-stat discussions on this board:

"Beware of sports writers who pretend to mastery of the facts. I come across a different version of these people in academia--they can recite a bunch of dates, or quote Hegel, and for this reason they seem to think that they've figured it all out. The ones who listen, however, who have a good sense of humor and know how to hold contradiction in their head without trying to resolve it--those are the ones who are most likely to say something interesting, something insightful, something new...Reader, beware of the sense of mastery which comes at the cost of a sense of wonder."

I have no problem at all with VORP and WAR and the like, as long as you view them as just more pieces of the puzzle. But I sometimes get the feeling that when someone throws VORP at me, it's like when someone yells "Challops!" on ILM, or "Muslim!" in Palin World--it's meant to end the discussion, not add to it. Obviously, we're a million miles ahead of the days when people used to think Steve Garvey was the best hitter in baseball because he'd go bat 700 times and knock in 100 runs. (Pointing out, however, that even James revised his thinking on Garvey when he reissued the Historical Abstract--one of many reasons I like James so much more than his disciples.) I wouldn't want baseball arguments to return to that level of thinking. But to echo Doyle's last sentence above, if your belief in the infallibility of VORP and WAR lead you to shrug your shoulders at the prospect of Pujols or Votto winning the Triple Crown, that's a place I don't want to end up.

I'll have more to say on this in my upcoming book, VORP: The God That Failed.

haven't you heard, the triple crown is now comprised of VORP, WAR, and WPA/LI

WPA/LI: "Well Played, Albert (Lasting Impressions)"? I can't keep up.

win probability added divided by leverage index

it's generally about the same as the batting component of WAR though, so not very useful. plain WPA is more interesting and kind of like the sabermetric equivalent of RBIs.

Thanks. I'm dying to find out what Ray Oyler's Leverage Index was for 1969--not very good, I'm guessing.

clemenza otm. James revolutionized my thinking during the mid/late 80s, but my enthusiasm for the game waned in the 90s when it seemed like the New Math was press-ganged into service to fantasy baseball. In the late 90s I sort of got my mojo back by actually watching a lot of baseball instead of reading about a lot of baseball. Sabermetrics are good corrective lenses, but I had to remember to use them to watch baseball games, not read box scores. I get a lot more fun out of the game that way.

leverage index is just a value which quantifies how "important" any single plate appearance is to winning that game

so bases loaded, 2 outs in a tie game would have a really high value whereas bases empty in a blowout would be really low

Has a leverage index been developed for relief appearances? Inherited runners stranded/scored drives me bananas.

Admission I'd rather not make: I'm still stuck in a place where I follow baseball primarily through the lens of statistics (more traditional statistics, but statistics nonetheless). Getting back to actually watching more baseball is my next therapeutic goal. (Part of this does have to do with the overload of baseball on TV. Somewhere along the way, it just became too much.)

well yeah it works both ways

if a game situation is a 1.5 LI for the hitter (1.0 is average) then it's a 1.5 for the pitcher too by definition

tbh i'm a math nerd and i love all the baseball stats stuff but i think sabermetrics folks tend to have too much confidence in their own metrics, there's not nearly enough self-evaluation in the "field".

i think the offense stats are pretty close to complete but there's still so much we don't understand about pitching, let alone defense or player development

I think there is plenty of self-evaluation in the field; the BP guys debate stuff all the time, and most if not all recognize that these metrics are imperfect tools.

(not that I have the time to read all the articles or watch a game every day, understand)

i think the offense stats are pretty close to complete but there's still so much we don't understand about pitching, let alone defense or player development

Agreed. And just to really horrify VORP disciples, I think you can even learn something from Joe Morgan when it comes to "in the field" stuff. I realize Morgan is considered a human punchline by most everyone who's been influenced by James, but if you can look past the many blind spots that someone of his generation probably carries around (having to do with character, clutch play, the value of a .300 average in and of itself, etc.), there are going to be some things that he's learned about the game that I just don't believe you can arrive at through abstract statistical analysis. So treat him skeptically, for sure, but don't try to ridicule him out of extistence. (When the influence of James on me was at its peak in the late '80s/early '90s, Kubek used to drive me up the wall for the same reasons.)

So treat him skeptically, for sure, but don't try to ridicule him out of extistence.

Not sure I can follow you this far.

Morgan does not deserve to have the most prestigious color commentary job for baseball in the world. That doesn't mean he's never insightful. But the fact that he has insights into baseball is meaningless. He lacks the ability to express those insights or the work ethic to learn about the teams he's watching. Orel Hershiser is a far better analyst. Keith Hernandez is another guy I've enjoyed. Neither of those guys is a stats guy, but both actually do the legwork to bring some on-the-field insight to the presentation.

Also, while I have my issues with Morgan, there are plenty of guys who are worse. Rob Dibble springs to mind.

Orel Hershiser is a far better analyst.

Which reminds me, John Smoltz has been an absolute treat this year since he sorta retired.

Keith Hernandez is listenable mostly for the crazy shit he comes out with. He calls Jeff Francoeur "a streaky hitter."

I probably haven't listened closely enough to Morgan to be defending him. The back-and-forth between Miller and him is easy enough on my ears that I've never quite understood the intensely negative feelings about him that I keep encountering, but maybe that's all credit to Miller. And I have the additional bias that the mid-'70s Reds were my favourite team. This goes back a ways, but I used to think Palmer, Seaver, and Reggie were great in the booth. As analysts, I can't remember. I just liked them.

to clemenza, i don't know dude, you seemed pretty "blinders-on" when discussing Bonds' achievements and were in the process of pooh-poohing him on the Pujols thread so........... idk, was tbh hard to take you seriously in your short shrift dismissal of him as a legit triple crown candidate given the 232 BBs that got in the way of him chasing such a "retro-cool" counting achievement (all the while destroying almost every offensive record in the process).

but kudos to all y'all who were reading bill james in the summer of love~~~

i don't mind Morgan and Miller, because they're both local guys. Morgan seems way worse on the page then in the booth ime.

francoeur is a streaky hitter in that he has a lot of cold streaks

Steroids notwithstanding, I really wasn't discounting the magnitude of Bonds's statistical achievements--just that I thought the walks ruled out him ever having a realistic shot at the Triple Crown. Not just in terms of RBI, but, I thought, also in BA. But Ciderpress's math made me realize that he in fact likely would have won one, maybe even two. Which was your point to begin with--you were right, I was wrong. What I didn't appreciate, though, was pulling out VORP as kind of a gotcha moment, like I'd just been teleported out a 1974 issue of Baseball Digest. (Not to knock BD, which I used to love.) Again, I've been reading James forever.

That's cool, just like I said, you appeared to be full blinders in your take on Bonds achievements.

Also, VORP was introduced 9 years ago by Keith Woolner. Bill James has always preferred win-shares and runs-created in my 10 years of being familiar with SABR. IIRC.

who went to the pitchF/X summit in SF?

i liked this little bit from the pitchFX summary on bpro:

5:39: Brad Hawpe play: starts with a >80% chance of catching the ball, but freezes in place and fails to make the play. Difficult to represent visually, because the out probability plummets while Hawpe stands in place and time elapses. In a different Hawpe play, his first step gives him a lower probability of catching the ball, since he broke in the wrong direction. Rumor has it no Rockies reps are in attendance, but they’re not missing out, since they’ve enjoyed a front-row seat for this sort of action for the last several years.

haha

http://www.baycityball.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/chernoffteams.png

wau

source?

http://www.baycityball.com/2010/09/01/wednesday-graph-major-league-chernoff-faces/

players w/an OPS of 1.000 or more in 2000

Todd Helton
Manny Ramirez
Carlos Delgado
Barry Bonds
Jason Giambi
Gary Sheffield
Vladimir Guerrero
Frank Thomas
Sammy Sosa
Moises Alou
Jeff Bagwell
Nomar Garciaparra
Richard Hidalgo
Alex Rodriguez
Brian Giles
Jeff Kent
Mike Piazza
Troy Glaus
Edgar Martinez

players w/an OPS of 1.000 or more in 2010

Josh Hamilton
Miguel Cabrera
Joey Votto
Albert Pujols

jim thome and justin morneau deserve a mention on that too for partial seasons of 1.000+

man some of the names on that 2000 list

Richard Hidalgo is the one that jumps out at me. I sort of remember him...I think.

I just looked him up--wow, his 2000 was huge. Should have mentioned him on the fluke thread a while back (although he did a few other good seasons).

troy glaus didn't even get an mvp vote that season (though his teammate darin erstad did with one of the weirdest fluke seasons of them all)

for good measure, the players this season who finished between .900 and .999 --

José Bautista
Paul Konerko
Carlos González
Troy Tulowitzki
Matt Holliday
Jayson Werth
Adrián Béltre
Robinson Canó
Adrián González
Luke Scott

and in 2000:

Jim Edmonds
Bobby Abreu
Chipper Jones
Edgardo Alfonzo
Will Clark
David Justice
Carl Everett
Bernie Williams
Rafael Palmeiro
Jermaine Dye
Darin Erstad
Geoff Jenkins
Tim Salmon
Jorge Posada
Ken Griffey Jr.
Luis Gonzalez
Mike Sweeney
Jim Thome
Jeffrey Hammonds
Scott Rolen
Jose Vidro
Magglio Ordóñez
Phil Nevin
Bobby Higginson
Ryan Klesko
Travis Fryman
Andruw Jones
Steve Finley
Sean Casey

Didn't realize Luke Scott had such a good year.

I know nothing about sabermetrics. (Well, I read Moneyball once.) Where do I start? Go buy some of Bill James's old 1980s Baseball Abstracts on eBay?

That's a good question. Is there a beginner's section at BP? Sabr 101?

http://playahardnine.wordpress.com/saber-101-saber-201/

http://www.baseball1.com/bb-data/bbd-bj1.html

What about OPS+ for 2000 vs 2010? The league difference is probably 40-50 points of slugging. I'm betting that those lists nearly even out if you use OPS+ > 135 or 140 as the cutoff.

context makes the length of the list -- see 1930 vs 1912

Lisa Simpson as sabermetric Little League coach right now...

Bill James: "I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes."

"It's the triumph of number crunching over the human spirit"

I don't know how many of you (if any) subscribe to James's site. He's been great lately. Right now, I get the feeling he is to sabermetrics what Andre Bazin ended up being to auteurism: original inventor (not quite true of Bazin, who was more the inspiration), now a somewhat skeptical onlooker. Bazin had that famous quote: "Auteur, yes--but of what?"

Here's James a couple of days ago on jargon:

Along the lines of your "PDO" story. . .at a spring training game in 2004 I was sitting in front of Mark Bellhorn's wife and son, and this boy, who I think must have been four years old at the time, is kind of chattering to his mom about the game. A player comes up that he doesn't know, and he says. .. I swear I am not making up one word of this. . . "Is he a good player? What's his on base percentage against left-handers?" That will always stick with me as the moment at which I realized that sabermetrics was mainstream, hearing this kid who I am sure hadn't started school yet ask about a player's on base percentage against left-handers.

But the question you pose is more central than you realize, I think, because what you are really asking is "How do you reach the public with your information?" I think the distinction I would make is between careless and careful progress. After RBI were introduced to the public and explained to the public, about 1912, there as eventually a column added to the Sunday batting summaries in the paper, "RBI". Somebody who saw the new column and didn't understand it could ask "What is this, RBI?", and there was probably a code at the bottom of the column that explained it.

That is CAREFUL progress. On the other hand, people will write articles in which they introduce LIPV (Leverage Index Performance Variation) and PAD/1000 (Pythagorean Advantage per 1000 games) and EBOR (Enhance Base/Out Ratio) and sixteen other measures, and then toward the end of the article they'll write that Michael Bourn had a 163 LIPV despite his -43 QXTR and his pathetic .721 M2D2, and you're thinking "What in the hell is he talking about?" That's careless progress.

My attitude has always been "Be sure that you take the public with you,"--or, at least, do what you can to take the public with you. Don't start speaking your own language that only you and two other people understand; take the time and make the effort to give anybody who wants to understand what you're saying a fair shot at it. I'm sure that sometimes I have failed to do that, but that's what I believe in. Take the time to type out "Batting Average on Balls in Play", rather than BABIP, and "Wins Above Replacement", rather than WAR. It just takes a few seconds.

Three things James often says that I love:

1) I need to look at that again.
2) I was wrong.
3) I don't know.

Especially the last one. I don't see those words too often around here. From at least a couple of you, I'm not sure if you're even familiar with those concepts.

Let me preemptively provide you with your comeback:

"I sometimes think Clemenza makes sense. I need to look at that again."

Every major saberoriented writer I'm aware of says there are tons of things we don't know.

But this was Neyer the other day disagreeing w/ James about the lingo thing:

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/5960/lets-not-call-the-whole-babip-thing-off

There's this really cool thing called Google. There was a time, not so long ago, when if you were reading a book or a magazine and you came across some obscure technical term and couldn't figure out what it meant, you were basically stuck.

You're not stuck anymore.

...Bill knows what BABiP means. The great majority of Bill's readers -- all of whom are interested enough to spend actual money to read his missives on the Internet -- know what BABiP means. BABiP's been around for 10 years, and is well-established among the people who pay to read Bill James. In that particular space, spelling out Batting Average on Balls in Play would be almost as pointless as spelling out Earned Run Average.

I think Bill just doesn't like BABiP because he didn't grow up with it. When I worked for him, he didn't like it when I wrote that a player slugged .472 (or whatever)....

You wanna put me on TV, before the great unwashed masses? Then I'll spell out anything you like. Until then, I'm going to reserve my right to use acronyms and abbreviations that I believe you can handle.

"There's this really cool thing called Google."

No kidding, plus sabermetric writers are writing for a sabermetric audience. That audience (the one that presumably pays their bills, not the "great unwashed masses", not that I have any idea how these dudes make money) isn't going to want to read every acronym spelled out.

Every major saberoriented writer I'm aware of says there are tons of things we don't know.

I'm sure that's true. Like I said, I just don't hear it very often around here. I guess I could do a search, but if Morbius ever came on and said "You know, you're right about that--what was I thinking?", I think I'd have several heart attacks on the spot.

As far as the acronyms go, I realize James is being disingenuous; he used to use things like RC/27 habitually. But I agree with his central point that jargon is odious. I deal with it every day in my job. No one can dream up ridiculous acronyms like educational resource teachers. Our big focus right now is "TLCP": Teaching Learning Critical Pathways. Which'll be in place till they dream up a new one.

clemenza, I try not to post anything here I'm not certain of. I save that for the politcs thread.

also, jargon SAVES TIME.

Okay--I'm headed over to the politics thread to sample the humble, truth-seeking, "You know, I was wrong about that" version of Morbius!

no, that's not what I meant...

I'm with Morbs on this one!

no, that's not what I meant...

Bizarre notion: explaining what you meant may actually help explain what you meant.

are you this passive-aggressive with your middle school students?

I try not to take the bait from Morbius's amen corner. But I do appreciate your contribution.

"now go to the principal's office"

I think I literally send a kid to the principal's office every two or three years. But is there any way I can send you back to the politics thread?

pretty funny nerdfight going on in here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/pujols_the_57mm_man/#comments

the nemeses part cracked me up

Praiseball Bospectus is my one-stop shop for sabr-slapfights:

http://praiseball.wordpress.com/

oh ok, hi Shasta.

The guy who does that blog seems to use "SABR" as jackassedly as you do. Ignorance is the new skinnyjeans.

nice one SS, will bookmark

morbs no collins bump?

where are u looking, on the politics thread?

also, why get excited about a middle manager?

damn.. some club just flat out bought the CHONE numbers and the guy who put em together. i kind of slightly liked those more than MARCEL.

http://www.baseballprojection.com/

damn, his projections were the most accurate the past few years of any of the public systems, free or subscription

ZIPS is the best one now i guess

I SO SAD

http://www.anditisliz.com/lusciousliz/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/figgins.jpg

if you'd like to attend a sabermetrics seminar at Harvard in May:

http://sabr.org/latest/sabermetrics-scouting-and-science-baseball-may-21-22

off praiseball, this is hilarious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_Cistulli

particularly the wes anderson casting call photo

this seems cool:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/shutdowns-meltdowns/

A reader comment from High Heat Stats that I think is quite good:

"Vida Blue's 1979 season is one of a thousand examples why W/L record is essentially meaningless." I think a better way to put it is "W/L record is often deceptive when used as a method of ranking individual pitcher performance". I looked at both the Wins and WAR of the 200 pitchers with the most career Wins over the 1962-2011 period, a group that takes you from Greg Maddux at 355 Wins to Dave Burba with 115 Wins. I ran CORREL in Excel and found the correlation between Wins and WAR among these 200 guys to be .85. (1.0 is a perfect correlation, -1 is a perfect negative correlation and 0 is random relationship with no correlation at all). .85 suggests a meaningful but not perfect correlation. In other words, Wins usually, but not always, tells a lot, but not everything, about a pitcher's WAR-type value. When I look at W-L records today, what automatically runs through my head is that I am looking at a set of numbers that combines individual performance with some team quality and some luck. That's not meaningless, just limited.

He's not saying anything startling, but I like that he took the trouble to actually investigate.

Neat chart from "Hey Bill": Power/Speed/Walks rating ("the harmonic mean" of three stats, an extension of his old Power/Speed rating). The Top 10 all-time, prompted by a letter about Abreu:

First Last HR SB BB P-S-W

Barry Bonds 762 514 2558 822.2
Rickey Henderson 297 1406 2190 661.5
Willie Mays 660 338 1463 581.7
Joe Morgan 268 689 1865 524.6
Alex Rodriguez 629 305 1166 523.9
Hank Aaron 755 240 1402 483.5
Bobby Bonds 332 461 914 478.1
Gary Sheffield 509 253 1475 454.9
Craig Biggio 291 414 1160 446.8
Bobby Abreu 284 393 1419 443.1

Thought I'd spaced that better.

you have to put everything in between CODE signs (see formatting help, below) if you use spaces to organize things into columns.

Por clemenza:

http://railsrx.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/james.png

Thanks! Such a great photo--I went to the site and tracked down the source, and it's from an early article about him in Sports Illustrated in May of '81. I've got four or five milk crates of SIs with baseball covers dating back to the early '70s, so I'll have to check if I've got that issue.

http://sabr.org/latest/unofficial-list-baseball-records-set-and-tied-2011

lol Uggla

Jo-Jo Reyes, Most consecutive winless starts, 28

this was actually news in Toronto. i went to the game he actually won to break the streak and it was mental!

ppl were rooting for a ND?

ha ha, no. the fans were shockingly pumped up, cheering for a W.

this Toronto, after all. the city of tempered expectations.

Bill James is contributing to Grantland! His first article: the 100 greatest pitchers duels of 2011:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7480753/bill-james-100-best-pitchers-duels-2011

Anyway, a great pitchers' duel implies that there is something at stake beyond fifth place, although you don't want to place too much emphasis on that criterion, or you wind up warbling on about Jack Morris in 1991, long after anybody cares.

I attended #82, which was the SABR convention's visit to Dodger Stadium.

Pretty sure the best pitching duel I ever saw live was this:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/TOR/TOR198506060.shtml

Key had a no-hitter through 8, until Tom Brookens led off the ninth with a single; he lasted 10 innings, gave up two hits, and left with the score 0-0. Petry also pitched 10 shutout innings, giving up 6 hits. The Jays won in the bottom of the 12th on a Buck Martinez home run.

It meets all of James's conditions: low-scoring, starters pitched well and deep into the game, pitchers of stature (Key was only 24, but in the midst of his first great year; Petry was having his fourth straight good-to-very-good season), and the game meant something (the best young team in baseball vs. the defending champs).

I've mentioned mine before -- also '85, Gooden v Tudor in September division race, scoreless til Orosco gives one up in 10th:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN198509110.shtml

That's about as good as it gets, regular season; Gooden's year was historic, and Tudor would have won the Cy Young 19 out of 20 times. Combined WAR: 19.2.

Took a quick look through '65 and '66 to see if I could find a 1-0 Koufax-Marichal game, but couldn't. Such games undoubtedly occur more frequently in the post-season. Johnson beat Maddux 2-0 to lead off the 2001 NLCS, although Maddux only pitched seven.

where you can celebrate SABR Day tomorrow:

http://sabr.org/sabrday

Neyer linked to this article on Fangraphs that charts reliever usage over the past 30 years:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/are-relievers-benefiting-from-pitching-less/

It's fairly short and to the point, basically it says that avg. number of batters faced per relief appearance has plummeted, but overall reliever effectiveness has stayed the same.

The data is persuasive, but you have to assume that 1) batters today wouldn't make the necessary adjustments if they faced the same relievers more, and 2) pitchers can be reconditioned to throw 100+ IP in relief (i.e pitchers throw a lot harder than they used to).

I was reading that last nIght - I think they had tacked on some analysis on performance in high-leverage situation. And what they found was slightly better performance in "clutch" scenarios and worse when it really didn't matter vs 30 years ago.

The Fangraphs iphone app is $1 today only. Pretty nice.

It's not too early for wild projections of meaningless metrics, is it? Good, I thought so.

If Halladay were to win the Cy unanimously this year, he'd move past Palmer, Seaver, Pedro, and Carlton into fourth place for Cy Young share on Baseball Reference. Only Clemens, Johnson, and Maddux would remain ahead of him.

That's pretty cool, actually. But he'll still move into fourth place eventually if he has a few more good years.

I think Halladay has led his league in CG's more times than any pitcher in MLB history.

Fourth seems like a good bet, and even Maddux is within reach (he's 1.42 shares behind--one solid win and a couple of seconds or thirds). Clemens and Johnson are out of range.

I think you're close to right about the CG's. I checked a handful of pitchers, and the only one I found who led the league more often was the first one I thought of: nine times for Spahn. I think Halladay's at seven. (Found out that Robin Roberts once completed 28 consecutive starts...science-fiction.)

Barring sudden collapse, I guess Halladay goes into the HOF in a Phillies cap. Too bad.

I swear to you, I didn't know there was "Cy Young share on Baseball Reference." I'm more familiar with Gingrich's delegate count.

I've always liked the Cy Young/MVP-share metric. If you think the two awards are compromised enough to be meaningless, then you'll think the metric is too. But the Top 10 in MVP share does a pretty decent job at ranking the greatest position players post-Ruth (when there often wasn't an MVP): Bonds, Musial, Pujols, Williams, Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Gehrig, DiMaggio, A-Rod. The Cy list is a little more erratic--Glavine sits ninth, and if Halladay does move into the top four, I'm not sure how many people would argue he's been one of the four greatest pitchers since 1955. (Maybe I'm being premature there.)

I can't really get worked up over the cap/HOF thing (nobody gets officially inducted as a member of any one team), but I can't see him in the HOF in anything other than a Jays cap. Gary Carter would be a good comp: started his career with the Expos, had most of his best years there, moved onto a higher profile gig and won a WS (which Halladay hasn't done yet, but he might), was inducted as an Expo.

so some friends and i accidentally, somewhat replicated RC.
except that instead of dividing the offensive numbers by PAs we used outs.

so the formula was this:
TB + BB + HBP + SB + SF + SH
––––––––––––––––––––––––
PA - (H + BB + HBP) + CS + GIDP

we liked it so much went and created a database for it!
http://www.dancochran.com/bapo

but then i discovered RC.

and yes - we called it BAPO. (bases advanced per out)

i think it's hands down the nerdiest thing i have ever done.

My legal firm and I are representing one William James; we'd like to arrange a meeting with you.

ha ha hahaa

i think one of the more interesting things we noticed with bapo is that even a good hitter is going to get out more than he advances the bases - which means sacrificing might not be such a terrible waste after all.

Of the dozen or so of my "Ask Bill"s that James has answered, the one I sent in on Saturday was the first time he responded with some impatience:

Bill -- A leap into the dreaded land of intangibles...Most everyone agrees now that the irreplaceability of a closer was vastly overstated for a number of years; teams move guys in and out of that role continually. Watching the Jays' struggles this year, though--five blown saves in 21 games--has hurled me back to the couple of years in the early '80s before they got Tom Henke, and the memory of how demoralizing a series of blown saves can be to an otherwise good team (to a fan, anyway). Question: even though the difference between a great position player and an adequate one is undoubtedly quantitatively larger (in terms of WAR, or Win Shares, or whatever) than the equivalent difference between a great/adequate closer, might there be an intangible psychological importance to the great closer that can't be measured?
Asked by: Phil Dellio

Answered: 4/29/2012
Implying that it isn't demoralizing to lose a game in other ways? If your offense is poor and you lose games because you can't score runs, this doesn't demoralize the pitchers? If your starting pitching is bad and you're playing from behind every day, this doesn't demoralize the rest of the team?

Of course it is POSSIBLE that there things we can't measure, in the same way it is possible that the world around us is full of creatures or beings of some nature of which we are unaware because none of our five senses will pick them up. The question is, why should one believe in any one of these things?

True enough about different kinds of losses being demoralizing in their own way--but I do think a blown save, where you were leading late into the game, has to be worse. (On the other hand, if you wanted evidence to the contrary, the 2001 World Series would do well.)

I feel like that's the kind of thing that's more demoralizing to the fans than the players...

I think you're probably right about that. (Not sure I picked the best counter-example in the 2001 Series; having Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling in reserve overcomes a lot of demoralization.)

I feel like that's the kind of thing that's more demoralizing to the fans than the players...

Yeah, I'm always amazed when your team loses in the bottom of the ninth in some brutal way, you'll be sitting at home stunned and the players are just calmly jogging off the field. Obviously they're upset about it but they don't get demoralized in the way that fans do. Which is why fans believe in stuff like "momentum", whereas players always claim they never do.

Cub broadcaster Len Kasper on the increased embrace of sabermetrics in the media/clubhouse environment:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=18680

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2012/11/16/3651520/wins-above-replacement-sabermetrics-war-stats

Reminds me of James when he wrote that assists needed to be replaced by something less polite (he suggested "baserunner kills").

If you had been reading baseball annuals in 1984....

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=18993

interesting analysis of how the size of the strike zone changes according to the count. it aligns with experience watching games - when the count is 3-0 it seems like anything near the plate is suddenly a strike:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/szBatR_02count.png

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/szBatR_30count.png

http://www.highheatstats.com/2013/03/fangraphs-and-baseball_ref-unify-their-replacement-level-values/

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/images/wysiwyg_images/rabin-arafat.jpg

about time! but...does that mean that WAR will be the same whether you go to bsaeball reference or fangraphs? or are they merely aligning one part of the equation ("The new level is 47-48 wins per 162 games, which will be used by both sites."), while the rest of their respective equations still differ? As one commenter says,

No, they won’t be the same, since they still calculate WAR differently. They’ve just agreed to use a common replacement level, since critics often denigrated WAR by pointing out that different sites couldn’t even agree on what replacement level was.

yeah that comment sounds accurate, they still use different defensive rating systems i believe. hitting should be about the same now except for very small differences in the coefficients.

The ultimate replacement level player -- Alfredo Griffin

http://www.baseballnation.com/2013/3/29/4161168/the-ultimate-replacement-level-baseball-player-alfredo-griffin

Except as a baserunner, where you'd have been wise to pinch-run a desk. Pretty sure James once nominated him as the dumbest player in baseball, too, based on some system for baseball IQ he devised--kind of a mine field, as he wrote, and I don't think he'd ever wade into anything like that today.

A lot of interesting follow-up in the comments: what does "replacement level" actually mean?

http://joeposnanski.blogspot.ca/2013/06/another-tango-question.html#more

And it should not be: Replacement level should be something that you feel naturally, something that just sort of makes sense without any real thought. This is something that Tango has spent quite a bit of time considering, and he offers a cool way to think about tit.

i have nearly made that typo sooooo many times

from a BP chat:

bcat31 (RedBengalland): Apologize upfront for the long question, but I was watching the Reds lose to the Brewers the other day, when Votto appeared to hit a homer with two outs in the 9th that would have plated the go ahead run. Carlos Gomez robbed him of the homer. I started thinking of WAR and what credit Votto would pick up or lose for the out. This was a great at bat for Votto, but I don't think he gets any credit for it in his WAR tabulation. I'm for WAR, but I think Votto should get rewarded with a positive at bat. Does WAR credit the offensive player for a homer that gets robbed and do you think this may be a weakness of WAR if it doesn't?

Sam Miller: WAR/WARP don't, but I don't think we're that far away from having hitting stats that are entirely process based and don't look at "results" at all, sort of FIP for hitters. So in this case, we would know that a ball hit that hard/that location/that trajectory would be an out X percent of the time, a double X percent, a homer X percent, and overall would typically be worth X runs. So Votto would get credit for X runs, regardless of which event actually happened. One issue with this is that Votto isn't defended the same way as, say, Maicer Izturis, so he's more likely to have that ball caught than Izturis would be. But the basic premise -- hitting the ball hard is the hitter's no. 1 responsibility, and what he is most in control of -- seems to have real statistical value, at least in support of the other stats. It's been hinted to me that there is at least one team that already views its hitters through this lens.

One issue with this is that Votto isn't defended the same way as, say, Maicer Izturis, so he's more likely to have that ball caught than Izturis would be.

if pitch f/x data is already collected, along with the trajectory of the ball after it's hit, how far it goes, etc, wouldn't it be fairly easy to also track the starting location of the fielders to help account for defensive shifts?

One would think so; that's probably what that "one team" is doing.

Like BABIP, this is interesting and very useful from the team's standpoint--for general consumption, I don't know. Results are results.

i get the move toward analysis based on process rather than results, but i would guess the results even out over time. i mean, duh - that's basically the reasoning behind looking at line drive %, BABIP, etc. but even on a micro-level, it doesn't make too much sense to worry about the credit that Votto does or doesn't receive for his near-homer in the 9th inning, because there was surely another big hit that he got that fell in only because the outfielder got a bad jump or was positioned poorly.

Have I ever mentioned Bill James before? He had a question on that a few weeks ago:

You often hear on tv broadcasts, when a player lines out that "those all even out", with the implication that players get just as many hits on 42 hoppers to short and weak Texas leaguers just over the infield as they lose on lineouts or deep fly balls that are caught. Do you have any idea whether this is true or not?
Asked by: RoughCarrigan
Answered: 6/24/2013

Well, of course it is not true. That's the reason some players hit .350 on balls in play while others hit .230, and the reason that, the next year, that advantage disappears. It DOESN'T even out. Saying that it evens out is a way of re-assuring yourself that the universe is fair, that the game ultimately delivers a "true" champion. It's complete nonsense; of course the universe is not fair to everybody all the time.

(I don't think he's disagreeing with you--you wrote "over time," and he seems to be talking about in-season.)

the "even out" thesis w/r/t hits relies on the assumption that, across the league, great unlikely plays happen as often as errors. i have no clue whether thats true or not, but it doesnt strike me as a given

hitters have a good deal of control over their BABIP tho ??

i have always thought wondered why we take credit away from hitters when a fielder makes an error but we don't do the opposite with great plays; sort of amazed the "great play" never became as standard a stat as errors

well, bcz they're often subjective -- where wd the floor be? (Hit/error scoring can be laughably arbitrary too)

yeah that's the thing, i don't think they'd be much more difficult to determine than errors

it's just weird that the most basic and accepted measure of defense never moved beyond "fuckups (e) and the absence of fuckups (fpct)" even though everyone even hawk harrelson knows there's more to it than that

Gabe Kapler on player education and metrics (he was also on the BP podcast discussing this Tuesday).

http://fullcount.weei.com/sports/boston/baseball/red-sox/2013/07/22/stats-101-time-to-re-educate-players-in-meaningful-statistics/

As mentioned on the general chatter thread this morning, if anybody can point me to a site where I can see visualizations of team strikeout rates over a season, please point me at it. I know they generate this stuff at fangraphs, but is there a way a site visitor can do so?

Also, I'd like to see a list of teams ranked by total player-days on the DL over the last few years. Would that be a legit measure of team training staffs and conditioning programs?

So I attended the first 3 of the 4 presentations written up here by Cecilia, and I recommend reading, esp the pitcher-batter matchups (winner of the convention's best award) and Sean Lahman's about Big Data:

http://www.whyilikebaseball.com/2013/08/sabr-43-research-presentations/

A bunch of other convention news, video here:

http://sabr.org/convention

Q & A from all rounds of the trivia contest is supposed to be online soon.

Nice (free) Colin Wyers column that punctures some misconceptions about SABR, and asks tough questions about the organization and the future of sabermetrics; also there's Chesterton's Fence:

I think there a lot of people out there who aren’t exactly sure what to make of SABR. There’s the public at large, who equates SABR with sabermetrics, despite the fact that it’s a very small part of the organization’s mission. On the flip side is the larger sabermetric community and its fellow travelers, who often have a hard time seeing how SABR is or could be relevant to the discussion in the Internet age. And there’s the leadership of SABR itself, which is unsure of how to make SABR more relevant to the modern generation of sabermetricians without driving off the current members in the process. And they have to, because SABR faces an existential crisis if it does not—the organization is aged and literally dying, and if younger people are not brought into the fold, eventually it will simply run out of members.

Bill James named sabermetrics after SABR, in homage to the organization. But most SABR members are not metricians—the organization has a much stronger focus on historical baseball than it does on statistical baseball. And most practitioners of sabermetrics do work privately and either self-publish their results or publish through organizations like ours or other websites’....

Let’s start with the role SABR seems to have taken on: public advocacy for sabermetrics. It has set up the annual analytics conference. It has partnered with Rawlings to try to bring modern defensive metrics into the Gold Glove discussion. It’s easy to see why this approach appeals to SABR. It lets it put its name on the field’s progress on a whole, even where it hasn’t directly contributed to any of it. It doesn’t require any of the actual researchers to change how they go about things, nor does it require SABR to get involved at a more fundamental level.

The question is, is it needed? And I think one has to conclude that it really isn’t. If sabermetrics has a problem these days, it isn’t reach. There is a Brad Pitt movie about how the underdog stats geeks took over the world. There are TV shows that discuss the sabermetric viewpoint. There are websites devoted to espousing sabermetric player measures, and they’re far from obscure. They get cited during actual baseball broadcasts....

And it’s not clear that SABR is particularly well equipped to be the PR arm of the sabermetricians. It’s been a largely private organization for most of its existence; most people know of it through sabermetrics, rather than the other way around. Sabermetricians have a larger following in the media than SABR does.

So if SABR is inserting itself somewhere that isn’t a real area of need for the field of sabermetrics, it can be tempting to conclude that there isn’t a role for it to play. But before we do that, let’s take a look at the problems with the field of sabermetrics and see if there are some that SABR is well suited to correcting.

The first problem with the field of sabermetrics we should probably address, because we’re already wandering past it, is that not enough people are asking the question, “What are the problems facing the field of sabermetrics?” A little introspection is healthy. A little outright perspective is good, too. (And sabermetrics needs to do a better job of accepting criticism from outside the field.) But I don’t see much of a role for SABR there.

So having gotten that out of the way, what other problems are there? A very big problem is brain drain. As sabermetrics becomes more popular, it also loses many of its best and brightest to teams and to other fields of study (one of the most famous sabermetricians is largely famous for his work on predicting election outcomes, not his baseball research). Could SABR offer incentives to help keep researchers in the public domain? The answer seems likely not; there’s far less money in public baseball research than there is in professional baseball, and it’s not realistic or fair to expect SABR to find a way to make that less so. (It should be noted that SABR is offering scholarships to young researchers to encourage new people to enter the field; it is in fact attempting to do something here.)

There is another problem, though, that if not exactly related, at least is exacerbated by the constant turnover in the field. It’s that sabermetrics, in many ways, is a field with a shallow connection to history—both its own history and the history of baseball in general. And that’s a problem....

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21511

http://deadspin.com/this-is-the-best-fake-law-firm-name-weve-ever-seen-1447497862

Is there a career measure of all-time players that includes defense? It's a big barrier once you go before 1950 or so, yes? Does Win Shares? I'm looking for a stat-based all-around ranking of all-time catchers.

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=c&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2013&month=0&season1=1871&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=20,d

?

thanks... so by fWAR we got this:

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=c&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2013&month=0&season1=1871&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=21,d

Not high on pre-expansion catcher defense, are they?

yeah i think the quality of defensive data back then was just so basic, certainly none of the pitch-framing info we've had in recent years

I looked into buying James's Win Shares book online (came out about a decade ago), and it's way too pricey--new copies $138 (!), used copies $25, which I'm sure would end up being close to $35 after postage. For some reason, I missed it when it came out.

Not really helpful, but Baseball References career defensive WAR leaders:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_def_career.shtml

You'd have to pick out the catchers. I don't know why they don't have a positional list--they have positional lists for about eight other categories.

If I haven't missed anyone:

1. Gary Carter
2. Bob Boone
3. Jim Sundberg
4. Tony Pena (big gap after Sundberg)
5. Yadier Molina
6. Carlton Fisk
7. Steve Yeager
8. Lance Parrish
9. Benito Santiago
10. Del Crandell

"This statistic is computed from play-by-play data which is only complete from 1974 to the present. From 1945-1973, the data is incomplete, though for most seasons only less than 20 games per season total are missing."

you missed the real #1 (from that list): pudge rodriguez

Super-sized "oops"--#8 all-time for any position.

so where did Fangraphs get their defensive ratings for Dickey, Hartnett, Wally Schang et al?

also, not sure if this was cited in Andruw HOF discussion: greatest defensive CF "ever"?

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=cf&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2013&month=0&season1=1871&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=20,d

Not high on pre-expansion catcher defense, are they?

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 6, 2013 12:39 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uzr is still considered entirely unfit for actual catcher defense analysis, i think it's basically in beta mode until they figure shit out

"I don't know if it's going to change the way we do business, necessarily," Amaro said. "We still plan to be a scouting and player development organization, but I think it's important to get all the information and analyze not just what we're doing, but how other clubs are evaluating players."

http://www.thegoodphight.com/2013/11/6/5072250/phillies-hire-the-analytics-guy-theyre-going-to-ignore

Freedman, however, is not a Phillies employee, assistant general manager Scott Proefrock said.

“He’s joined us through the commissioner’s office,” said Proefrock referring to the arrangement as an “externship.” ”He’s here for a period of time,” Proefrock continued. “We were contacted by [the commissioner's office] this summer. They proposed the arrangement, we had a need and took advantage of it. He’s a bright guy. It might become something more than [the current role].”

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/11/07/the-phillies-didnt-hire-a-stat-guy-after-all-theyre-just-renting-him-for-a-while/

I just want to know if the Philths' hatred of analysis led them to coin “externship.”

so where did Fangraphs get their defensive ratings for Dickey, Hartnett, Wally Schang et al?

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 6, 2013 1:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externship

news to me! disgusting business English goes way back.

No idea in which thread to share this, but somehow I guess scheduling is one form of baseball metrics (and I had to, it's a fun little documentary):

The Schedule Makers

^^ great story

At the end they complain about how bad the schedules are now compared to theirs, but they never had to deal with combination of unbalanced schedules + interleague play + odd number of teams in each league. I have a hunch that the last one has ruined the elegance of the scheduling beyond all repair.

That was fantastic. Guy looked eerily like Judd Apatow. Any of the other short ones good?

They dealt with all except the last though for at least 7 years though.

I haven't watched Van Horn's one yet, but it led me to one on the Honus Wagner card that I thought was good--the link is in the card thread below this one.

stupid question maybe but i was checking out big papi's BBR page and how does he have a -1.7 dWAR for only 6 games played in the field last season? he's got similar stats for previous years. i don't think he'd be THAT bad, so what's the position adjustment w/r/t DHing?

dWAR now contains the position component as we feel this better captures player defensive value.

er, maybe you knew that

DH takes a huge hit

looking at fWAR's defensive scores for him it looks like a full-season DH starts around a -1.5 baseline.

ah gotcha...interesting.

For $200, Alex.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/jeopardy--contestants-were-stumped-by-sabermetrics-clue-002124051.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory&soc_trk=fb

barves' coppolella on WAR

Like it as means for comparison, but too much emphasis on defense

managerial tactics that are withering away

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sabermetrics-is-killing-bad-dugout-decisions/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/bob-nightengale/2016/01/14/mlb-scouts-s-getting-harder-avoid-force-out/78803500/

January 30 is SABR Day, with lots of chapter meetings.

http://sabr.org/sabrday

with links to nominated pieces

We're pleased to announce the finalists for the 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards, which will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year.

Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

http://sabr.org/latest/announcing-finalists-2016-sabr-analytics-conference-research-awards

Prospectus annual is out, which means there'll be a new METS THREAD AS SOON AS I CONJURE A TITLE.

PECOTA! Indians w/ 10-win advantage/projection in AL Central.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbbMEpLWEAAWANI.jpg

BP editor Sam Miller on the Royals and PECOTA (free)

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/a/28457

Pirates hopeful Cole Figueroa and his pursuit of analytics

http://triblive.com/sports/pirates/10149683-74/figueroa-ball-spring

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=28697

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cegi7j4XIAAIauV.jpg

The Indians are projected as the winningest AL team by PECOTA.

I read at least some of every BP Annual team chapter while i had an i.v. drip in yesterday. Some real good stuff despite two different references to Flo from Progressive... Russell Carleton (I think) wrote a breakup letter to WAR ("Remember when we stayed up all night making fun of Murray Chass?"), and the guy who wrote the Angels chapter calls the team, given its defiant-ostrich culture, The Comments.

on DRA

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-analytics-guru-who-could-be-the-next-nate-silver-has-a-revolutionary-new-stat

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/goose-egg-new-save-stat-relief-pitchers/?ex_cid=538twitter

seems cool!

I like that stat, more telling than a save. It raises a bit of the bar on John Franco and Lee Smith, both of which's career straddled between the old 'Fireman' and the 'Eckersley - 9th inning only' style of closers.

i'll have to read the article again closer to understand the applied stats a little better but when it comes to ranking pitchers based on value added, i don't see why you wouldn't just use WPA. as far as basic box score stats go tho, the goose egg definitely seems preferable to the save

an issue with using goose eggs to retrospectively evaluate relievers tho, as silver notes, is that reliever roles have revolved around getting saves for the past 30 or 40 years, so guys like rivera miss out on opportunities. also seems a bit unfair to LOOGY guys

Win Shares does this as well as LI (Leverage Index). But it may not be as general public friendly as goose egg.

I think the idea of it being only 2 run lead is what is interesting in the figure. A 2 run lead to me is a standard of the such, as it is a 'bloop and a blast' from the opposition being back in the game.

It's a good stat to do the comparison Nate set out to do, which is look at the classic 70s to mid 80s 'Fireman" compared to the LaRussa/Duncan closer works the 9th setup. I think this stat would perhaps be more an illustration of worth for some long time setup men too.

The type of relievers that are perhaps not as easy to compare would be old school long man types that would often come in early with the club to hold a team in a game. Big Red Machine's pitching staff was anchored by a couple of those types with Pedro Borbon and Clay Carroll. Those guys threw alot of innings held teams in check and let those big bats get them come back wins.

some of the differences here are rather small, but it does suggest the dodgers have found a metric they like for pitchers: average exit velocity (here filtered for a minimum of 150 batted ball events)

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_leaderboard?year=2017&abs=150&player_type=pitcher

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/putting-war-in-context-a-response-to-bill-james/

dave cameron responds to bill james' nonsense

I'm at work and can only skim, but judging from the tone, he hardly seems to dismiss James's piece as nonsense. They see the issue differently.

yes, the issue is mostly one of what we value when we use statistics to evaluate players. that said, many of james' points were pretty ill-informed -- he even mentioned that he never really took the time to understand how WAR worked until now, which was pretty shocking to read considering...he's bill james!

I could be wrong about this--and if true, I don't think James would ever concede the point--but I do think he's always had a certain amount of resentment that WAR was adopted industry-wide and Win Shares never really went anywhere. (As opposed to the Pythagorean Formula or RC/27, among other things, that became foundational.) Did you read Posnanski's response to James? That, and a NoTime post on the awards thread, helped me understand his piece better.

i did read the posnanski piece, and he seemed to fall into the same trap james did. as cameron says, it more or less comes down to what question you want to answer. if you really want to reflect “what happened”, then just use WPA and be done with it (although as cameron points out, that solves one problem while not addressing another, if the objective really is to tie the statistics to wins). better yet, just use RBI, lol

it’s 2017. we accept at this point that performance in clutch situations is due largely to chance. WAR essentially says that if this player put up the same numbers over a million simulated seasons, he would add this number of wins to the team relative to a replacement player. the timing is irrelevant — but of course, that is a value judgment

The Yankees and Astros both scored almost 200 runs than they allowed. But the Astros won 101 games while Yanks won 91. When adding the individual contributions of the players do you want the Astros to be even with Yanks or way ahead?

— Tangotiger (@tangotiger) November 20, 2017

Can I answer "I have no desire to add the individual contributions of the players together?"

— Voros McCracken (@VorosM) November 20, 2017

I think the 1,000 simulated seasons would quite probably (though not with absolute certainty) prove that Altuve hit in luck in high-leverage situations this year, and that Judge had very little. But I still don't think that's particularly useful in determining 2017's MVP.

we’ve been over this, but to put it briefly: the “question i’m trying to answer”, to use dave cameron’s phrase, is — which player performed best in skills over which we can be reasonably certain they have signficant control? i think it’s fine to use as a tiebreaker for voting purposes, but in 10 years from now i’m going to look back at this season and conclude that judge and altuve had comparably productive years. the fact that it was an up year in leverage situations for altuve and a down year for judge won’t matter

One of the respondents to Posnanski's piece makes a good point, maybe the same one you're making (John Autin, who I think is one of the High Heat Stats guys...never look at that site anymore):

— New York’s 9-win shortfall from Pythagorean Wins is one of the 40 largest of all time, placing in the 98th percentile for absolute distance from expected wins.
— Judge’s “clutch” shortfall is also extreme. For instance, his high-leverage OPS was .188 less than his overall mark, which ranks near the 4th percentile in the last 5 years (of those with 100 hi-lev PAs in a season).

Basically, that James got lucky that this one very extreme case fits his argument.

Cameron talked about it on the EW podcast

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/effectively-wild-episode-1139-the-war-we-want/

Cameron isn't disagreeing with James, he's emphasizing what WAR is and what it isn't. He even says that he wouldn't rely solely on WAR when filling out an MVP ballot.

The MVP criteria are whatever you want them to be, so if you value players solely on their skills devoid of context that's fine. But applying some context to those skills is fine too, if you're looking to assign credit to who won the actual games. An RBI single in the bottom of the ninth makes you the hero, but a single with nobody on in the third doesn't. It's the same skill with different results, and it's OK to consider both if you're choosing the MVP of the game or for the entire season.

This is as good a place as any to revisit Judge's consistency vs Altuve's, which points to another problem with WAR -- it's strictly cumulative. Take this extreme example, who is more valuable over a four game stretch, a player who hits four home runs in the first game but does nothing during the next three games, or a player who homers in four straight games? WAR would say they're the same, but they're clearly not. In the first case, the player is doing nothing to help the team during three of the four games, in the second case he's contributing in every game. By the same notion, you'd rather have a player who performs consistently well over the entire season rather than a player who puts up three bad months and three great months, even if their season stats turn out to be identical.

i don’t agree the player who homers every game is more valuable...

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/35455/prospectus-feature-bill-james-vs-noise

very good article

very important assumption that James implicitly makes, but does not discuss: that the sole events worthy of consideration are the outcomes that actually occurred

Not sure where he implies this. And what type of outcomes are we talking about? It's not like he's arguing that you got a single but you get no credit because you didn't score.

According to Position A, the only thing that matters about Joey Votto’s walks is how the other Reds hitters capitalized on them.

Same thing. Don't think so.

if he only gets credit for them in games the reds win, then that's true

I think James was making a general point about context mattering and that stats that purport to show a player's overall worth might take context into consideration. To extrapolate from this that someone like Bill James doesn't understand that it's valuable to have a player on your team that gets hits even when his teammates don't happen to come through and bring him around to score is silly.

I completely agree, "position A" is a bad mischaracterization of James' views.

The three-HR game vs. three-games-with-a-HR question...I guess it comes down to a) the first guy greatly increases the likelihood you'll come away with at least one win in the series, vs. b) the other guy increases your chances in three games, but you still could get swept. I'd rather have the three games with a HR myself, but I understand the argument that they're of equal value.

Judge's slump...I wonder what his WAR was for those two terrible months. If a guy just missed two whole months, his chances of winning MVP would be close to nil (Trout this year might support that--best player in the league again, but voters thought he missed too much time). I have to believe Judge was at, maybe even below, replacement level for those two months, the walks and the HR aside--a .180 batting average makes for a whole lot of outs. If that's true (and I don't know that it is), he may have been actively reducing his team's chances of winning games. Which to me has to count as even worse than simply being out of the lineup.

Again, not two months' worth of games, but two actual calendar months.

One thing I remember from James in the 80s is the notion that a team's, let's say, 3rd run scored in any given game was more valuable than, say, their 10th run in any game that they happened to score that many, because a 10th run is generally less necessary for a win. Wouldn't that argue that the player who homers in four straight games is more valuable in that four-game stretch than the player who hits four in one game and then nothing?

I am bad at statistics and know it, so

Judge's slump...I wonder what his WAR was for those two terrible months.

from 7/14 to 9/2, his wRC+ was 82. obviously nowhere near as good as his first half of 197, but he was still putting up a 19% walk rate and playing solid defense. people act like he suddenly became a worthless player. i can't figure out how to split it up to get only the second half of july and all of august, but he put up +0.2 WAR in august, which extrapolated out over a whole season would come out to a little over 1 WAR. (it's 1.169, but you can dock him a little because the second half of july was his nadir.)

Thanks--I don't know how to figure that stuff out for myself. (I'm a whiz at RC/27...) The two months I isolated were slightly different: 7/13 - 9/12. Anyway, so he was a little above a replacement player. That helps his case. A little. I should also mention that I don't know how that measures up against MVPs historically. Maybe what I'm treating as this unprecedented slump for an MVP-candidate isn't in fact unprecedented--maybe other MVPs have had two-month stretches just as bad. I highly doubt it, but I can't say for sure.

(xpost) I think that's the basic argument, WC. In a way, Judge's season is a variation on that. It's a three-game series, though. He hit a home run in game 1, and overall went 3 for 8 in the first two games, with a couple of walks; in the third game, he went 1-6. Altuve went 2-5, 2-5, and 1-4, and he did other Altuve-like things in each game. (You can't do this precisely...that has him hitting .357, and you can't give him half-a-HR.) Who would you rather have?

clem, you can see WAR leaders over certain splits on the fangraphs leaderboard. they just do monthly/yearly/halves, so to go from specific dates i had to use the splits tool

just . . . everyone . . . stop with 'valuable'

if we're going to go this deep we should also factor in salary, and i *hope* no one wants to do that

make it the best fucking player over the course of a season award and let's go from there

I think there have always been such awards; The Sporting News' Player of the Year comes to mind.

We love to argue, though, so in 1931 some people got together and said "Let's create an award just ambiguous enough that we'll always have something to argue about." The arguments were so good, they did it all over again a few years later with the HOF.

One thing I remember from James in the 80s is the notion that a team's, let's say, 3rd run scored in any given game was more valuable than, say, their 10th run in any game that they happened to score that many, because a 10th run is generally less necessary for a win. Wouldn't that argue that the player who homers in four straight games is more valuable in that four-game stretch than the player who hits four in one game and then nothing?

Yes, that's exactly what I was getting at.

I guess it comes down to a) the first guy greatly increases the likelihood you'll come away with at least one win in the series, vs. b) the other guy increases your chances in three games, but you still could get swept.

Right, the counterargument would be that a 4 HR game basically guarantees you the win, whereas HRs in four straight games will score you some runs but won't guarantee a win. But to me that's kind of like claiming that a HR is equal to four singles, i.e. the HR guarantees you at least one run, whereas four singles gives you four chances to score runs but doesn't guarantee you'll score. And I probably don't have to explain why that's a fallacy (e.g. acc. to linear weights, a single is worth 0.4 runs on average, whereas a HR is worth 1.4 runs).

One thing I remember from James in the 80s is the notion that a team's, let's say, 3rd run scored in any given game was more valuable than, say, their 10th run in any game that they happened to score that many, because a 10th run is generally less necessary for a win. Wouldn't that argue that the player who homers in four straight games is more valuable in that four-game stretch than the player who hits four in one game and then nothing?

this is the sort of trivia that was probably interesting or even groundbreaking back in james’ day when no one had really given it serious thought before. but in 2017 it doesn’t really address any issues that are interesting to most sabermetricians

Except, it would seem, to the guy who invented sabermetrics.

game done changed

but in 2017 it doesn’t really address any issues that are interesting to most sabermetricians

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. WPA, run expectancy, and pitcher leverage indices aren't interesting to most sabermetricians?

The basic point is still the same: context is relevant for evaluating past performance, but not for predicting future performance. The people arguing against that point are the ones jumping to silly conclusions, like in that BP article. Literally nobody is saying that Votto's walks are meaningless unless someone drives him in, that's a strawman argument. Bill James isn't the problem here.

context is relevant for evaluating past performance only if you wish to evaluate past performance in context :)

WPA and the like are fine for that, but those are a good deal more sophisticated than what i was commenting on. sorry, didn't mean to imply context-dependent stats don't have currency in the current sabermetric world -- of course they do. i personally don't care for them much, but that is just due to the questions i find interesting ("who are the best players?" rather than "who got luckiest this year?"). i agree with mookie in that i wish the award would just go to the player who played best that year (although not necessarily the "best player")

i will admit that i don't understand the granularity of win shares well enough (for some reason it seems to be impossible to find a good article on this...) to comment on it for certain, but my assumption is that because it is derived from total team wins, players on teams with better records might have an advantage. maybe that is incorrect

https://deadspin.com/major-league-baseballs-statcast-can-break-sabermetrics-1820987737

finally getting around to reading this

cameron to the padres

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-one-i-never-thought-i-would-write

goodness gracious

a team shd hire me

damn, this one hurts. not great for the saber community when all its best writers get scooped up by MLB teams and their work becomes proprietary

which is partly what that article I posted above is about

this isn't new info, but the visualization is pretty cool: https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=radar%20from%3AMattEddyBA&src=typd

vlad jr is a beast

read and vote, if you like

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/instagraphs/sabr-analytics-awards-voting-now-open-2/

You might notice some subtle changes to WAR. That's because of a new update we've rolled out that includes some improved or new data! Here's what you need to know https://t.co/odY5lVdYtb pic.twitter.com/Zq3kAmPua0

— Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) March 15, 2018

Only 70 players, not league-wide, but interesting anyway:

http://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-players-vote-for-stats-they-value-most/c-274986480

No votes for pitcher wins, but, somewhat amazingly, three for batting average.

Not sure why that doesn't link. One more try:

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-players-vote-for-stats-they-value-most/c-274986480

something to be said for players ranking games played/innings.

probably the one I'd pick, if you're getting innings you're probably being pretty valuable to your team

or you have a really bad manager, in a few cases. i definitely that in general more playing time is a positive indicator, especially IP for starting pitchers. for position players, it's a little more muddy. for every star like joey votto, stanton, or blackmon in the top 10 list of games played of 2017, there's also an alcides escobar, rougned odor, and (non-2018 version of) nick markakis.

Shameless self-promotion: The Infield Shift has a tragic and hidden flaw and should be (mostly) shelved. @baseballpro https://t.co/lgVNAE5d3d

— Russell A. Carleton (@pizzacutter4) May 22, 2018

Wow, look at the single season leaders in strike outs at the plate and how many are from the last decade or so.

Rob Deer is a contact hitter by comparison.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SO_season.shtml

Rank Player (age that year) Strikeouts Year Bats
1. Mark Reynolds (25) 223 2009 R
2. Adam Dunn (32) 222 2012 L
3. Chris Davis (30) 219 2016 L
4. Chris Carter (26) 212 2013 R
5. Mark Reynolds (26) 211 2010 R
6. Chris Davis (29) 208 2015 L
Aaron Judge (25) 208 2017 R
8. Chris Carter (29) 206 2016 R
9. Drew Stubbs (26) 205 2011 R
10. Mark Reynolds (24) 204 2008 R
11. Kris Bryant (23) 199 2015 R
Chris Davis (27) 199 2013 L
Adam Dunn (30) 199 2010 L
Ryan Howard (27) 199 2007 L
Ryan Howard (28) 199 2008 L
16. Jack Cust (29) 197 2008 L
17. Joey Gallo (23) 196 2017 L
Mark Reynolds (27) 196 2011 R
19. Chris Davis (31) 195 2017 L
Khris Davis (29) 195 2017 R
Adam Dunn (24) 195 2004 L
Curtis Granderson (31) 195 2012 L
23. Adam Dunn (26) 194 2006 L
Mike Napoli (34) 194 2016 R
25. Trevor Story (24) 191 2017 R
26. Ryan Howard (34) 190 2014 L
27. Bobby Bonds (24) 189 1970 R
Adam Dunn (33) 189 2013 L
Danny Espinosa (25) 189 2012 B
30. Jose Hernandez (32) 188 2002 R
31. Bobby Bonds (23) 187 1969 R

steve carlton's best K/9 in any season was 8.7 (it was 7.1 for his career)

so far this season the average, among 93 qualifying pitchers, is 8.6

read in a recent post that fangraphs will soon debut a K+ stat

One thing I think about modern baseball is just how big the whole league is anymore. Dudes like the Big Unit, Dave Kingman or Richie Sexton were odd balls of their day being so tall and now every team has a bunch of guys 6-5 and taller.

many of them pitchers.

https://imgur.com/a/NFXUl6u

https://imgur.com/a/NFXUl6u

I'm mad that Sixto Sanchez isn't 6'2"

Not sure if there would be an article out there on that but I’m interested in analysis about players who lose their ability or perhaps willingness to draw a walk as they age. Specifically thinking about someone like Albert Pujols, and whether or not it has mostly to do with pitchers challenging him more as his skills erode, thereby not pitching around him anymore + not IBBing him nearly as much (if ever!) I’m interested primarily bc of the many aging players who either retain those skills or sometimes even improve them over time (one example: Willie Mays drawing a career-best 112 walks in his age 40 season.)

My guess is there’s a lot related to bat speed and players having to cheat a bit more, which means they’re simply not going to be able to wait that extra split second anymore. But it’s interesting to me how some players completely lose a skill that seems to be one that would age well (and often and perhaps usually does!)

i think with pujols specifically it's that pitchers aren't afraid to challenge him anymore. same with the ghost of chris davis. i'm not so sure that they necessarily had a walk 'skill' so much as it was a by-product of their other skills

curtis granderson, on the other hand, has seen his walk rate go up even as his power fades. it is intersting

James once wrote about the Mays phenomenon--great hitters who lose their bat speed and become more selective to compensate.

I saw this stat and read the list and had a good chuckle on how many of these guys I knew as players from baseball cards or reading the Sporting News all the time as a kid.

Yonder Alonso: Similar Batters through 30

Sid Bream (966.4)
Doug Mientkiewicz (959.4)
David Segui (955.0)
Mike Ivie (946.9)
John Mabry (941.7)
Casey Kotchman (940.1)
Nick Etten (939.0)
Gerald Perry (938.2)
Babe Dahlgren (937.0)
Todd Benzinger (936.7)

https://www.tradingcarddb.com/Images/Cards/Baseball/80/80-445Fr.jpg

I’m not sure how, but a cleveland reliever got a save tonight in a 19-4 win

Think if you pitch three innings or more it doesn't matter what the score is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/sports/baseball/24rangers.html

Today around the #statcast lab we worked on naming/defining a bunch of new metrics around reaction, burst, & route-running, and I'm very excited for them to be ready. We also kicked around what's driving the xwOBA-wOBA gap we're seeing, because that definitely seems like a thing.

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) July 19, 2018

the xwOBA-wOBA gap
😕

it's league-wide, too, right?

this gap is going to be the end of us all

here is the draft schedule for the Boston Saberseminar

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VID-J4MUyRtzsXv3o9Ie7pH029VVb8GJ6jJfFNGBnOY/edit#gid=0

...so former players Fernando Perez and Nate Freiman will be presenting.

https://imgur.com/a/Z04LVtf
is this becoming a thing??

https://imgur.com/a/Z04LVtf

god, i hope it becomes a thing.

*sigh*
https://image.ibb.co/byvn8o/Screen_Shot_2018_07_24_at_9_22_55_PM.png

It was kinda bizarre listening to broadcasters extol the virtues of advanced stats for a half-inning; it was awesome, i don't know if it's a regular thing anyone does

BABIP is kind of a weird one to use

honestly if they could only pick 3, i'd take BB%, K%, and OPS. it's usually possible to get a decent idea of what kind of batter someone is by those measures alone

wRC+, OBP, ISO

bWAR, fWAR, GWAR

babip is also not a weighted metric

ha good catch

Got curious so searched for baseball's best inning-eaters and came across these numbers on a fantasy baseball site.

Starters throwing a heavyweight innings workload over a season are a declining breed. The number of starters pitching at least 180 innings has dropped year-on-year.

2014: 66 starters
2015: 56 starters
2016: 45 starters
2017: 35 starters

The trend is dramatic, and although it is unlikely to fall by another 10 this season, it is also unlikely to increase. So in 2018, there are only likely to be 30-35 heavyweight starters.

Looking up the top innings pitched numbers in MLB, there is a decent chance that the number might not hit 30 starters throwing 180 innings.

I created this tool that shows frequency of trade partnershttps://t.co/ncInXyCYKa pic.twitter.com/fPHGMWSlIc

— Dan Hirsch (@DanHirsch) July 28, 2018

This was kind of interesting.

From Day 1 of Saberseminar... BP has a new stat for you!

The highlight of the morning, however, did not focus as much on pitching. Instead it was a presentation by Jonathon Judge on a companion stat to DERA, Deserved Runs Created. DRC should appear on Baseball Prospectus in the next couple of weeks. And, it promises to be one of the best comprehensive hitting stats for overall offensive output. In particular, the DRC+ version (adjusted for parks) looks to be particularly useful. Judge was also quick to back up the data by showing the reliability of the stat for players switching teams as compared with alternative measures such as wOBA or wRC+.

https://thesportspost.com/mlb-saberseminar-boston-diversity-all/

further

https://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/fantasy-relevant-information-from-saber-seminar/

I check the WAR leaderboard on Baseball Reference every two or three days, mostly with an eye towards the awards. Something I will never understand (i.e., not the first time I've encountered this): Scherzer's dropped by 0.3 from a couple of days ago without making a start.

Is it possible that it's a case of the R in WAR getting better?

I think I mentioned that as a possible explanation when I brought this up a few years ago. But the replacement level changing by a third of a win in a couple of days seems like a pretty wild swing.

Wonder if the replacement level calculation gets updated every so often rather than changing automatically.

could be other things getting updated, too, like park factors? i'm not sure. if the replacement level for calculation for pitchers was updated, wouldn't that affect all pitchers WAR?

Maybe on days when you're not playing, they factor in intangibles. Were you offering your teammates moral support from the bench, or did you spend the game in the clubhouse getting a massage? Were you out there for yesterday's bench-clearing brawl? Did you make yourself available for autographs before the game, or did you tell some seven-year old to take a hike?

4 bonus points for playing the game the way it was meant to be played

And that game in question was Euchre by clubhouse rules.

Baseball Statisticians Unveil New Analytics Model Measuring Precise Amount Of Joy They Suck From The Game https://t.co/4ljqgrBotM pic.twitter.com/lFpw3jOchd

— Onion Sports Network (@OnionSports) August 24, 2018

guest Onion editor Goose Gossage

https://sabrstatanalysis.blog/2018/09/11/what-a-drag-it-is-getting-old

good old players are disappearing . . . since roughly around the time that steroid testing really kicked in

and yet further CBA ramifications

useful link for the future: http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/article/re288-run-expectancy-by-the-24-base-out-states-x-12-plate-count-states-recu

the first image is the good old run expectancy chart, broken out by pitch counts:

https://i.imgur.com/sfBkCBd.png

the second is the same data presented in a different way, relative to the 0-0 count. it took me a second to figure out wtf was going on, but you start with the number of outs and the position of the runners on base. then move to the 0-0 column. from there, it tells you how every subsequent pitch to that batter affects the run expectancy.

https://i.imgur.com/riTvIO0.png

Quite interesting:

http://www.billjamesonline.com/jack_kralick/

Was Jack Kralick the best pitcher in the American League in 1961? WAR says yes (bWAR, anyway), James says "Are you kidding?"

Baseball Prospectus followers: did they ever publish the detailed mechanics/formulae/algorithms of DRC+, like they said they'd do back in December? Couldn't immediately find it in the archive, and although I'm not a subscriber, it seems that is not the reason, as the titles of other subscriber-only articles do show up.

There was a good reddit thread where JJudge mentioned some more info was coming...

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/a747wg/hello_im_jonathan_judge_bachlaw_senior_metrics/

given the monumental wealth of statistical information available now, and advances in AI, surely 95+% of managerial decisions could be outsourced to a real-time computer? and if this is true, wouldn't it be borderline negligent not to?

some of them have been outsourced, to the degree that the field manager is expected to share the org's philosophy more specifically than ever.

Sabrites have said for awhile that allocation of playing time is more crucial than in-game tactics, and the front office has more to say about that too.

According to a friend who works for a team, most teams have their own proprietary algorithms and analytics departments. He likens SABR/FanGraphs intel to an open source resource like wikipedia.

nothing new here but https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/sports/sean-forman-sports-reference.html

this is, hands down, my favorite statcast discovery so far

i looked at every two-pitch sequence (within PA but not across) in 2018 to see which combination is best at inducing swinging strikes

the result: throw the same exact pitch right before it! pic.twitter.com/8KZ8aaiGMM

— Alex Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) February 21, 2019

i'd also be curious to see the analysis of the bad results of the throwing the same exact pitch twice. in other words, it leads to higher swinging strikes more often than other combinations, but maybe it also leads to a higher HR% or harder contact, etc - either it completely fools people or they're primed to wail on it. dunno, just guessing

yeah i can see going changeup-changeup being a high risk/high reward scenario

good point, karl

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/affinity-pitchersAndHitters-byHittingProfile

explain that?

Enjoyed this:

Also wrote @ringer about how the rise of the opener is changing WAR, whether working as an opener or a bulk guy could affect a pitcher's earnings, and why unlike a lot of traditional stats, WAR never stays the same.https://t.co/cAswNEVH6c

— Ben Lindbergh (@BenLindbergh) March 25, 2019

Pre-move excavation...Found this list of the greatest hitters ever I drew up in 1976 or 1977, a couple of years after I bought my first Big Mac (and around the time I owned my first calculator). The very elegant formula I used is at the top. Keep in mind that a) I would have been 14 or 15, and b) I was still at least five years away from any awareness of Bill James or Thomas Boswell or anyone.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/hitters.jpg

The bad: 1) The randomness of the formula. There's an attempt to weigh the different elements (10 x HR vs. 1 x SB), but the final number (Ted Williams - 65.12) connects to nothing.

2) Strikeouts four times as important as walks! So Joe Sewell comes out ahead of Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Um...I have no words of defense.

3) Runs and RBI front and center.

3) I'm not even sure the formula works. I remember finding this a couple of decades ago, and when I tried to calculate a couple of hitters, their overall rating didn't match what was on the paper. I suspect I calculated parts of the formula in some order that didn't follow correct order of operations.

The good: 1) An awareness that batting average and HR weren't everything.

2) Did I mention I was 14 or 15?

I'm very impressed with the printing in view of my illegible scrawl nowadays.

I don't know who the mystery player is at 51.05...

I suspect I calculated parts of the formula in some order that didn't follow correct order of operations.

You did! You just went left to right when there is a multiplication in the middle.

I don’t see strikeouts in the formula! Also, it penalizes walks I guess? Dammit 13 year old Clemens’s, wtf??

jk of course. This was a noble effort. esp knowing that you had to hand calculate everything. Weren’t you afraid you missed some players? (Unless...you didn’t do every player of all time...did you?)

Sorry, my phone autocorrected you to the rocket

Or wait, it’s adding for walks, and then subtracting 250

That's supposed to be 2 x SO - 1/2 x BB; strikeouts looks like 50. An ILX'or I'm Facebook friends with figured out how to make the numbers work out...Mike Trout comes in at 43-something, just below Mantle. The guy just strikes out too damn often, and I'm surprised the Angels don't cut him loose.

give me ed delahanty over any of these bozos

Weren’t you afraid you missed some players?

I also found pages of the final totals (not sure what to call it...CI, the Clemenza Index) for an alphabetized list of anybody who had a good career. I was working from the '74 edition of the Mac, not the first '69 edition; Aaron was still active, so I'm not sure what my cut-off date was (more likely, I had a minimum AB requirement).

Ed definitely makes the all-drinking team, from what I remember.

in 1895, delahanty scored 149 runs in 116 games. he hit a healthy .404 but came in second in the batting race behind jesse burkett at .409

it's a really cool list - awesome that you kept it!

despite my misreading of the equation, it is also very very neatly printed.

Would have generated a few posts on the ILB police blotter thread:

"Delahanty died when he was swept over Niagara Falls in early July 1903. He was apparently kicked off a train by the train's conductor for being drunk and disorderly. The conductor said Delahanty was brandishing a straight razor and threatening passengers after he consumed five whiskies. After being kicked off the train, Delahanty started his way across the International Railway Bridge connecting Buffalo, New York with Fort Erie (near Niagara Falls) and fell or jumped off the bridge (some accounts say Ed was yelling about death that night). Whether "Big Ed" died from his plunge over the Falls or drowned on the way to the Falls is uncertain. His body was found at the bottom of Niagara Falls two weeks after his death."

don't ask why i felt compelled to make this, but might as well share. this is the top 5 wRC+ for each year of the 1950's. i wanted to see which player seasons were way ahead of their peers, relatively. williams in '54 and williams and mantle in '57 both stand out

https://i.imgur.com/5tSykHj.png

also, i have to share this as well because it is crazy how the charts in Excel wannabe clone Numbers are hard to customize and offers all the wrong options...unless you go into 3D graph mode, in which case everything is possible

https://i.imgur.com/Sr0KzWP.png

Surprised there's such a difference between Mantle's '56 and '57--his bWAR is the same for the two seasons. I know it's relative to the league, but still.

heh, the chart i made is confusing as all hell. it's so confusing even i can't figure out wtf is going on!

but basically, the top line represents the first place finisher in wRC+ for the year. it happens to be williams in both '54 and '57, which makes it look like the entire top line is williams. but in '55, for example, the first place wRC+ was mantle, at 179.

...i know, that's really confusing! i only did it that way because i wanted to see the discrepancy between the top 5 finishers each year, to look for outliers.

mantle's '56 was actually very close to '57, by wRC+. it was 202 in 1956 (twice as good as the average hitter!!), which was first place in the league, and 217 in 1957, second only to williams.

*fingers crossed behind back*

i will never make another ill-advised graph again

C'mon, the 3D one even casts a shadow--worth the price of admission alone.

not exactly sabermetrics, but: the details behind pitch classification

https://technology.mlblogs.com/mlb-pitch-classification-64a1e32ee079

this seems like a wild stab in the dark to me, but

We created a dashboard for NCAA WAR over the past four seasons. Calculate WAR based on school, year, name, and more: https://t.co/ZI6q74BApb

You can read an introduction to cWAR and what went into the dashboard here: https://t.co/PvFB5KGiKV pic.twitter.com/ftkYyfEsW1

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) June 10, 2020

this is great

https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2020/7/17/21328094/analytics-60-game-season-war-stats

i'm with John Thorn

Dallas Keuchel is 6-2 w/ a 2.19 ERA. He has 1.7 bWAR & 1.5 fWAR.

Rick Porcello is 1-5 with a 6.06 ERA. He has 0.0 bWAR.& 1.5 fWAR.

— David Laurila (@DavidLaurilaQA) September 17, 2020

thing is, both bWAR and fWAR are useful, for pitchers, they just measure different things. bWAR lines up with what people think they're getting out of WAR, and is based on results. fWAR for pitchers is based on FIP, so it's more of a measure of how they "should" be doing. which is confusing, agreed on that. wish that both b-r and fangraphs would offer both versions - give me both a results-based WAR and a peripheral based WAR, and just keep them separate imo

i like having them both because i can look at porcello's line and immediately know that he's been unlucky in terms of his results (likely he has been giving up a ton of home runs, or his LOB% is way lower than it normally would be because of bad sequencing luck).

actually porcello's given up very few homers and his babip's a nightmare, which is no doubt why fangraphs likes him

i'm willing to grant that he's been unlucky with balls in play and LOB (the mets defense probably doesn't help). but i suspect his 5.7% HR/FB this season (12% for career) is luck too. meanwhile his WHIP is over 1.5, he doesn't have great strikeout numbers for this day and age, and he goes less than five innings per start.

and keuchel's been *insanely* lucky in every facet! so i guess i feel like they should both have lower fWAR

(this is not to argue with your larger point, which is otm)

it also seems likely that i have an outdated idea in my mind of what one should expect from a (good/average/replacement-level) major league starter

Starters? pfffft. Give me a listicle of the top 500 openers in the game (globally, including little league) and I'll be projecting HOF eligibility by sundown.

there's always been this...WAR (sorry)... between BR and fangraphs with the WAR stats. honestly, i think fangraphs needs to change, because their WAR philosophy inconsistent between the pitchers and hitters. for hitters it seems more (though not entirely) results-based, like BR. but for pitchers it's more peripheral. it's just kind of weird, especially when you're trying to compare value between pitchers and hitters.

Do you really want to get me started about how flawed their defensive metrics* are and how that number is quietly folded into each site's "offensive" WAR and just published as QED gospel?

*just about every other season there is some radical makeover of defensive stats causing some huge ripple in the lists that appeal to whatever you call the devotees of "MOJO-magazine equivalents of baseball"-type content.

oh yeah, i feel you on that for sure. i've never understood why it's not just clearly bifurcated as offense WAR and defense WAR.

it is! At least on bbref it is, there's oWAR and dWAR (which doesn't actually add up to WAR because it includes the position adjustment bonus in each)

oh d'doh, i just mean on fangraphs. i still hate the baseball-ref style/format, and rarely visit it for that reason alone. you know how there are chrome extensions? and particularly for some websites (like discogs) that reorganize the data on the fly? i wish someone would do that for either baseball-ref or fangraphs.

Good Posnanski piece that definitely spotlights a major flaw in bWAR.

https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/burnes-baby-burnes?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

(That's his "share this piece" link, so should work.)

the fog of glove again

great article, thanks for taking the time to share!

however, i ran across a similar anecdote the other day and removed it from my memories, and i am afraid i am about t delete this again for similar reasons:

*By the way, do you know who IS playing in front of the 1970s Baltimore Orioles defense? Adam Wainwright. DRS does show the Cardinals being a terrific defensive team, but even that underrates how good they’ve been behind Wainwright; the Cards are 22 Outs Above Average when Waino is on the mound. That is more than double anyone else in baseball.p

i don't know what the previous series of deleted words was about, but one thing i know is that adam wainwright is on his way to be being the best pitcher in baseball again, and it's definitely related to luck!

i prefer fWAR to bWAR a lot for pitching, though i find that bWAR defenders tend to be way more defensive about it than fWAR defenders. people really just don't like the concept of FIP. but the thing tango said about halving the value of DRS should apply to hitters too... it results in massive outlier seasons because DRS is so springy when UZR is more conservative. it really seems to impact MVP conversations too even though no one really trusts defensive stats. you get these wild 10+ WAR hitter seasons because someone put up a DRS of 8 million (and a UZR of 15)

should also point out that fWAR isn't just FIP, there are also adjustments for IFFBs and catcher framing (though that's controversial for some people too)

that said i do appreciate that bWAR updates its position adjustment values season by season, fangraphs just keeps pretending that playing shortstop is as valuable now as it was 20 years ago despite teams now feeling comfortable parking their trucks there

yeah it is a fluid situation for sure

trying to figure out why there's such a huge disparity between the 2015 phillies' UZR (-15) and DRS (-98) - one thing i didn't know was that DRS also calculates pitcher defense while UZR doesn't even attempt to. a lot of the difference between the two is just DRS giving a lower rating to their defenders across the board, but there's also 22!!! runs lost by the pitching staff. 5 pitchers have a DRS of 1 and the rest have a combined DRS of -27. there are 3 pitchers worth -4 runs and 2 of them are relievers. refuse to believe that ken giles, who had 1 error all year, somehow cost his team 4 defensive runs in 70 innings of work

i generally get that, but then i remember jon lester playing his position a few years ago, when he forgot how to throw first base for a while

those would generally register as errors though wouldn't they? so what's the knock against giles, he wasn't rangy enough? hard to figure out what the individual components are on bbref pages. lester did have a pretty bad season (-7 DRS) though he never had more than 3 errors in a season - i think that's mostly because he allowed a lot of SBs that year.

thing is, i don't think pitcher bWAR includes individual defense, but i think individual pitcher DRS contributes to the overall defensive adjustment. so hypothetically a pitcher could have a really bad DRS which wouldn't lower their WAR at all, but might actually raise their WAR by contributing to a bad team defense adjustment. but i'm not sure of that.

lester allowed a lot of SBs that year because he was yips-unable to throw to first and keep runners honest. so, not an error, but a definite problem on defense.

that *was* kind of an outlier though, and the ken giles example seems unreasonable

Have statskeepers ever tried to account for walkoff singles that would have been doubles or triples if they'd played out in a non-walkoff situation? Like last night, Austin Riley's walkoff would have been a double in any other inning.

no idea, but I’d guess that these are so rare that the difference would be negligible

Sounds like irresistable bait to statheads to me.

well there are def stats out there that rate hitters on hit probability based on predicted batted ball outcomes measured by contact speed off the bat, launch angle etc that would prob see such a hit as something more than a single (would not even know that it was recorded as a single) and thus reward austin riley for it based on that

yeah that’s a good point, his xwOBA doesn’t take a hit because he’s only credited with a single

xp interesting, thx

As EW pod

-ask

From Robert Christgau's monthly reader-questions column (it has a terrible name...):

Professional baseball is rapidly changing. Are you familiar with sabermetrics baseball and its implications? Or is this just too nerdy a thing to ask? — KBW, South Korea

I was reading sabermetrics pioneer Bill James as early as the ‘70s, I think--long ago, anyway. Thought all of his analysis was fascinating and a lot of it worth incorporating into the game. It really changed pitching, although not as much as the revised strength training stratagems that have generated so many near-100 fast balls. But if I remember correctly, even then I didn’t like how down he was on stolen bases--they’re too much fun (I loved how much the Yankees stole late in the past season). And when I watch the game with its radical shifts these days I sometimes get nostalgic for the old days, as well as wishing more players would settle for singles by exploiting shifts. In particular I still prefer human umpires calling balls and strikes even though what was clearly a bad call on a held-up swing prematurely ended the Dodgers-Giants championship game.

xxxxp i thought official scorers were supposed to use their judgment on walk-off hits . . . and i was wrong. this seems unnecessarily complicated, especially with the ground-rule double possibility:

2019 OBR rule 9.06(f) Subject to the provisions of Rule 9.06(g), when a batter ends a game with a safe hit that drives in as many runs as are necessary to put his team in the lead, the Official Scorer shall credit such batter with only as many bases on his hit as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run, and then only if the batter runs out his hit for as many bases as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run.

Rule 9.06(f) Comment: The Official Scorer shall apply this rule even when the batter is theoretically entitled to more bases because of being awarded an “automatic” extra-base hit under various provisions of Rules 5.05 and 5.06(b)(4)…

When interpreted literally, does WAR really work with an extreme closer like Josh Hader?

Hader has pitched 28.2 dominant innings and is 1.3 WAR on Baseball Reference. He's saved 26 games out of 27 save opportunities. If you actually did swap him for a replacement-level closer, wouldn't that guy likely blow at least three or four of those games?

Are you suggesting blowing a save should earn you -1 WAR? There's a whole 8 innings of player performance that happened beforehand

I don't even know what I'm suggesting...it just doesn't seem to jibe. The way a poor inning can be directly translated into a loss at that stage in the game, and the way all of Hader's innings fall into that category, throws me. But I guess he's no different than any closer since the advent of save-only usage.

how would you feel differently if he were just pitching the sixth inning every second or third day

Because the leverage would be much less, I'd assume.

Anyway, just asking, and ✖'s reductio ad absurdum explanation basically makes sense to me.

If WAR considered game situation like that it be a very different (and not very useful imo) stat... if you're giving things like blown saves and GWRBI that much credit it throws everything else off. There's only a finite amount of WAR to go around in a season. If you're going to give -1 WAR to a reliever for 10 bad pitches, do you give +1 WAR to the two or three batters who hit them? What do you give to the completely unrelated hitter that hit 3 HRs earlier in the game to get their team in a position to do that? Or to the starting pitcher who gave up those 3 HRs and set up the save situation by pitching badly? If one inning can swing WAR a full win either way, WAR totals would be insane and meaningless.

But for what it's worth, the fWAR formula adds a leverage adjustment to relievers which gives them more WAR for pitching in later innings. Not sure if rWAR does that too.

yeah both WARs give a leverage boost to relievers (which I think is silly)

Hader has given up 4HR in 29 innings. "Not blowing games" is partly a measure of circumstance, not ability. It so happens that none (or maybe one) of those HRs happened with a one run lead.

Projected over 200 IP, it works out to about 9 WAR (better than Clayton Kershaw's best season) so if Hader was putting up these numbers as starting pitcher we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Actually made the same calculation in my head but took it further: Hader's innings and WAR x 10 = 282 innings and 13 WAR, which would be in line with Dwight Gooden in 1985 (276.2 IP, 12.2 WAR).

Did that a couple of days ago--Hader got shelled yesterday.

Not sure where to put this...James just conducted some poll on Twitter on who was the best hitter between Carew, Boggs, and Gwynn. Gwynn won handily with 65.5% of the vote; Boggs got 21.5%, Carew 13% (~1,800 voters in total).

My assumption was that Boggs would have a clear statistical edge because of all his walks, but by at least one metric, the three of them are dead even: Boggs and Carew had a career OPS+ of 131, Gwynn's was 132.

Here's the thing that caught my eye as I looked over their three career boxes. In their 57 combined seasons, they only failed to hit .300 eight times: Gwynn once (.289), Boggs three times (.259, .292, .280), and Carew four times (.292, .273, .295, .280). It's like Bill Russell's championships: they were probably only 150-200 hits short of 57/57 .300 seasons.

Never seen a saber guy on a beer before

Stuff+, now in liquid form https://t.co/sUWtppLCB3

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) September 2, 2022

clemenza: which beverage should put Bill James on their label?

What beverage do ornery, disagreeable old guys drink?

https://www.alcoholprofessor.com/blog-posts/blog/2017/09/12/classic-cocktails-in-history-suffering-bastard

🙄

An MLB owner told Rob Manfred "analytics is an arms race to nowhere." The commissioner agrees.

Manfred: “Once everybody’s doing it, that little margin that maybe you’re getting… it sure as heck is not worth the damage that was done to the game"
https://t.co/IEHJhzOac7

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) April 1, 2023

lol what

Noticed that Mookie Betts has crossed 60 bWAR (60.7, should be 63.0-65.0 at season's end) in his age-30 season. Some points of comparison:

A-Rod - 85.0
Trout - 82.4
Pujols - 81.4
Griffey - 76.2
Bonds - 74.0
Ripken - 69.3
-------------------
Cabrera - 54.8
Thomas - 50.5
Beltre - 44.6
Chipper - 44.3
Manny- 41.2

This is tangentially related to sabermetrics...I'm amused by how certain language has sprung up around analytics that can sometimes dress up the most basic concepts. They had a Sportsnet writer on the call-in show yesterday, and the host asked him what he'll be looking for to know that Brandon Belt is healthy and productive again. "Hard contact" the guy said, which is basically an extension of "barrel rate." "Balls off the wall," he added, "preferably even over the wall."

So: if I'm translating that correctly, we'll know Brandon Belt is back if he starts crushing doubles and home runs. We wouldn't have known that in 1975; we do know.

(I corrected five typos in that post, was headed home without a throw, then a "k" snuck into the last word.)

Brandon Belt just made hard contact with exactly the right launch angle and exit velocity and the ball went over the fence, so I know he's healthy and productive.

Just saw one of those generic Player A vs. B tables on my FB wall, this one with Schwarber and Dave Kingman. Through age-30 season (i.e., this year for Schwarber):

Schwarber - 246 HR, .227/.340/.492, 121 OPS+, 11.9 bWAR
Kingman - 252 HR, .241/.305/.504, 121 OPS+, 14.5 bWAR

Was surprised by the closeness in HR/OPS+/bWAR (I would have thought Schwarber would have a clear edge), even more so by the perceptions of each in their day: Kingman a one-dimensional freak, Schwarber an underrated analytic sleeper. There's a bit more, of course: Kingman's toxicity in the clubhouse, Schwarber's postseason heroics. But they really do underscore changes in attitudes brought on by analytics.

i bet schwarber is even worse on defense than Kingman was. though considering the "fog of glove" i wonder if the correction for his fielding ability is a bit extreme. but he's a player of such extremes overall, so who knows? i tend to think his value might be a bit more than the analytics suggest, though.

i don't think he's really an underrated analytic sleeper? i mean he's *interesting*, but there are pieces out there asking whether his are the least-valuable 40+ homer seasons ever. b-ref has him at 0.7 WAR this year with fangraphs at 1.4. he suffered from their need to use harper at DH this year, but a 119 wRC+ in itself isn't super-great for a $20m/yr player who offers nothing else (tangible)

kinda curious exactly how bad a catcher he was tho

I overstated that, yes, but I think he gets a measure of respect from a lot of fans and writers today that Kingman didn't. This evolution, of course, started 25 years ago when James would tell people that Bobby Grich and Darrell Evans and Gene Tenace were better players--contributed more to winning games--than Steve Garvey or Bill Buckner or Al Oliver did. He was widely viewed as a crackpot. Analytics isn't exactly mainstream yet, but it's getting closer and closer all the time. (Not a meaningless indicator, I'd say: WAR on Immaculate Grid today.)

Today: James is widely viewed as a crackpot, but for different reasons...progress!

"25 years ago"--make that 45

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/86275/veteran-presence-kyle-schwarber-phillies-leadoff/

I can't access this--"Is Kyle Schwarber the Weirdest Leadoff Hitter Ever?--but I'm guessing it splits the difference as to how he's viewed today.

108
115
104
126

I imagine it's really tough to have a full season in which your runs, hits, rbi, and walks are so numerically close to each other.

Not as close, but geez, his batting average was also a three-digit number starting with 1.

I stand corrected on Dave Kingman. Turns out he did have his fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNnXZqQom8

Sabermetrics is kind of old news; I propose turning this into a "Tommy Lasorda sure does love to say 'fuck' a lot" video thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvFMEoKI7eE

Getting back to the subject at hand, all those links in this thread's original post 13 years ago are still active. SIERA (Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average): never really took off.

Which is odd, being so easy to calculate in your head:

6.145 – 16.986*(SO/PA) + 11.434*(BB/PA) – 1.858((GB-FB-PU)/PA) + 7.653*((SO/PA)^2) +/- 6.664*(((GB-FB-PU)/PA)^2) + 10.130*(SO/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) – 5.195*(BB/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) where +/- is as before such that it is a negative sign when (GB-FB-PU)/PA is positive and vice versa.

u mad doggie?

Brian Cashman pushes back on the notion that the Yankees are an "analytically-driven" organization:

"No one is doing their deep dives, they're just throwing bulls--- and accusing us of being run analytically. To be said we're guided by analytics as a driver is a lie." pic.twitter.com/ru6gAYc0Cf

— Yankees Videos (@snyyankees) November 7, 2023

Amusing if you grew up with this:

https://i.postimg.cc/ZRPJVS6M/lineup.jpg

They've got #2 wrong: that was your fabled bat-control, hit-and-run guy.

"guy who sees 10 pitches per AB"

That too, yeah--give your leadoff guy a chance to steal. Neither of the first two #2 hitters I think of, though, match the stereotype: Griffey for the Big Red Machine (faster than Rose at leadoff), and Alomar for the Jays' WS teams (would have been a #3 hitter on many teams, but the Jays were overloaded with hitting).