rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

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