rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

(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).

Just digging into Ted "Big Klu" Kluszewski's career a little bit and happened upon this remarkable stat, which seems unlikely to ever be repeated for even a month, much less four seasons:

At his four-year peak, Big Klu had more homers than strikeouts.

Wow. Anyone done it since 2011 (min. 20 HR)?

https://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/10091.html

Bonds and Brett the only two guys on there after 1956.

Mattingly came very close a number of times in the '80s: he had consecutive years of (HR/K) 23-33, 35-41, 31-35, 30-38, 18-29, 23-30.

Interested in the other extreme, too. Teams will put up with 200 K if you hit, what, at least 30-35 HR. Wonder if anyone's been over 200 K and under 20 HR? That would seem to be a quick ticket out of the league.

Yoan Moncada had 17 HR and 217 K in 2018

Drew Stubbs in 2011 had 15 HR and 205 K

(xpost) Yikes! That's gotta be the worst ever. Maybe even more amazingly--that's not an easy thing to fix--he came back the next year and hit 25 HR with only ("only") 154 K, and hit .315.

So Stubbs is slightly worse. Also kept his job--I'm clearly wrong about that.

9 of the 39 190+ K seasons in MLB history were achieved by a Chris, Khris, or Kris.

Negro League stats incorporated in with MLB, pretty cool

https://apnews.com/article/negro-leagues-statistics-4a204a3cac0527ab5be750783fd411df

A rundown of all the changes on all-time seasonal and career leaderboards:

https://www.mlb.com/news/stats-leaderboard-changes-negro-leagues-mlb

I had no idea this was happening! Amazing!

I had no idea Josh Gibson died age 35.

And in 1947, making it one of the most poignant moments in the Ken Burns film. (Jan. 20: I assume the Dodgers had already announced their intention to bring Robinson up.)

not sure how i feel about this

on one hand, it's cool that some great players get recognition

on the other hand, waiting until essentially all the negro leaguers are dead and then claiming them as part of its history is kinda fucked up for an organization that specifically banned them for 50 years!

on the other other hand, it's all just numbers and lists; does it really matter

saw someone suggest that we treat pre-fully-integrated baseball (i.e., before the red sox called up pumpsie green in 1959) kind of like the deadball era -- it happened, but it operated under circumstances so different as to be barely applicable to today's game. that will never happen -- we're too attached to ruth and dimaggio and williams etc. etc. -- but it's an interesting thought

It's weird: Baseball Reference still has Cobb first, but they also--and have for a year or two now--have Oscar Charleston second and Jud Wilson fifth. Is it that Gibson's career was too short? (But wouldn't bRef be using the same benchmarks as MLB?)

Howabouttttt.....

giving Sadaharu Oh the all-time home run title?

From a friend:

“I caught part of an interview on NPR with the guy who started doing the research. There were no databases so he had to enter stats from each game by hand. He said that one game took about 30 minutes and he had 16,000 games. Yikes.”

(xpost) The one caveat I'd throw up about that is the occasional ex-MLB player who went over to Japan and went from being a journeyman to a star. There were a handful of famous examples in the '80s I'm blanking out on. Obviously we've seen a number of Japanese players go in the other direction and become stars and superstars and Shohei. Maybe the overall depth 50 years ago wasn't what it became later?

Bob Horner!

I'm not sure I follow the argument though. There were no gentlemen's agreements excluding hundreds of Japanese players from MLB - this harmonizes American professional baseball nothing more. If someone wants to create a composite chart of the world's baseball players, including Cuba and the DR etc - nothing's stopping them

RANDY BASS

For every Randy Bass mention, I am legally obligated to repost this amazing story (esp. if gyac has yet to encounter it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Colonel

Yes--Randy Bass! His '85/86 seasons in Japan, which were Bonds-like numbers (54/47 HR, .350/.389) after a six-year, .212/.284/.326 career. Anyway, it's an interesting point about Oh. Posnanski had him #85 on his list, with, as remember, lots of evidence (beyond just his HR) that he would have had a great MLB career. If they were to make that change, I'd be fine with it.

Wasn’t Davey Johnson huge in Japan? I just read a book about American players in Japan you think I’d remember

Had a big year there in '76, yes. (Mind you, unlike Bass, he was a legitimate MLB star who hit 43 HR with the Braves one year.)

randy bass was also part of the fabled* 1980 denver bears team that also featured a young tim wallach and very young tim raines among other recognizable names

*also* randy bass spent 2005-2019 in the oklahoma state senate as a democrat

I'm excited about the Negro Leagues stats announcement, this will hopefully lead to a lot of new research and debate.

However, incorporating their stats into MLB doesn't really address the real problem. We don't know whether Josh Gibson would have had a higher BA than Ty Cobb had they played in an integrated MLB. A lot of the weaker pitchers that Cobb faced wouldn't have been in the majors if the league had been integrated. I don't know what Cobb's BA would have been, but surely a lot lower than .366. And you could make the same argument about Gibson. Putting Gibson and Cobb on the same leaderboard gives the illusion that they were contemporaries whose stats can be compared (which is possible post-1947, or post-1961 expansion), but it's not so straightforward.

(actually, if we're going to fantasy book an integrated MLB pre-1947, then a racist like Cobb might have refused to join it and instead found a white-only minor league to play in, in which case we might not know his name today)

One of the most extreme disparities between the two WARs that I've seen in a while: Tyler Anderson leads all MLB pitchers in bWAR with 4.0, while in fWAR he's 57th with 0.9.

I almost always use bWAR as a matter of habit--I just find it easy to look up and navigate--and the two are usually more or less in sync. But fWAR is clearly the better one here. I don't know how they arrive at that 4.0. Good ERA (2.63) for a lousy team, and under 7 hits per 9 innings, but that's about it. Anderson leads the AL in walks given up, he strikes out under six batters per 9 innings (I didn't think anybody was that low anymore), and his FIP is 4.77.

bWAR is supposed to be less accurate for pitchers iirc? But yeah I’ve seen the difference between his ERA and his FIP (the latter basically in line with his career numbers) as partial explanation; he’s been getting bailed out by position players.

Must be the case, although that generally happens with good teams. Is fielding the one thing the Angels can do?

No. I think it’s just insane luck.