rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

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

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.