rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

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?