rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

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.