rolling sabermetrics and statistics thread

Starters? pfffft. Give me a listicle of the top 500 openers in the game (globally, including little league) and I'll be projecting HOF eligibility by sundown.

there's always been this...WAR (sorry)... between BR and fangraphs with the WAR stats. honestly, i think fangraphs needs to change, because their WAR philosophy inconsistent between the pitchers and hitters. for hitters it seems more (though not entirely) results-based, like BR. but for pitchers it's more peripheral. it's just kind of weird, especially when you're trying to compare value between pitchers and hitters.

Do you really want to get me started about how flawed their defensive metrics* are and how that number is quietly folded into each site's "offensive" WAR and just published as QED gospel?

*just about every other season there is some radical makeover of defensive stats causing some huge ripple in the lists that appeal to whatever you call the devotees of "MOJO-magazine equivalents of baseball"-type content.

oh yeah, i feel you on that for sure. i've never understood why it's not just clearly bifurcated as offense WAR and defense WAR.

it is! At least on bbref it is, there's oWAR and dWAR (which doesn't actually add up to WAR because it includes the position adjustment bonus in each)

oh d'doh, i just mean on fangraphs. i still hate the baseball-ref style/format, and rarely visit it for that reason alone. you know how there are chrome extensions? and particularly for some websites (like discogs) that reorganize the data on the fly? i wish someone would do that for either baseball-ref or fangraphs.

Good Posnanski piece that definitely spotlights a major flaw in bWAR.

https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/burnes-baby-burnes?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

(That's his "share this piece" link, so should work.)

the fog of glove again

great article, thanks for taking the time to share!

however, i ran across a similar anecdote the other day and removed it from my memories, and i am afraid i am about t delete this again for similar reasons:

*By the way, do you know who IS playing in front of the 1970s Baltimore Orioles defense? Adam Wainwright. DRS does show the Cardinals being a terrific defensive team, but even that underrates how good they’ve been behind Wainwright; the Cards are 22 Outs Above Average when Waino is on the mound. That is more than double anyone else in baseball.p

i don't know what the previous series of deleted words was about, but one thing i know is that adam wainwright is on his way to be being the best pitcher in baseball again, and it's definitely related to luck!

i prefer fWAR to bWAR a lot for pitching, though i find that bWAR defenders tend to be way more defensive about it than fWAR defenders. people really just don't like the concept of FIP. but the thing tango said about halving the value of DRS should apply to hitters too... it results in massive outlier seasons because DRS is so springy when UZR is more conservative. it really seems to impact MVP conversations too even though no one really trusts defensive stats. you get these wild 10+ WAR hitter seasons because someone put up a DRS of 8 million (and a UZR of 15)

should also point out that fWAR isn't just FIP, there are also adjustments for IFFBs and catcher framing (though that's controversial for some people too)

that said i do appreciate that bWAR updates its position adjustment values season by season, fangraphs just keeps pretending that playing shortstop is as valuable now as it was 20 years ago despite teams now feeling comfortable parking their trucks there

yeah it is a fluid situation for sure

trying to figure out why there's such a huge disparity between the 2015 phillies' UZR (-15) and DRS (-98) - one thing i didn't know was that DRS also calculates pitcher defense while UZR doesn't even attempt to. a lot of the difference between the two is just DRS giving a lower rating to their defenders across the board, but there's also 22!!! runs lost by the pitching staff. 5 pitchers have a DRS of 1 and the rest have a combined DRS of -27. there are 3 pitchers worth -4 runs and 2 of them are relievers. refuse to believe that ken giles, who had 1 error all year, somehow cost his team 4 defensive runs in 70 innings of work

i generally get that, but then i remember jon lester playing his position a few years ago, when he forgot how to throw first base for a while

those would generally register as errors though wouldn't they? so what's the knock against giles, he wasn't rangy enough? hard to figure out what the individual components are on bbref pages. lester did have a pretty bad season (-7 DRS) though he never had more than 3 errors in a season - i think that's mostly because he allowed a lot of SBs that year.

thing is, i don't think pitcher bWAR includes individual defense, but i think individual pitcher DRS contributes to the overall defensive adjustment. so hypothetically a pitcher could have a really bad DRS which wouldn't lower their WAR at all, but might actually raise their WAR by contributing to a bad team defense adjustment. but i'm not sure of that.

lester allowed a lot of SBs that year because he was yips-unable to throw to first and keep runners honest. so, not an error, but a definite problem on defense.

that *was* kind of an outlier though, and the ken giles example seems unreasonable

Have statskeepers ever tried to account for walkoff singles that would have been doubles or triples if they'd played out in a non-walkoff situation? Like last night, Austin Riley's walkoff would have been a double in any other inning.

no idea, but I’d guess that these are so rare that the difference would be negligible

Sounds like irresistable bait to statheads to me.

well there are def stats out there that rate hitters on hit probability based on predicted batted ball outcomes measured by contact speed off the bat, launch angle etc that would prob see such a hit as something more than a single (would not even know that it was recorded as a single) and thus reward austin riley for it based on that

yeah that’s a good point, his xwOBA doesn’t take a hit because he’s only credited with a single

xp interesting, thx

As EW pod

-ask

From Robert Christgau's monthly reader-questions column (it has a terrible name...):

Professional baseball is rapidly changing. Are you familiar with sabermetrics baseball and its implications? Or is this just too nerdy a thing to ask? — KBW, South Korea

I was reading sabermetrics pioneer Bill James as early as the ‘70s, I think--long ago, anyway. Thought all of his analysis was fascinating and a lot of it worth incorporating into the game. It really changed pitching, although not as much as the revised strength training stratagems that have generated so many near-100 fast balls. But if I remember correctly, even then I didn’t like how down he was on stolen bases--they’re too much fun (I loved how much the Yankees stole late in the past season). And when I watch the game with its radical shifts these days I sometimes get nostalgic for the old days, as well as wishing more players would settle for singles by exploiting shifts. In particular I still prefer human umpires calling balls and strikes even though what was clearly a bad call on a held-up swing prematurely ended the Dodgers-Giants championship game.

xxxxp i thought official scorers were supposed to use their judgment on walk-off hits . . . and i was wrong. this seems unnecessarily complicated, especially with the ground-rule double possibility:

2019 OBR rule 9.06(f) Subject to the provisions of Rule 9.06(g), when a batter ends a game with a safe hit that drives in as many runs as are necessary to put his team in the lead, the Official Scorer shall credit such batter with only as many bases on his hit as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run, and then only if the batter runs out his hit for as many bases as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run.

Rule 9.06(f) Comment: The Official Scorer shall apply this rule even when the batter is theoretically entitled to more bases because of being awarded an “automatic” extra-base hit under various provisions of Rules 5.05 and 5.06(b)(4)…

When interpreted literally, does WAR really work with an extreme closer like Josh Hader?

Hader has pitched 28.2 dominant innings and is 1.3 WAR on Baseball Reference. He's saved 26 games out of 27 save opportunities. If you actually did swap him for a replacement-level closer, wouldn't that guy likely blow at least three or four of those games?

Are you suggesting blowing a save should earn you -1 WAR? There's a whole 8 innings of player performance that happened beforehand

I don't even know what I'm suggesting...it just doesn't seem to jibe. The way a poor inning can be directly translated into a loss at that stage in the game, and the way all of Hader's innings fall into that category, throws me. But I guess he's no different than any closer since the advent of save-only usage.

how would you feel differently if he were just pitching the sixth inning every second or third day

Because the leverage would be much less, I'd assume.

Anyway, just asking, and ✖'s reductio ad absurdum explanation basically makes sense to me.

If WAR considered game situation like that it be a very different (and not very useful imo) stat... if you're giving things like blown saves and GWRBI that much credit it throws everything else off. There's only a finite amount of WAR to go around in a season. If you're going to give -1 WAR to a reliever for 10 bad pitches, do you give +1 WAR to the two or three batters who hit them? What do you give to the completely unrelated hitter that hit 3 HRs earlier in the game to get their team in a position to do that? Or to the starting pitcher who gave up those 3 HRs and set up the save situation by pitching badly? If one inning can swing WAR a full win either way, WAR totals would be insane and meaningless.

But for what it's worth, the fWAR formula adds a leverage adjustment to relievers which gives them more WAR for pitching in later innings. Not sure if rWAR does that too.

yeah both WARs give a leverage boost to relievers (which I think is silly)

Hader has given up 4HR in 29 innings. "Not blowing games" is partly a measure of circumstance, not ability. It so happens that none (or maybe one) of those HRs happened with a one run lead.

Projected over 200 IP, it works out to about 9 WAR (better than Clayton Kershaw's best season) so if Hader was putting up these numbers as starting pitcher we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Actually made the same calculation in my head but took it further: Hader's innings and WAR x 10 = 282 innings and 13 WAR, which would be in line with Dwight Gooden in 1985 (276.2 IP, 12.2 WAR).

Did that a couple of days ago--Hader got shelled yesterday.

Not sure where to put this...James just conducted some poll on Twitter on who was the best hitter between Carew, Boggs, and Gwynn. Gwynn won handily with 65.5% of the vote; Boggs got 21.5%, Carew 13% (~1,800 voters in total).

My assumption was that Boggs would have a clear statistical edge because of all his walks, but by at least one metric, the three of them are dead even: Boggs and Carew had a career OPS+ of 131, Gwynn's was 132.

Here's the thing that caught my eye as I looked over their three career boxes. In their 57 combined seasons, they only failed to hit .300 eight times: Gwynn once (.289), Boggs three times (.259, .292, .280), and Carew four times (.292, .273, .295, .280). It's like Bill Russell's championships: they were probably only 150-200 hits short of 57/57 .300 seasons.

Never seen a saber guy on a beer before

Stuff+, now in liquid form https://t.co/sUWtppLCB3

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) September 2, 2022

clemenza: which beverage should put Bill James on their label?

What beverage do ornery, disagreeable old guys drink?

https://www.alcoholprofessor.com/blog-posts/blog/2017/09/12/classic-cocktails-in-history-suffering-bastard

🙄

An MLB owner told Rob Manfred "analytics is an arms race to nowhere." The commissioner agrees.

Manfred: “Once everybody’s doing it, that little margin that maybe you’re getting… it sure as heck is not worth the damage that was done to the game"
https://t.co/IEHJhzOac7

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) April 1, 2023

lol what

Noticed that Mookie Betts has crossed 60 bWAR (60.7, should be 63.0-65.0 at season's end) in his age-30 season. Some points of comparison:

A-Rod - 85.0
Trout - 82.4
Pujols - 81.4
Griffey - 76.2
Bonds - 74.0
Ripken - 69.3
-------------------
Cabrera - 54.8
Thomas - 50.5
Beltre - 44.6
Chipper - 44.3
Manny- 41.2

This is tangentially related to sabermetrics...I'm amused by how certain language has sprung up around analytics that can sometimes dress up the most basic concepts. They had a Sportsnet writer on the call-in show yesterday, and the host asked him what he'll be looking for to know that Brandon Belt is healthy and productive again. "Hard contact" the guy said, which is basically an extension of "barrel rate." "Balls off the wall," he added, "preferably even over the wall."

So: if I'm translating that correctly, we'll know Brandon Belt is back if he starts crushing doubles and home runs. We wouldn't have known that in 1975; we do know.

(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