THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, February 03, 2012

Werth: How long can a non-CF stay in CF?

Good job trying to identify the Jayson Werth comps.  It looks like Ichiro is the most comparable case for Werth.

Illusion of numbers

It’s not that RBIs are ”wrong”, it’s that the context is missing.  Wins for pitchers aren’t wrong.  But, the attribution pretends that the hitters, bullpen, and fielding is absorbed by the pitcher.

Sabermetrics is about the hidden game of numbers.  It’s trying to give context, meaning to those numbers.

Numbers, that stand there by themselves, are meaningless, as surely as words strung together have no meaning without understanding the rules.

When I read that blog post above, I see someone who looks at the surface, sees some heads bobbing out of the water.  But how can you tell which is Jessica Alba and which is not?  You need to dive into the water, and that’s what sabermetrics does.  You can swin along and not drown, or you can just wait for us to drain the water out of the pool.

Danks or Garza?  ToMAYto, ToMAHto?

Same service time, similar in age.  Over the last 4 years, 125 starts for one and 124 for the other.  48-43 for one and 44-41 for the other.  3.77 ERA to 3.72 ERA. 12 innings apart.  One gave up 6 more HR, the other gave up 15 more 2b+3b.  59 more K, but 25 more walks+hit batters.  Even their contracts over their last two years: 9.3MM$ for one and 9.45MM$ for the other.

Danks of course signed that big contract extension which we talked about, with the first year coming in at 8MM$.  It’s no surprise that Garza was going to eventually settle at something a bit above that figure.  (In the Danks thread, I had figured close to 10MM.) He’s not at the Felix/Verlander/JJ/Weaver level, so he wasn’t going to get 13-14MM$.  He’s one level below that, and 9MM$ is right about there.

It’ll be interesting if he ends up signing a 5/65 deal like Danks did to supplant the arb deal.

Best Player not on Chain Game

Fun stuff from Poz.  This would be quite simple to program.  You create 100 threads, all starting with the same 15 names.  Someone logs in, gets assigned a thread, and has 60 seconds to put in a name, and then the next person in queue gets an awaiting thread, and he puts in his answer.  This way, you’ve also got some open thread.

You compile the results, and bam, 8500 votes later, we’ve got Poz’s answer.

Politicians using baseball players to drum up their own profile

And you thought Congress parading the PED boys so the politicians can guarantee themselves face time on TV was obscene.  How about in 1927, Babe Ruth being charged for labor law violation, because the parents of the children brought the children to a show, allowed those kids to go on stage with Babe, and the kids ended up with a signed baseball, all so a politician can make a name for himself.  It happened. Everyone loves to feel like the big man by challenging an even bigger man, in front of an audience, knowing that the bigger man has to reign it in.  Good for Babe for acting cool like this guy:

Aasif Mavi and The Daily Show

Non-sports post.

Brilliant!

Wait until you see the show posted online.

Basically, the brain-dead legislators of Florida want Floridians on welfare to pee in a cup to prove they are not on drugs before getting the welfare money.  One of the legislators said something like “The taxpayers deserve to know if that money is going to go to drugs or not.”

Manvi asked: “Who pays your salary?”

“The taxpayers.”

Manvi: “So, can you pee in this cup?  Don’t the taxpayers deserve to know you are not on drugs?”

The politician knew he got nailed, and then danced around the issue.

It was beautiful. 

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Susan G. Komen

Once again, non-sports post!

As most of you probably know, they are in the news again for cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood. Their stated reason is that they just instituted a policy of not funding any organization that is under investigation, whatever that means exactly. Apparently, PP’s Congressional investigation was initiated by anti-abortion politicians. They hate PP.

SGK claims that their position is not politically motivated, which sounds disingenuous to me, in light of the fact that their new VP, Karen Handel, recently ran for governor of Georgia on an anti-PP platform, whatever the heck that is (I’m going to run for governor on an anti-Baseball Tonight platform).

As you may also know, SGK was in the news a while ago for filing lawsuits against organization that use their logo or slogan in fundraising events, like “Bark for the Cure.” I remember developing a dislike for them then. Now I really do.

I Googled their financial information and found this from a web site called Charity Navigator.

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4509

This is from the site:

Revenue
Primary Revenue $273,707,240
Other Revenue $38,148,304
Total Revenue $311,855,544

Expenses
Program Expenses $254,840,077
Administrative Expenses $37,629,831
Fundraising Expenses $23,797,862
Total Functional Expenses $316,267,770

Payments to Affiliates $0
Excess (or Deficit) for the year $-4,412,226

WTF? They raised almost 312 million and took a loss? What am I missing?

Also, the former CEO and President made almost half a mil in salary and benefits:

$456,437 0.14% Hala G. Moddelmog Former President, CEO

Casey Kotchman line

Kotchman’s last four teams: Redsox, Mariners, Rays, Indians.  Can we say that a team that signs Kotchman is saber-leaning?

What other players have played for at least three teams over a four season period, and we can say was only given a shot because of the saber-tendency of team management?

Greinke’s many curveballs

Good stuff from David.

Verducci Year After Effect: Get over yourself, goodbye

Derek’s turn at it.

Tango, Jr.

My boy got all excited as he noted a mathematical pattern.  If you square a number (say 4), then you square the next (5), the difference is two less than the square of the next after (6).  So, 25-16 = 9.  36-25=11. 

Here’s some explanations.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Knowing enough about numbers to be dangerous

Ben takes a look at how Scott Boras is a baseball pitchman (no pun intended), framing things in ridiculous ways, to make a point that he hopes knowing spends more than 2 minutes trying to think through.  Alot like a politician, actually.

There were 137 teams from 2001-2011 with a Boras-approved closer, so I played around with the statistical cutoffs for second basemen until I came up with a group of similar size. Over the same span, 128 teams had a second baseman with at least eight home runs, an OBP of at least .315, and at least 500 plate appearances. You know, the famous 8-.315-500 club. And guess what? Teams with a second baseman meeting that description went .522. All others went .483.

Tempered Yu Forecast

Brian doesn’t blindly follow his off-the-wall forecast.  Good for him. 

Is the price of “security” really worth it?

Non-sports post!

This “incident” barely makes the news. Shouldn’t it be an outrage in England at least? Are we (U.S. authorities) that dumb that we can’t quickly figure out the difference between real and imagined threats? Shouldn’t this have taken 20 minutes to clear up. And shouldn’t these tourists be able to sue the crap out of someone? Finally, what kind of country have we become, or have we always been like this and we never realized it until now? Is there some place I can move where they just leave you alone? Seriously. I’d like to hear from people who are familiar with other countries and their governments.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-get-them-denied-entry-to-the-u-s/

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Are relievers being used optimally, compared to 1980?

This is a followup to this post.

***

Guy, thank you.  I prefer being lazy when I can, so thanks.

Ok, this is how it works, and I’m going to have to recalibrate things a bit so it works out to zero.  It’s possible for example that David doesn’t give out WPA to pitchers on baserunning events (SB, CS, etc).  Not important at the group level.

My first adjustment is to divide all the LI by 1.04 for 1980 and 1.02 for 2011.

The WPA has to be baselined as well.  I have to remove 3.87 wins in 1980 and 19.71 wins.  It’ll be weighted by IP x newLI.

Anyway, this is Guy’s data, recalibrated:

Next thing is to figure out how many runs above average each group was.  That’s easy to do as the league average minus the particular group, divided by 9, times IP.  We now have this:

We then need to convert the runs into wins.  Since both have the same run environment, we’re going to use the same multiplier.  I have a quick estimator that is simply RPG+5.  Which in the above case would mean 9.3 runs per win.  If I use PythagenPat, I get 9.4.

Anyway, dividing the RAA by 9.3, and we get:

Finally, we apply the LI, to get leveraged wins.  So:

LevWins is what we’d expect of their WPA, if those pitchers pitched at those exact levels in every situation.

Instead, what do we find?  Well, let’s subtract WPA by LevWins:

I’m not going to make the final adjustment to zero it out, because the point is about to be made.

We see that in 2011, the relievers and starters have a WPA exactly matching what we expected.  This would point to having no “matching” of talent to situation.  Or, if there was matching (like Rivera) that was undone by bad matching.

But, look at 1980.  Relievers were terribly used, getting very little win benefit.  Basically, not only was there no matching, but there was severe mismatching.  This points to really good relievers being used in really low LI situations.

So, back to 2011.  For all the obvious Mo and Papelbon situations, we also have plenty of situations that the managers simply undid those leveraged situations. 

Therefore, while they could stand to improve their 2011, they were simply abysmal in 1980.

Injury database?

I’ve received a few requests in the last two weeks for an injury database.

I know there were a couple out there floating around.  Josh maybe?  Or Zimm?  Anyway, if someone wants to help out the community, please post a link to your injury DB.  Ideally, you have it cross-referenced to MLBAM or Retro IDs.

Same media that “suspects” Bagwell + PED is same media that “suspects” Brady guaranteed a Super Bowl

Marcellus Wallace throwing someone out of a window for massaging his girlfriend’s feet is more reasonable than what the media creates/reports.

Dissecting a mystery pitch

The always affable, generous, and insightful Alan Nathan follows up.

KNUCKLEf/x

From Alan:

Within the precision of the tracking data, knuckleball trajectories are just as smooth as those of ordinary pitches. Read on to find out how I arrived at this conclusion.
...
With apologies to John Walsh, I conclude that knuckleballs are more like bullets than butterflies.

How about it’s more like bullets fired by a 10-yr old?  So, the kid doesn’t have good aim, he’s jittery when he fires, and ask him to rehit the same target, he won’t be able to.  So, it follows a smoothish pattern, after the fact, but even upon release (knowing angle of release, speed, spin angle), you won’t be able to predict that path.

That about right?

Extra Innings Book

This is a followup to BPro’s Between the Numbers.  The intriguing sabermetric articles seem to be:

2.How Does Age Affect The Amateur Draft? (Rany Jazayerli)
2.Are Relievers Being Used Properly? (Colin Wyers)
4.What Has Pitchf/x taught us? (Mike Fast)
1.Is It Possible to Accurately Measure Fielding Without Shoving a GPS Device Up Derek Jeter’s Ass? (Colin Wyers)
2.How Do We Value Hitting vs. Fielding? (Dan Turkenkopf)
1.How Did Jose Bautista Become a Star? (Colin Wyers)
2.When Does a Hot Start Become Real? (Derek Carty)
3.What Is the Effect of the Increase in Strikeouts? (Christina Kahrl)