THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Manager ejection

Start at 1:30 if you are pressed for time.

Interesting play

In the Boston/Tampa game tonight, in the bottom of the 7th with Boston leading 1-0 and a runner on third and 1 out, Matt Joyce hits a clearly foul fly ball to deep RF.  Drew makes the catch and the runner on third scores easily.

Drew could have not caught the fly ball.  Should he have?  The count was 3-2 on the batter and Dan Johnson was on deck.  Buchholz was still on the mound for Boston.

Of course all teams should know the answer to that question and should be relaying it to the outfielders.  My guess is that virtually no teams do that.

PITCHf/x Summit 2010 - Recaps

I’ll update links as they come in.  First up is Colin:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11868

Ben:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11869

Pitching machines until age 16?

With parents chasing the almighty dollar on the backs of their pitching breeding, perhaps we ought to ban human beings pitching until their bodies are more developed?

Great article by Gregg Doyel:
http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/story/13824602

Reminded me of the iron curtain countries and how they developed Olympic athletes…

Friday, August 27, 2010

Hunter at it again…

We had a thread a couple of weeks ago about a terrible base running decision by Torii Hunter.  In it, several people stated that Hunter was known to make bonehead base running errors. I had always assumed that he was a “heady” player, although I am not sure why.

I was just watching tonight’s BAL/ALA game.  With 1 out, someone hit a routine, but fairly deep fly ball to LF with Hunter on second. He tried to tag (with 2 outs) and was thrown out at third by a country mile.  Nary a word from the announcers.

And the Angels are known for their great base running, right, and that’s one of the reasons why they always outperform their pre-season w/l projections?

A responsible headline?

My home page is msnbc.com.  One of their headlines was this:

No blacks allowed to be class president, school says

Needless to say, I was shocked.  I thought, “Can that possibly be in 2010?”

Well, when I read the story, it turned out that the headline was completely misleading.  One, they just reversed the policy in an emergency board meeting (shouldn’t the headline read, “School board reverses racist policy,” or some such thing?).  And two, the policy, which has been in effect for 30 years, was actually this:

Whites and blacks alternate offices.  This year only whites were allowed to run for president and blacks for vice president.  Last year it was the reverse.  So the headline could just as easily, and accurately, have read:

No whites allowed to be class vice-president, school says

And of course it should say “school used to say” since the policy is no longer in effect.

Now, of course the policy of alternating races is ridiculous, but that is a far cry from, “No blacks allowed to run for president.”

Are legitimate news agencies allowed to mislead readers in order to get them to read the articles?  Is that ethical? I really don’t know.

Could Rob Dibble have been a comp for Strasburg?

When we do comps, we try to find as many matching characteristics as we can.  And that pretty much precludes a reliever being compared to a starter.  But, what if we use some baseball senses?  Let’s say that Strasburg as a starter pitches as effectively as a top pitcher does in relief.  And then, rather than the focus being on the quantity stats, we focus solely on the rate stats.  And so, how Dibble progresses as a reliever might be an indicator for what Strasburg might have been expected as a starter.

Just a thought I had.  Dibble from 1989-1992 had 511 K on 1387 PA (excluding IBB), or a rate of 37% K per PA.  He had 8% BB per PA, which somewhat worse than Strasburg. Only 1.1% HR per PA, which is very very low.

So, could we say Dibble is a decent enough comp?  Could we say that if we looked at each of the comparable Dibble years (89, 90, 91, 92) and see how he did in the year after (90, 91, 92, 93), that we get a good prognosis 75% of the time and 25% of the time a bad one?  Could we expand our pool to find say 50 relief seasons of high K/PA and look to see how they did the year after?

Interested to hear your thoughts…

Bill James on social justice

Bill had thoughts on several social issues.  What I was struck with is not that he had some good theories, but that, those theories can already be tested with actual real-life data.  For example:

We don’t want to live in a paranoid country.  Americans should not have to drive around in constant fear of straying across a line.  If we have red-light cameras and radar cams, what’s next?  Lane-straying cameras, that send you a ticket when your tire goes out of its lane?  Signaling cameras, that send you a ticket when you change lanes without signaling?  Who wants to live in that America?

I first went to Calgary in 1997, and they had speed-cameras.  In Montreal, they recently installed red-light cameras in very few and carefully selected intersections.  In Toronto, they have toll lanes, with some tracker in your car (and ostensibly, they can track your speed, though I don’t know if they do).  The point is that it’s all fine and well to have an opinion as to how one million people in an area on Earth will respond to some new social order.  But, we have actual working experiences of what has happened.  Therefore, if you are going to advance the hypothesis, why not go all out and also present the results?

Punishing people as a way of modifying behavior is massively inefficient at best, and is very often counter-productive.  The prison system manufactures as much crime as it prevents. 

We’ve talked about this in the past, comparing the Finnish to Swedish to other countries prison systems.  The Phillipines has some cool system where they make the prisoners perform in a YouTube music video every month.  (Yes, it’s true!) The point is the same as the above: we’ve got the test cases, so present results rather than just leave it at the hypothesis and predict what could happen.

And if Justice McReynolds is excused on this count because he was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history, then shouldn’t it be pointed out as well that, with regard to the other attitudes that we now condemn, Justice McReynolds as well was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history?  After all, the attitudes that Justice McReynolds had toward Jews and blacks and working women, in the time and place where he grew up, were the universal attitudes that everybody held. . .that is, everybody who counted.  Everybody who was white, male, and Protestant.  McReynolds’ only fault was that he held on to these attitudes after others had discarded them. 

Well. . .no.

There was a very powerful exchange between Archie Bunker and Michael Stivik (All in the family… for you kids too young, you missed one of the greatest shows of all time), about how Archie’s racism was a product of how his father was, how his father would teach him things, and how Archie as a kid knew nothing else but to listen and idolize his father.  It was a very powerful exchange, and if you can find it somewhere, you should watch it, as I can’t do it justice.  I last saw that episode at least 20 years ago, but I still remember it.

Wouldn’t it be obviously better if they could communicate to us how hard it is actually raining?  A “20” might mean that if it rained at this intensity for one hour that would result in two inches of rainfall.

Of course, it would take us a little while to learn the meaning of the terms, but if you grew up with a system like this, by the time you were an adult you would be able to just look at a rainstorm—even without a reading—and say “I’d guess we’re at about 13 IPH right now”, and

a) the observer would be very nearly right almost all of the time, and

b) the listener would know exactly what he meant.

IPH is Inches Per Hour; it’s not actually inches per hour, it’s tenths of an inch per hour, but IPH sounds better than TPH.  You’d know that, too, if you grew up with the system.

I think Clay is a meteorologist, and I think SABRMatt is probably involved in it.  So, I think it’s safe to say that it exists because otherwise, this is the first thing these guys would have invented.  It’s probably called “mL per hour” (millilitres, not inches).  After all, if you have wind speed, why not rain speed.  Let me do a quick google check. Ok, the first hit on google for PRECIPITATION SPEED was this:

Present weather sensor for precipitation speed/type/intensity

The drop speed is captured with a 24-GHz-Doppler radar.

The precipitation quantity and intensity is calculated from the correlation between drop size and speed.

The type of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, hail) is detected from the difference in drop speed.

Really, Bill’s objection is that it’s not part of the standard toolset of our mainstream weather people, much like OBP once was not.  It’s there, it exists, now we just need a sabermetric weather movement to get it out there.

And please, mL, not inches.

Kristi + THT

Great pairing.  Kristi takes a look at the leaked documents.

How to do true talent batter platoon splits

Good stuff from Jeff.

Why are minor league umpires allowed to eject MLB players?

Bill is asking.

Move over Carlos Ruiz, make way for Andres Torres

Entering 2011, Andres Torres will have 3+ years of service, making him eligible for arbitration.  That means that as long as the Giants keep offering him arbitration for 2011, 2012, and 2013, he’s stuck with them.  He has been a free agent multiple times prior to 2009, back when he was considered no good.  Now that he’s considered good, well, that’s off the table.  Entering 2014, he’ll once more be a free agent.  He’ll be 36 when that happens.

Andres Torres is the kind of guy, like Carlos Ruiz, that the MLBPA simply throws to the wolves, uninterested in closing the gaps in the CBA.  There’s no reason that the Giants need to maintain exclusive control on Andres Torres.

The entire point of the “6 years of service” rule is so that the teams that developed those players in the minor leagues for 1-4 years aren’t left with nothing to show for it after 2 or 3 years.  It’s clear that there should be an age-based threshhold (in addition to service years), that once a player is say 29 years old, then the service time rule no longer applies.  (The NHL uses age 27 as one threshhold, and since NHL players peak about 2 years before MLB player, then 29 would seem to be a fair point.)

I doubt that MLB and MLBPA care about doing the right thing here.  This is a negotiating point, so that means MLBPA has to give up something to get that.  Since this gap in the CBA has such little value to the MLBPA membership (and MLB teams too) OVERALL, what would be a fair trade to add in an age-29 free agency threshhold?

Blogger tax licence

In NJ, you have to register a business and pay the 50$ annual tax ("fee"), if it’s an actual LLC or if you use a trade name.  If you are a self-employed person using your name, you don’t have to pay.  Makes sense.  In Philadelphia, it seems that you have to get a licence if you make any money.  This article focuses on bloggers and freelance writers.  But, I presume, it would also affect tutors, babysitters and the kid who shovels your snow maybe?  I don’t know, but I don’t know what would separate a blogger from a babysitter, seeing that they both work out of basements.

Hat tip: Aaron

Strasburg -> Tommy John

The wire:

Rookie right-hander Stephen Strasburg has a significant tear on the ulnar collateral ligament that probably will require reconstructive Tommy John elbow surgery, the Washington Nationals announced Friday.

The star rookie pitcher has had two MRIs since he was removed from Saturday’s game at Philadelphia. The initial diagnosis was a strained tendon in his right forearm. But the first MRI raised enough questions for the team to order a more enhanced MRI that was performed Thursday.

Strasburg is scheduled to see Dr. Lewis Yocum.

Strasburg was placed on the 15-day disabled list Monday, the second time he’s been on the DL in less than a month. He was previously shelved with inflammation in his right shoulder.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Wow, I am quoted as the “lead-in” for a blog…

This blog:

http://praiseball.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/this-week-in-sabr-war/

Has this quote at the top:

“That doesn’t mean that I am going to change the same tone I have been using for 30 years. What the hell is the difference? If you guys can’t separate tone from substance, that is your problem not mine. Stop being such whiners about tone.” –MGL

I don’t remember writing that, but I must say, it is one of my better ones - and I have had many good ones!

Anyone know who started this blog?  Shouldn’t a blog have its author(s) prominently displayed?  I have no idea of the point of this web page…

Mariners offense

Syzm:

So, by how much have the team’s bats underperformed expectations? And how does this compare historically?

To answer this question, I used the historical Marcel projection database that sabermetrician Jeff Sackmann recently created. Marcel is a simple projection system originally created by Tom Tango based on a player’s most recent three seasons, age and regression to the mean. Using this database, I went through every team’s offense from the past 40 years to see how the actual offenses compared to their expectations, taking into consideration league offenses, mix of players and actual playing time received. The “performance ratio” is simply the ratio between runs expected before the season and the actual runs scored.
...
As it turns out, the 2010 Mariners offense is one of the biggest underperformers of the divisional era, behind only three teams and the biggest underperformer in the past 15 years. It isn’t all bad, however—the rest of the top-10 disappointments had fairly quick reversals of fortune, averaging a 0.6 run/game improvement and a nine-win improvement a season later.

3 strikeouts, or one HR?

Beltre was ejected by a rookie umpire who, RULES ARE RULES, are within their rights to eject any player for practically any reason.  We are supposed to sit there and take it, not boo about it, yada yada yada.  So, ignore my golf shot, and focus on this:

“I was talking to Felix, we had a little bet where he told me he was going to strike me out three times and I told him I was going to take him deep. He struck me out in the first at-bat and I went back to my position and he was talking smack,” Beltre explained. “I was facing him, talking in spanish. I told him the next at-bat I was going to take him deep over the Monster. That’s all I said to him. I heard the umpire talking to me. I told him I was talking to [Hernandez], and he threw me out. I had no idea why he threw me out. I wasn’t even talking to him.”

In his career, Felix has struck out 1002 of 4615 batters.  So, 3 K’s would happen 1% of the time.  He’s given up HR at a rate of 2%.  Beltre has struck out in 16% of his PA, just a bit better than league average.  That doesn’t help us there.  And his HR rate is 3.7%, meaning that Felix-Beltre should give us a, say 2.5% chance of a HR.

Bad, bet, Felix.  Bad bet.

John Olerud

The Hall of Fame voting is made for guys like John Olerud, guys who are deserve consideration, but likely won’t get strong support, if ever.  So, we get to see him on the ballot for a long time, get to talk about him, etc, without being enshrined.

• Win Probability Added takes every plate appearance in player’s season and looks at how much it contributed to winning or losing. In each of Olerud’s three years with the Mets, he was their most valuable hitter. Olerud’s combined score from 1997 to 1999 rated fifth-best in all of baseball, trailing only Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Larry Walker and Jeff Bagwell.

• Wins Above Replacement (WAR) attempts to combine a player’s hitting, baserunning, defense and position played into a single value. Olerud ranked ninth-best in baseball during his time as a Met, but his defense rates tops among those at the position. In fact, using those metrics, his defense at first base ranks second in Mets history to Keith Hernandez.

It is defense about which Olerud has the most to say…

Average duration of game

I love it when all the information is right there in one chart:

My strongest early memories of baseball, my most enjoyable as well, is 1978-1987.  So to me, a game should be 155-160 minutes long (up to 2:35-2:40).  That’s also pretty close to the average NHL game.  The current pace is 175 minutes, which is 15-20 minutes longer than I’m used to.  That’s one minute an inning.

And, I am sure if we looked, the between-inning break has probably risen by one minute per inning.  One little minute… that’s what’s causing me so much grief?  I guess so.  The commercials make it seem interminable.

Florent Clairambault

French echie has a nice blog.  Seems to be a kindred spirit, so I’m linking.