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Friday, June 19, 2009
I’m just looking at Rally’s WAR database, and here are his totals of WAR for the ten year period 1999-2008, as average per team per year:
15.8 Non-pitcher WAR
8.2 Starter WAR
3.4 Relief WAR
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27.4 Total WAR
I estimated the breakdown of the last two, but combined it is 11.6. So, he allocated 57.7% to non-pitchers and 42.3% to pitchers, which is right around where I have it. The starter-relief split is 70/30, which is too much for relievers (compared to my method). It’s possible that my way to split up his WAR for the swingmen was too primitive to make this 70/30 claim valid.
At 27.4 WAR, he’s putting the replacement-level team at 81-27.4 = 53.6 wins, or .330 win%, which is a bit higher than what I use. 0.330 is justifiable.
The 8.2 WAR for starters sets the replacement level at .420 for starters. I can’t do the same calculation for relievers because of the leverage aspect. The 15.8 nonpitcher WAR sets the replacement level at .402 for the team of nonpitchers, per game.
I use .380 for starting pitchers and for nonpitchers. His relief WAR is likely consistent with my levels.
Dave Allen gives us a bunch of spray charts. The more I see these, the more I presume that breakdowns by individual batters is where the real stories will come out. So far, we’re getting the right basis to whet our appetites. This chart shows the best spray angle off the bat to get maximum horizontal speed of the ball off the bat:
For RHB, you best spray angle for speed is zero to -30 degrees (i.e, from up the middle to the SS position). And similarly for LHB, it’s at zero to +25 degrees. It very close to being a mirror, but tt could be a small but real difference; most likely it is because the RHH prefers to pull the ball more because of the longer throw, and the LHH might be tempted to not pull as much because of the play to 1B. I will also guess that the spray charts would be similar for a RHH with a runner on 1B or not, but for a LHH, he probably has a more noticeable difference in spray when a runner is on 1B or not.
Love this stuff!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The email from the reader:
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Lindsey Willhite of the Daily Herald (which is a Chicago paper, though I don’t know anything about its size) talks some good sh!t about FIP and DER:
FIP sees a guy like the Cubs’ Ted Lilly as someone who has benefited from excellent defense (his ERA is 2.94 but his FIP is 4.03), while the Sox’ Gavin Floyd is at the other end of the spectrum. His ERA sits at 4.94, but FIP estimates an average defensive team puts his rightful ERA at 3.80.
...
Through Sunday’s games, the White Sox were tied for eighth in the American League in DER (.692) while the Cubs (.715) shared the major-league lead with Milwaukee.
Now, to indicate how DER and FIP play off each other, the Cubs’ ERA stands at 3.84 but FIP suggests it would be 4.14 without such great fielding. Conversely, the White Sox’ official ERA of 4.22 only rises to a FIP of 4.24 once you factor in the team’s mediocre fielding.
Well said. They even had this rather remarkable quote from Rany, the originator of PAP:
In that vein, Jazayerli even suggests baseball’s emphasis on pitch counts - perhaps the sport’s biggest development over the last decade - has become a little too onerous. Of course, forever playing the role of the fan trying to get his point across from the outside looking in, Jazayerli phrases his concern as only a Baseball Prospectus original can: “I almost feel like teams are almost too protective of their pitchers in a way,” he said. “Which is a better problem to have.”
I remember a year or two ago, I emailed Rany my great skepticism with PAP, and I pointed him to my research on how much mileage actually is left on pitchers’ arms. Even then, he was not as firm on PAP as I had expected. So, to him to come out like this and be in a position to (potentially) recant everything he said is fantastic.
Dave points out that it could belong to the same pitcher:
That’s his arsenal. An 80-84 MPH cut fastball. That’s it. He throws that pitch, and that pitch only, 99% of the time. He also has thrown this loopy 72 MPH curveball a couple of times this year, but practically every pitch he throws, in every game, is this low-80s fastball with some tailing action away from right-handers. I faced guys in high school who had better stuff than this.
However, whatever DiFelice does to his cut fastball, or however he hides the ball, or whatever voodoo spell he chants before he pitches, it works wonders against right-handed bats. Here’s his career splits since joining Milwaukee:
Vs RHB: .149/.192/.202, 120 PA
Vs LHB: .321/.357/.717, 56 PA
I presume it’s location, location, location?
Dan converts SB, CS, PK into an equivalent-line, depending on the game state they occurred. Basically, it works out as the following: newSB = actualSB * LI . And then he scales it by the run environment. Basically.
I disagree with his using of rolling averages. The run environment of 1969 has nothing at all to do with the run environment of 1968. (Is that one reason Camps shows up so well?) It should strictly be based on the runs per game. It should be fairly straightforward to come up with a function that determines the win value for SB and CS given the runs per game, similar to what I did for the run value for major hitting events.
Also, the reason for the better run value for the PK compared to the CS is that PK do not always lead to outs (neither do CS for that matter). I think 25% of PK keeps the runner on base. It’s one of those silly accounting rules that confuses matters. Ideally, we’d have a PKsafe and PKout, to distinguish between runners who were “picked off” by the pitcher but managed to get to 2B anyway.
Colin checks in to see how well they correlate.
Colin: if you have the r for that table, I’d love to see it.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Interview from 2002 of RJ:
7. Where did you get the nickname Big Unit?
Here, from Tim Raines. He was coming out of the batting cage, bumped into me and looked up and said: “You’re a big unit.” I don’t know that it stuck with me then, but he called me unit a few more times and it caught on.
8. Your wife, Lisa, must have a different nickname for you?
(Puzzled look) Well, I am her husband. So it’s “honey.” Or Randy.
...
15. All this talk about juiced baseballs and juiced hitters. Is today’s pitcher at a disadvantage?
Without a doubt, the balls are harder than they have been in prior years, the bats are a little harder, the fields are a little smaller, and the strike zone varies on any given day. With those intangibles, I think a lot of pitchers would agree - even if few hitters would - that hitters have an advantage. ... From what I’ve observed the past 14 years in the major leagues, things have changed considerably. The numbers indicate that. For whatever reason, there are more home runs being hit now. And that was even before the steroid controversy came up.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Jason sent me an email:
Hey Tango,
I was going to post this but couldn’t figure out how to put the chart into a post. I figured it would go best here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/the_hitf_x_database/
This is my first go at using LW’s, but I believe it’s correct. I am attaching the excel file if you want to take a look. I got the LW’s from here, but if there is a more up to date chart that I can use that: http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2008/02/writing_about_t.php
If these results look good, I can also do it by hit launch and spray. Thanks
Results:
The harder you hit the ball, the better it is. Interesting that it doesn’t cross 0 until at least 90 mph.
hit_initial_speed Average of LW Count of Events
<50 -0.188 1358
50-55 -0.240 372
55-60 -0.207 456
60-65 -0.096 643
65-70 -0.062 783
70-75 -0.080 961
75-80 -0.116 1097
80-85 -0.094 1509
85-90 -0.056 1787
90-95 0.047 2115
95-100 0.208 2086
100-105 0.473 1420
>105 0.535 457
Grand Total 0.030 15044.000
Sky tells us to simply do: 20/SQRT(pickSlot)
That is, the 100th player selected is expected to get TWO career wins above replacement. In his career! The first player selected is expected to get 20 wins in his career.
The first 30 picks will average 6.4 career WAR. If we presume that about half of that comes in a player’s first 6 years, then we can see that the typical first round draft pick is worth about 3 wins pre-free agency.
If the average first round pick signs for $2MM, and gets another $1MM in his first six years in MLB total (on average, remembering that a bunch of them won’t even be called up, much less hit arbitration), teams are paying $3MM for 3 wins, a far cry from the 14MM or so they should be paying. That’s 20 cents on the dollar.
About ten days ago, I declared Scott Boras is right in terms of trying to crystallize Strasburg’s value. The question however would be to figure out what his fair market value would be, given that there is no market to establish that value.
The Book readers however see his value fairly clearly, at somewhere halfway between Jair Jurggens and Justin Verlander, who I’ll call Jair Verlander for brevity’s sake.
If Strasburg signed a deal in an environment like Evan Longoria (highly touted, signs away his pre-arb and arb years within months of playing MLB), then we can try to estimate what Jair Verlander got/would get, and establish that as Strasburg’s pre-free agency value.
- Verlander received 3.15MM for signing bonus, and another 3MM for his 3 pre-arb years. He signed a 3.7MM in his first arb year, and will likely sign for 13MM in his next two arb years, for a total pre-free agent compensation of around $23MM
- Jurggens received no signing bonus, will play for barely above the minimum his first 3 pre-arb years (1.5MM total), and will likely get a 13MM deal if he were to sign away his 3 arb years, for a total compensation of $14.5MM
Jair Verlander therefore would get a $19MM deal, which includes his signing bonus and his salary for the next six years.
However, Stephen Strasburg is not yet in the sole ownership of the Nationals. He can decline to sign with them, and will take his chances with the draft (and the Nationals will get an extra pick as compensation). Therefore, the 19MM value does not apply specifically here.
What if we treated him as a free agent instead? Well, the typical player in his pre-free agency years gets 30 cents on the free agent dollar. That is, players sign heavily discounted contracts simply because they have little leverage. Star players, pitchers especially, sign even bigger discounts. If Jurggens and Velander were free agents today, and if they were signed to six-year deals, they’d probably get 60MM and 100MM, respectively. So, Jair Verlander would get an $80MM free agent deal.
Seeing that Strasburg should get about 20MM if he simply goes the traditional route, over his first 6 years, and that he should get about 80MM if he were truly a free agent, there’s 60MM being left on the table, that he thinks he’s not getting today.
The problem is that he wants a large portion of that 60MM today, AND he also wants the extra premium that free agents have been getting, when it will be his time to be a free agent.
Seeing that Strasburg’s true status is somewhere between being the sole property of the Nationals and being a free agent, he should settle for a portion of that 60MM that he thinks he deserves. I think his true status is much closer to the sole property point, and therefore, should sign for about one-fourth to one-third of the way, or 15-20MM.
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Comments • 2009/06/21
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Sabermetrics
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Poll
Poz seems to think so:
And make no mistake: 100 pitches is the magic number. This year, going into Sunday, there were 1,543 starters who went at least five innings in a game. Their average pitch count: 99.2. Can you believe that?
As Woolner pointed out ten years ago, based on the data provided by Retrosheet of the Dodgers pitchers of fifty years ago:
For the 2,690 starts we have on file, Dodger starters threw a total of 253,513 pitches, an average of 94.2 pitches per start. As our modern standard, we took the 1998 NL data, to keep the comparison between non-DH leagues (save a smattering of interleague games in AL parks). In the 2,588 starts made by NL pitchers last year, they threw a total of 247,197 pitches, an average of 95.5 pitches per start.
The difference is that pitchers of old would be pulled ALOT before they even got to 70 pitches. The distribution was simply far wider:
Keeping in mind that the average pitch count per start was about 95 for both groups, look at the percentage of starts made between 81 and 110 pitches: whereas last year, 61.1% of starters were pulled in that range, just 35.7% of all starts in the other group--barely one-third--fell into that range. To describe the differences between the two eras in a sentence: Pitchers in the 1950s came out of the game when their performance dictated it; pitchers today come out of the game when their workload dictates it.
I have the numbers somewhere, but not handy. From what I remember, the average number of pitches thrown per start for Koufax and Drysdale was something like 105-110. Podres was around 100, and everybody else was in the 85-100 range. And that’s pretty much what’s happening today. The difference is that managers would pull Koufax before he even got to 70 pitches, and would leave him in past 130 pitches. But the average is right around what current top starters do.
The wisdom that Woolner and Rany tried to impart on us is that it’s not the average number of pitches that’s the problem, but the games with high pitch counts that is the problem. I do not believe in that wisdom, since, as I have shown in the past, the number of pitches left in a pitcher’s arm for his career, is the same whether you take a group of top starters born 50 years ago or today.
I’ll give Joe major props for referencing my pitch count estimator later in that discussion. Unfortunately, he did not go directly to my site, where he would seen how many pitches Koufax threw per start, by year, and his game-by-game log. If you go half-way down the log page, you will see the same data, but sorted by pitches thrown.
Self-named replacement-level PITCHf/x-ers Harry Pavlidis (*) points out:
Ken Takahashi and Brian Stokes both pitched in relief of Santana on Sunday, and we happen to have another game (May 11) from Citi Field where all three pitched.
Talk about the fantastic luck to find the same three pitchers who pitched in two different games, with the game we are most interested in be one of those games.
(*) Harry three months ago called himself a replacement-level PITCHf/x-er. I have no idea if it was true then, and if it was, it simply shows what dedication, inspiration and hard work can do to turn such a baseball fan into a quality analyst.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Switch-pitcher:
He is dominating much younger hitters with well-located stuff that probably will not survive as he moves higher.
“If you can throw breaking balls that start in the zone and leave, or throw soft stuff in a fastball count, you can drive these kids nuts,” Newman said. As the Charleston pitching coach Jeff Ware put it, “There are a lot of mistakes here that can’t be made at higher levels.”
You get a 0.60 ERA disadvantage, more or less, with the platoon disadvantage. And, if you are a righty pitcher, that’ll happen say half of the time. But, if you are a switch pitcher, that disadvantage doesn’t apply. So, you can gain 0.30 in ERA if you always get to pitch with the platoon advantage just by learning to pitch lefthanded. It’s not necessarily a reason to bring someone up, but in a cloud of pitchers who don’t stand out, it is more than a tie-breaker reason to make him stand out. Give him a shot. What do they have to lose?
(Hat tip: Rob Neyer)
Non-sports post. Avoid at your pleasure, enter at your peril.
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Comments • 2009/06/19
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Blogging
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Comments • 2009/06/16
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Sabermetrics
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Poll
Kincaid looks at Duncan using a WOWY/Marcel/FIP approach:
We don’t have nearly as large a sample as we’d like to decide anything for sure. Our use of FIP downplays Duncan’s pitch-to-contact philosophy where utilizing those good defenses was more effective than FIP can account for. We can, however, tell a couple important things. One, a pretty good chunk of the percieved Duncan Effect is due to other factors, probably most notably the defenses his teams have had. Two, those other effects don’t cover all of the improvement we see in pitchers Duncan has coached, and they still did noticeably better than expected as a group. This does not prove a Duncan Effect, nor does it assign a real value to it, but it does support the claims and suggest that there is a good chance it does exist.
How come I’ve never heard of this site (3-D Baseball)? I look at the Blogroll it links to, and it’s the standard sabermetric fare. If there are other articles of interest on that site, please link to it.
Sky is putting a call out:
If you want to shout out suggestions, feel free to do so in the comments. If you’d like to talk about developing a relationship with the BtB gang and providing your own touch to the site, please email me at .
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Comments • 2009/06/19
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Blogging
Q1: Today is Jun 15, 2009. The following pitchers have all been declared free agents (yes, in the middle of the season), and you are lucky enough to have the most money available to sign one of these pitchers. You are going to give them a 6-year contract. How much would you give each one?
Cole Hamels (b. 1983)
Jair Jurrjens (b. 1986)
Stephen Strasburg (b. 1988)
Justin Verlander (b. 1983)
Chien-Ming Wang (b. 1980)
Q2: Same question, but today is Jun 15, 2008, and you have no knowledge of what has happened in the year that follows.
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