THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, February 02, 2012

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)

Baseball International Draft: Puerto Rico

Story:

No one here disputes the diminished stature of baseball in Puerto Rico, and most agree on the culprit: Major League Baseball’s decision, in 1990, to include Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, in its first-year player draft. This means Puerto Rican players must wait until they have completed high school to sign a professional contract, and then they are going up against players from the United States and Canada in the draft.
...
“What is the difference between 1980 and 2011? The draft,” David Bernier, Puerto Rico’s former secretary of sport and recreation, said in an interview in his office here. “Nothing has changed but the draft. Everything else is the same.”
...
“From a socioeconomic standpoint, things have changed quite a bit in Puerto Rico,” [Sandy Alderson] said. “There are lots of other ways to spend your time. In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, unfortunately, poor kids who are playing ball and who are from the lowest economic strata in that country, baseball is a way to escape, so there’s a greater concentration of players and effort. I think they’re just very different dynamics than Puerto Rico.”

Monday, January 30, 2012

When is an almost six hour match not too long?

When it was Nadal-Djokovic, that’s when.  It’s not the quantity, but the quality.

I was also shocked how little commercial time there was as well.  In that fifth set, it seemed they were resting alot, and each time, I thought they’d cut to commercial, but they didn’t.  Hats off to everyone involved for keeping the pace of the game so tense.

Imagine if they allowed each player’s coach to come on the court, and talk strategy.  The only thing fans care about is the players.  Not the coaches, not the officials, none of that.

Spongebob: breaking the Fibonacci rule of pineapples

She makes a pretty good case:

Marcel Team Standings Forecasts, unofficial

I don’t know where these Marcels come from, but it’s not from me.  That said, since I’ve published the formula, it wouldn’t be hard at all to try to recreate them.

One thing I did want to talk about is the “play-in” game for the Wild Card.  As far as I’m concerned, since teams 4 and teams 5 will play only amongst themselves, to have the chance to play for the final 4th spot in the playoffs, I do NOT consider that we have 5 teams in the playoffs, but 4.

Now, how far would I go with this idea?  If let’s say we had 12 teams qualify post-regular season, with the first 4 teams having a bye, and then the next 8 teams playing amongst themselves for the final 4 spots, what would I do?

I think I would do the same thing.  That those 8 teams each earned “half a spot” for the playoffs.  You have to make a distinction between teams who get a bye from those who don’t.

If outsourcing is bad then so are industrial robots and the like.

Non-sports post.

Almost everyone thinks that outsourcing of jobs to other countries where the labor (and sometimes materials) is cheaper is a bad thing. I listen to left-winger Thom Hartman all the time on the radio. He is a really smart and knowledgable guy and he constantly rails against outsourcing as do most commentators and political activists from the right and the left (and middle).

However, is this one of these things that everyone just assumes is bad because the pundits and talking heads say so and it sounds logical - after all, it puts hundreds of thousands people out of work and just allows large, money-grabbing corporations to make more money?

I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me to require a lot of complex thought and analysis and I lean toward thinking that outsourcing is a good thing for a country. Then again, I am far from fluent in economics and the like. Many of you are way smarter than I am in that field.

The basic wealth and prosperity of a nation is based on two things: One, natural resources that other countries need (as well as your own). If your country sits on a pile of oil, no one had to work. You simply sell that oil to other countries to buy whatever you want. I am looking at this on a simplistic level of course. Obviously some totalitarian governments can (and do) keep most of the profit for themselves, live like Kings and give out just enough to survive to the rest of the people.  But you know what I mean.

Two, developing technology and gaining knowledge that enables your country to produce things really cheaply and run things efficiently as well as sell that technology and knowledge to other countries to get things that you want (like the natural resources). If your country can somehow produce food, medicine, cars, etc., at very little cost, then everyone can live a great life and no one has to work real hard.

Anyway, one way to produce things more cheaply is to pay people that don’t live in your country $1 an hour to help you make something rather than $10 an hour you would pay people in your own country. Now, the disadvantage to that is that those people who are out of a job have to find something else to do to be productive.  However, one of the benefits, besides being able to produce things more cheaply, is that some of those people who are out of a job can get educated and do something more productive than answering a phone or operating a sewing machine. The more people you have in a society who do non-menial things, the more prosperous your society. In fact, ideally, a society would be most prosperous if no one in that society did any menial jobs - if all of them were outsourced to people in other countries or you developed technologies that replaced all menial labor. Of course outsourcing everything would be exploitative. But that is another issue.

So it seems to me that outsourcing always outweighs the temporary job loss of the people who are being replaced. In fact, even if some percentage of those people remain completely unemployed forever (and the rest of the country supports them), there is still a net gain.  After all, if one million people lose their $10 an hour jobs and are replaced by one million people in other countries making $1 an hour, a country saves 9 million dollars an hour right off the bat. With that savings, you can actually pay 90% of the people who lost their jobs $10 an hour to do nothing, and you break even!

Anyway, the piece de resistance counter-argument to the notion that outsourcing is bad is this: If outsourcing is bad, then any technology that replaces workers, which is pretty much ANY technology, like computers, industrial robots, machines, etc., have to be bad also!  Sure, that kind of technology creates some more jobs and also increases the overall level of technology in the society, but they are essentially the same thing. Whether I use robots and machines to manufacture my widgets or outsource my workers, it amounts to the same thing.

Finally, the argument that, “Well, the corporations will keep all the profits from outsourcing anyway,” is not an argument, although you hear it all the time. That is nonsense. Yes, the companies will make more money. But the consumers will also be able to buy things for a lot less money. Why can we buy computers, DVD players, watches, phones, TV’s, clothing, etc.  so cheaply?  Only because they are made in China and Taiwan (and Haiti, Mexico, etc.). If it were true that companies reap all or most of the profits from outsourcing and that the consumer (i.e., the whole society) does not benefit much, then it would also have to be true that any technological advance that enables a company to produce things more cheaply and efficiently also is not good because only the company will benefit. Of course, when a company benefits, so do their investors, their employees and everyone else from whom the owners of the company buy things from.

What say you guys?

Sunday, January 29, 2012

ULTIMATE BASEBALL THE GAME

I asked the game creator to give me a non-marketing view of his game.  And he delivered. (pdf).  On pages 2-3 of his 15 page response(!), he talks about “Gamer-led strategizing”, which is a fantastic feature to consider.  I’ve never heard about it being offered in such detail.

Anyway, he’s offering a couple of free trials to me, but I declined, and instead, I will forward that offer to two Straight Arrow readers.  This is how you qualify:
1. email me at tom~tangotiger~net
2. be prepared to play this game for several hours, if not dozens of hours
3. be prepared to write a review of this, that I will post to my blog; I want you to be fair, and honest, and review from the perspective of what kind of person would enjoy this game (rather than if YOU enjoyed it or not)

Anyway, I love how much and how detailed he wrote me, easily the longest email response I have ever received on any subject. 

UPDATE: Offer has been closed!  I got a bunch of emails, so, I’m going to pick out two semi-randomly.  I’ll send an email out tonight.

Prince Fielder comparables

I looked at the last 10 firstbaseman (born not later than 1973) to have had at least 10 WAR from age 25-27.  These 10 players averaged 13.8 WAR, right in line with Prince’s 14:

I got a chuckle at #10 on the list.

Anyway, how did these guys do over the next 9 seasons?  I added a column to the above chart called “WAR9”, which is the number of WAR from age 28-36:

The average is 31 WAR.  If we start a player at 4.8 WAR, and gradually accelerate his aging, we get this kind of aging chart, along with the cost per win (starting at 5MM$ per win, and increasing at 5% each year):

The total comes in at 9 years, 183MM$.

If we take out Cecil Fielder (for whatever reason you want), the other 9 comps average out 34.2 wins, and that would work out to 201MM$.

So, we can create some reasonable scenario where the overpay is some 13MM$ to 33MM$, rather than the 50-100MM$ being discussed.

Blast from the Past: Leverage Index Primer

This article came up in a search, and given all the new readers around here, I wanted to highlight it:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/crucial-situations

For those interested in part 2, and part 3, as well as the LI chart:
http://insidethebook.com/articles.shtml

Favorite sport of Americans

Football, by a landslide, with 49% choosing either NFL or college football.