THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Drinking Age for Paris

In Canada, the legal drinking age is 18.  In Italian households in Canada, the required drinking age is puberty.  That’s just the way it is.  Asking for a glass of vino is a rite of passage.  I’ve always believed that if drinking and driving is the problem, don’t raise the drinking age (as teenagers are not the most likely of residens to comply), but set the drinking age to 18, and raise the driving age to 21.

Now comes the inexplicable human being with a great name, Paris, who manages to get out of jail and into house arrest, because of her frail mental state.  I’m not a doctor, but that won’t stop me from giving my medical opinion: if she acts like she’s still a teenager, no responsibilities, no consequences to actions, etc, then she should be treated like that.  If you can’t do the time, then you can’t do the crime: bar her from drinking and bar her from driving.  Once she becomes real 18-yr old, ready to accept the consequences of her actions, let her drink.  And three years later, let her drive.

Best performing players so far

Chone checks in with his offensive Linear Weights + UZR + position adjustment for all players.  The position adjustments follows the form I’ve been discussing, but he sets the DH adjustment similar to 1B (-10 runs), rather than the better -20/-10.  He does this because of what Andy found in The Book: it’s tougher to DH.  Just as it’s easier to relieve than to start, and therefore, you need a different baseline to compare against, the same applies here.

Positional adjustments based on one-year (or less) offensive numbers should be given a bloody nose.  Even a 10-year set of offensive numbers would put the 1B and CF at the same level, at some point in baseball history (around the 50s I think).

Andrew Speaker

Great interview as usual from Larry King.  If you haven’t seen the video, you can read the transcript.

In short, the choice was NOT: travel or don’t travel.  The choice was: live in quarantine or live in the open.  And, Speaker says that he was told that he was NOT contagious (he was not told that he was slightly contagious, and he was not told that he was not highly contagious).  Being told that you are not contagious, and being told that he doesn’t need to be quarantined, he was then free to live in the open.  Andrew Speaker points out: why would it not be ok to travel to another country, but it would be ok to interact with his daughter and wife, and to continue to go to work?  He point-blank said that if he was even slightly contagious, he would have sequestered himself, to ensure that his daughter would not be at risk. 

Andrew Speaker also point blank calls the CDC and Fulton County administrators liars, to the Senate.  That they’re stories are not consistent, and they are certainly not what they said to him.  Andrew Speaker’s father brought audio tapes that King played.  Pretty compelling when you hear his side of the story.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Selig reminds me of John Zeigler

This is disappointing to read from someone in charge:

“Discipline for wrongdoing is important, but it is also important to create an environment so players can feel free to honestly and completely cooperate with this important investigation.”

Unless he’s creating an environment of immunity from baseball prosecution (and keeping his statement confidential so that admitting to having committed an illegal act isn’t going to bring the real prosecutors after him), what the heck is Selig talking about?  What environment?  Talk or else we’ll suspend you for whatever we think we can get away with?

John Zeigler once suspended Borje Salming for an entire season for having admitted that he used cocaine several years prior:

Published: September 5, 1986
The National Hockey League has suspended Borje Salming, a Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman, for eight regular-season games and fined $500 because he used cocaine several years ago, the league announced yesterday.

John Ziegler, National Hockey League president, said the penalty was the ‘’the very minimum.’’ Salming, who is 35 years old and a 13-year veteran of the team, was quoted in a Toronto newspaper in May as saying that he used cocaine ‘’five, six years ago, but not since and I feel good about saying no.’’ The league suspended him for the entire season, then commuted the suspension.

Here’s the list of NHL players.  The basic rule is: don’t ask, don’t tell.  Pro leagues care about its image first, and the players last.  There’s nothing wrong with that, since the players care about themselves first.  But, don’t be a hypocrite and say otherwise.  Leagues and players will do anything to ensure that they maximize their revenues. 

Except for someone like Dominik Hasek, who told the Redwings a few years ago to stop paying him, since he was injured.  And Pavol Demitra who would have had a sizeable bonus kick in if he scored one more goal.  As it turns out, he had an empty net, and instead of shooting, passed the puck to his teammate.  That act of generosity cost him something like 500,000$ a year, for two years.  The Blues *wanted* him to score since they had an insurance policy against the bonus.  It would not have cost them an extra cent.  Why did he do that?  Because he passed the puck to a teammate who had a 300,000$ bonus on the line.  The shot was deflected, and both players got nothing.

Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Baseball

http://mitch.watnik.com/symposium.html

Lineup of speakers
Cory Schwartz, Director of Statistics, MLB.com
Chris Long, Senior Quantitative Analyst, San Diego Padres
Sig Mejdal, Senior Quantitative Analyst, St. Louis Cardinals
Nate Silver, Columnist, Baseball Prospectus
Jeffrey Ma, Vice President of Research, and Mark Kamal, Statistical Analyst, Protrade.com
...

I don’t know Sig or Mark, but of the rest, they are all good guys.  Mark’s posted here once or twice.

One Year and One Million Hits Later

I just noticed that we launched this blog just about exactly 1 year ago (Jun 2, 2006), and we just passed our 1 million page hits.  Thanks for stopping by (or hitting refresh so often)!

I’ll see your Cease and Desist letter, and raise you a better one…

I’m always fascinated with Cease & Desist (C&D) letters for some reason.  Maybe because I’ve always loved law shows.  There was this one between BP and Primer.  (I remember thinking that I should create a site called BaseballPraetor to one-up them all.) And the one between MLB and Ray Kerby.

But, this one I love between two web hosts, complete with lawyer letters from both sides.  Great read, and the presentation was even better.

Classifying Pitches

When all the talk about the “gyroball” came out, I always thought of three things: tell me
- how much fast the ball moves,
- how much the ball breaks (horizontal, vertical), and
- whether the pitch has topspin, backspin or knuckles. 
That’s really what we care about.  Calling it a split-fingered fastball, a cutter, a slider, a fastball, or what have you is really irrelevant.  Along comes John Walsh with some great research on just that topic.  Rather than relying on an observer to determine if a pitch is a sinker, why not simply infer it (or more accurately, classify it) based on what the ball actually does.  Walsh, Appleman, Fox, Sheehan, et al: keep it up guys! 

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Another Aging Study

Guest-blogger Steve Walters over at the Wages of Wins blog links to an aging study by Ray Fair (PDF).  I was asked to review the paper a few months ago, which I have reprinted in the comments section, and will repost here:

Read More

Monday, June 04, 2007

What’s an intern?

I thought this was an interesting article by Joyce Roseberg on the Federal laws on what qualifies as an intern. 

The Book is now availale

The self-published first edition is sold out.  The reprint edition from Potomoc Books is now available. 

If you will buy The Book from Amazon (or actually, if you make any Amazon purchase whatsoever), click on the link at the top of the page.  We get referral fees from Amazon.

(If you already bought the first edition, you won’t find any new content in the reprint edition.)

Saturday, June 02, 2007

A-Fraud

Someone I know was on the receiving end of a fender-bender.  She tried to settle with the offending party because she felt bad for her and didn’t want her to get insurance points, but the offender’s father got in the way, and so, she had to let insurance settle it.  She felt bad.  So, I told her: if you really feel bad, and since the insurance company will probably pay more than what the damages really are, take the excess, and give it to the girl.  She didn’t feel that bad about it.  All part of the phony outrage.

When I was playing softball, our team was killing the opposition.  We went around the order once already, and it was clear they weren’t in our league.  When it was my turn at bat, I took a half-hearted swing, and flied out to LF.  End of inning.  In a later inning, a teammate hit a sure inside-the-parker, but he jogged around the bases, and stopped at 3B, even though he could walk home.  These are sportsman’s-like plays.

If Joe Torre really believes what he says:

“They were angry,” Torre said. “Oh, there’s no question. I can’t say I blame them, but what are you going to do about it? What’s happened has happened.” Torre said he spoke with Rodriguez after the game.
“It’s probably something he shouldn’t have done,” Torre said. “I don’t sense he’s going to do it again.”

He should have instructed the next batter to swing at any and every offering.  Oh, I see.  He didn’t feel that bad about it.  There was a remedy to the situation, if you really believed that something wrong happened.

***

I should also add the reason that you don’t do this play.  And, the Fenway fans, as you see later in the above article, show you the reason.  Why is it that you call for a play?  It’s so that two players don’t collide: avoid injuries.  But, for now, until forever, Fenway fans will call for the ball.  Runners on base will call for the ball.  ARod and Jeter may end up colliding one day.

Friday, June 01, 2007

UZR, 2007, complete list

Here you go, courtesy of MGL.

expOuts: number of outs made by an average fielder, given this fielder’s
- ball in play distribution (location, trajectory, hardness of hit)
- park
- pitcher’s GB/FB tendency
- runners on base and outs in inning

G: expOuts divided by average number of expOuts per game for that position.  For example, the average LF makes 2 outs per game.  If Manny has 86 expOuts, then he’s got around 43 “games’.

UPDATE:
And here’s the complete UZR, 2003-2007:
http://www.tangotiger.net/mgl/UZR0307.zip

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Measuring Plate Discipline

Pizza Cutter offers a study in By The Numbers on measuring plate discipline.  I’m afraid it’s going to take me several reads to understand it.  It looks cool.  You can get a link to his article, and talk about it on his blog:
http://mvn.com/mlb-stats/2007/05/24/the-adam-dunn-debate-defining-plate-discipline/

(Comments closed.)

PZR

PZR is one side of the defense coin, with UZR on the flip side.  You can find discussions on it in the archives:

The description of PZR is in post #1 here:
http://www.tangotiger.net/archives/stud0191.shtml

Extenive discussion on PZR:
http://www.tangotiger.net/archives/stud0014.shtml

In a nutshell, PZR doesn’t care about whether a ball was caught or not.  It only cares about the distribution of balls allowed.  How many were hit to point x,y, how hard was the ball hit there, what’s the tendency of the pitcher/batter to allow GB, what’s the park, and what’s the handedness of the batters/pitchers.  Given all that, then we don’t need to know if Mike Cameron or Wily Mo Pena is playing CF.  Or in the case of Roger Clemens last year and this: Everett or Jeter.

If 95% of balls allowed by RHP to angle 27 degrees by a RHH who has a tendency to hit GB on a grass surface are outs, then *all* RHP who gives up said ball gets 0.95 outs.  If Clemens gave up 100 such BIP, and Everett gets 100 outs and Jeter gets 90 outs, we don’t care (for Clemens).  Clemens gets credit for 95 outs.  Everett gets +5 and Jeter gets -5.

Add up all the “virtual” outs, virtual singles, virtual doubles, virtual HR, and you get a park and fielder-independent stat line for a pitcher.

***

This really won’t work for hitters, since there’s a quality to hitting a ball that is simply not captured by the data recorders.  While Wade Boggs has some control over whether a ball is hit at 22 degrees or 24 degrees, a pitcher doesn’t have anywhere near the same control.  A hitter can hit based on the fielder positioning far more than a pitcher can make a hitter hit the ball based on fielder positioning.  That’s why HZR won’t really work.

Converting OBP (or wOBA) to Runs

This is a pure numbers post.

Read More

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Versus

Versus is a cable channel, where the NHL has its games.

On my cable system (Cablevision), channels 35, 36 are ESPN2 and ESPN.  Channels 37 through 49 are various movie and serial channels, like USA, TNT, AMC.  Channels in the 50s are entertainment shows, the 60s are weather and CPAN types, and 70s have MSG and YES.  All the way on channel 408 is Versus.  Men are channel surfers.  But, they’re not going to surf from channel 72 to 408.  They’re certainly not going to type 408.

According to The Hockey News, MLB on FOX got a 2 rating, and NHL on NBC got a 1.  That’s pretty good in comparison.  Remember that the NHL revenues are a bit over 2 billion, compared to the 6 billion of MLB.  Versus is on about half the homes of NBC, but it got 20% the ratings of NBC.  Location, location, location.  Versus needs to at least move into the channels 140s, like ESPN News and Fox Sports.

The NHL should also abandon any hopes to “convert” fans, especially since this is being done at the expense of annoying the core base.  The NHL is a regional sport.  Leave it at that.  Bettman has the same attitude like NJ politicians, as they tried to come up with a state slogan (all of the form “Please love me").  Desperation is not attractive.

Are GMs as clueless as Boras implies?

I’m reading this feature-length on Scott Boras where he says:

“It says here Varitek is hitting .129 when the pitch count is no balls and two strikes,” he says ...
an agent or general manager would simply say, “Varitek struggles when he’s behind in the pitch count.”
Here’s what Boras says: “With one ball and two strikes he’s hitting a little better, about .138. But then, with two balls and no strikes, or two balls and one strike, he’s up around .315. So even with health issues last year, he’s still a better than average hitter.”

On 0-2, .129 is below average.  At 1-2, .138 is below average.  And 2-0 or 2-1, .315 is below average.  And yet, he stands there and says: he’s still a better than average hitter on that basis?  Wow.

Last year, another longtime Boras client, Jeff Weaver, was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals after a poor start with the Angels in Anaheim. Weaver was dominant in the postseason, and the Cardinals won the World Series, but St. Louis offered Weaver only a one-year, $5 million contract — which Boras found insulting. “That’s what you’d offer a relief pitcher,” he says.

Weaver eventually signed with the Seattle Mariners for $8.3 million. “You have to respect that teams have a right to make their own decisions,” Boras says, before turning around and passing judgment on Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty. “Here’s a GM who never played the game saying, ‘We’re going to go with our young guys,’ and I go, ‘You can’t.’”

The Cardinals simply blew it, Boras concludes. “The Cardinals not signing Jeff Weaver is how you don’t win divisions, and my prediction is the St. Louis Cardinals won’t win their division this year.” (At press time, the Cardinals were at the bottom of the National League Central.)

Uhhh… do you think the writer of the article could tell us how incredibly horrible Jeff Weaver was actually pitching this year?  And in the earlier passage, Boras tells the Redsox that they won’t win without Damon.  I suppose you can tell every single team they won’t win, and you’d be right 29 out of 30 times.  At least we know Epstein and Jocketty are not clueless GMs.

When San Francisco reliever Kevin Correia faces Dodger pinch hitter Olmedo Saenz with a runner on third and two out, Giants catcher Bengie Molina has Correia pitch around Saenz — who gets hit by a pitch. Boras notes that now there’s a possible force out at second. “Molina is a smart catcher. He knows that was a bad matchup. Saenz is hitting .400 off this pitcher.” That Boras knows these sorts of things off the top of his head tells you just about everything you need to know about him.

According to baseball-reference.com, he’s 1-1, with 1 HBP.  I guess that means he was 1-1, before that PA.  Does the writer make no fact-checking at all?

Now this I like:

He says he wants MLB to scrap the current World Series format and adopt a nine-game series in one designated city per year — the way it was played in the early 20th century. He’s talked to owners and says some see nothing but upside.

“The TV and advertising and marketing revenue would explode,” he says. “Places that might never have a World Series could compete for the location like they do for the Olympics. Nine games would allow a greater chance for the best team, and not just the hottest team, to win. It would be like the Super Bowl, but better.

You can certainly make the case that MLB is not maximizing the profit potential of the World Series.  So, let the market close the gap.  Heck, who knows, the World Series can be played between the Yanks and Mets in Tokyo.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Don’t look now ARod, but look who’s overtaken you…

Derek Jeter.

ARod managed to hit those two dramatic HR, which together combined for +1.5 wins.  In his other 200 PA, he’s +0.2 wins (for a total of +1.7 wins).  Jeter’s top two PA in terms of win impact was +0.4 wins.  In his 206 other PA, he’s +1.5 wins (for a total of +1.9 wins).

Their WPA/LI, which properly reweights all their events, based on the game state (i.e., K more costly when men on 3B and less than 2 outs, GB out that moves the runner over is more valuable than otherwise, etc), but without the extra bonus for leverage, are as follows:
Jeter: +1.8 wins
ARod: +1.8 wins

Jeter’s OBP/SLG is .444/.494, while ARod is .396/.676.  Their OPSwins are +1.2 for Jeter and +1.8 for ARod.  Isn’t that incredible?  Jeter managed to situationally convert his .444/.494 to be the equivalent of .396/676!

(Aside note: Placido Polanco, who last year I called the equivalent to Derek Jeter, in terms of hitting+fielding+position talent level, also has a hitting WPA of +1.8 wins.)

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Odds of making the playoffs

There are at least two sites that track daily the chances of each team of making the playoffs.  CoolStandings.com even offer two flavors, one the “smart”, and one the “dumb” (presumes a prior of .500 for each team).

The Yanks, as far behind as they are, have a 40% chance using the BP prior (i.e., whatever PECOTA thinks they are), a 30% chance using the Smart Cool Standings prior, and a 15% chance if they were a true .500 team in a league of only .500 teams ("dumb", or more accurately, clueless, prior).  The Houston Astros, virtually in the same spot as the Yanks, have a 4% chance according to BP, 6% according to the Smart Cool Standings, and a 15% chance according to the clueless Cool Standings.

It’s a remarkable difference of how much the true talent of a team can impact their chances of making the playoffs, given that they are both equally, and so far, behind.  Looks like Clemens picked the right team, between the two.