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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Of players born since 1924, here are the least number of plate appearances for Hall of Famers:
7831 Kirby Puckett
8237 Duke Snider
8364 Yogi Berra (C)
8379 Bill Mazeroski
8669 Johnny Bench (C)
8695 Orlando Cepeda
9019 Gary Carter (C)
As you can see, it’s extremely tough to make the Hall of Fame with under 9000 plate appearances. Players with a short career, born after 1924, but not in the Hall of Fame:
8553 (I’m) Keith Hernandez
8288 Sal Bando
8220 Bobby Grich
8050 Reggie Smith
8010 Jimmy Wynn
7314 Dick Allen
Even if you can make a strong case for any of these guys, their (relatively) short career works against them. Others who will soon join them:
8672 Edgar Martinez
8030 Larry Walker
7980 Jim Edmonds
7745 Mike Piazza (may benefit from being catcher)
7660 Mark McGwire
Jim Edmonds is of course a much better candidate than Kirby Puckett, even though their careers lasted just as long. He’s a better hitter and better fielder. Kirby got the “my career ended too early” bonus votes
It’s happened.
Katin, 28, was told he would be suspended for 50 games, and he appealed the findings. Two months after he got that phone call the suspension was overturned, making him the only ballplayer who has successfully appealed. Katin is hoping his former University of Miami teammate, Ryan Braun, will be the second.
In Katin’s case, his first sample came back with a high level of testosterone.
“They assumed I was on something,” he said.
In 2007 in the Minor Leagues, players would submit two urine samples—marked “A” and “B.” Katin was notified that he tested positive for high levels of testosterone, and he said the “B” sample was then tested for synthetic drugs. It came back negative. Now, if a player has a high level, Major League Baseball will automatically test for synthetic drugs before contacting the player.
In Braun’s case, they did test for synthetic drugs (presumably from the A sample). It’s unclear what they are going to test for in the B sample, other than the exact same thing. Unless the B sample is somehow not representative of the A sample, and if they perform the same tests, the margin of error would, presumably, be pretty narrow in Braun’s case.
Too much is made of matchup stats (i.e., how batter X does against pitcher Y after 20-40 plate appearances, while ignoring each player’s career 2000 plate appearances).
At the same time, is too little made of individual player-park factors? If you have 3000 plate appearances of Barry Bonds at 3Com and away from 3Com (is that what it was called then? I can’t keep up with corporate names), and he hits as many HR at home as he does on the road, do we really care that the average LHH hits two-thirds as many HR at 3Com than away? I say: NO! Barry Bonds has very little in common with those hitters, other than handedness, but (traditional) park factors DEMAND that we treat Bonds as being tightly coupled with that group.
This is Mat Latos’s career Petco / non-Petco slash line (BA, OBP, SLG):
.229 .287 .348
.224 .286 .351
I won’t even bother to tell you which is Petco and which is not, since it’s the same thing! The question is: did he simply have made luck at Petco and good luck away from Petco? Or, is his talent level such that it’s an important parameter when looking at the park factors of the rest of the players? That is, with Bonds, he hits HR so far, that it doesn’t matter that 3Com suppresses HR.
Similarly, is Petco such that Latos can’t benefit from its pitcher-friendliness? I DON’T KNOW. But, these are the kinds of valid questions that are out there.
Latos’ strikeout rate per PA is 23.7% at home and 23.4% on the road. His walk rate is 6.9% at home, 7.9% on the road. His HR rate is the same 2.2% at home and on the road. His BABIP is .283 at home and .276 on the road.
Therefore, we need to do just like we do with handedness splits: personalize them. In The Book, we showed that you take the observed handedness splits and regress them toward the league mean (by adding 1000 PA for LHH and 2200 for RHH, to the number of their PA against LHP). We need to come up with the same thing for parks.
The problem is that you may have to come up with a different regression amount for each park AND for each quality of player. It makes it a tougher job.
So, we can’t presume that Latos was either:
a. completely unaffected by Petco (as evidenced by his splits)
b. extremely unlucky at Petco (as evidenced by all MLB players at Petco)
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
I’ll put my money on 750 random Posnanski readers who choose to vote over 600 BBWAA writers:
86% 645 Barry Larkin
84% 629 Tim Raines
81% 605 Jeff Bagwell
61% 459 Alan Trammell
57% 430 Edgar Martinez
57% 427 Mark McGwire
28% 214 Larry Walker
22% 171 Rafael Palmeiro
21% 162 Dale Murphy
19% 147 Fred McGriff
19% 144 Jack Morris
16% 124 Lee Smith
15% 113 Bernie Williams
14% 105 Don Mattingly
2% 17 Juan Gonzalez
1% 11 Brad Radke
1% 9 Tim Salmon
1% 8 Rubin Sierra
1% 8 Tony Womack
0% 6 Terry Mulholland
0% 5 Javy Lopez
0% 4 Vinny Castilla
0% 3 Brian Jordan
0% 2 Bill Mueller
0% 1 Eric Young
0% 0 Jeromy Burnitz
0% 0 Phil Nevin
Saturday, December 17, 2011
So says Bob Gibson:
Too much is made of camaraderie and chemistry and all that stuff. I don’t need a teammate that I love. Give me one who can play.
Friday, December 16, 2011
His own testimony:
Joe Paterno’s minutes-long January testimony before a grand jury investigation Jerry Sandusky was read into the record in absence of his in-person testimony at a hearing for two Penn State officials.
Read aloud by a representative for the Attorney General’s office, his testimony lasted 6 minutes in court Friday.
Here is what he said: McQueary called him on a Saturday morning, he couldn’t remember what year.
McQueary told him he’d seen Sandusky who was “fondling a young boy” in the showers of the Lasch Building.
“It was of sexual nature. I’m not sure exactly what it was. I didn’t push Mike ... because he was obviously very upset,” according to his testimony.
“I was in a little bit of a dilemma ... because Sandusky didn’t work for me anymore,” it continues.
Paterno testified that he told McQueary he would contact the appropriate people at Penn State.
“I have a tremendous amount of confidence in Mr. Curley, I thought he would handle it appropriately,” according to testimony. “...I did tell Mike, you did what was right, you told me.”
He continued to explain that he couldn’t be precise about when he called athletic director Tim Curley because it was a Saturday, and he probably didn’t want to disrupt his weekend.
When asked about other reports of similar activity, Paterno said he had no recollection of any such rumors being discussed in his presence.
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Comments • 2011/12/19
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News
Justice. Or, at least, what we have to put up with for a functional justice system.
These are my favorites. My second favorite is the best-fielding plays. Give me those two, and I’ll be sitting in front of channel 790 all day.
The one shocking one that I saw, was a game with Pascual Perez, where he was standing on the very edge (or even outside) of the batter’s box, and the Padres pitchers were throwing at him… all 4 times he was at bat. It was rather revolting, not to mention cowardly on the pitchers’ part. It’s one thing for players to self-police, but it’s another when it’s a tit-for-tat kind of situation, where one side gets to throw a punch (via throwing a baseball), while the other guy’s defense is to run away (via trying to avoid getting hit by a moving pitch). And then, his response is to do the same, or, have everyone get into a brawl.
What is a better way to avoid beanball wars? And please, don’t dismiss others’ ideas as being unworkable. This is a brainstorming session. All voices will be heard.
Dryden takes to task Gary Bettman role. As usual, Dryden is brilliant.
Gary Bettman has arrived at Stage 2 in the NHL’s response to fighting and violence.
Stage 1, as embodied by Colin Campbell and former Boston Bruins coach and immensely popular TV commentator Don Cherry, was aggressive, belligerent, and dismissive. Look, this is hockey. This is how the game’s played. Always has been. If you don’t like it, don’t play it.
Stage 2, as embodied in Bettman’s interview, is more modulated, more thoughtful-sounding, and more reasonable-sounding (aided by the interview’s setting, a room lighted dark and warm, almost cozy; there’s a reason 60 Minutes’ interviews and congressional committee hearings are done in the glare of bright lights).
Occasionally he strays into a lawyer’s gentle, prickly combativeness, but mostly he stays on his message: It is Boston University’s scientific work on the brain samples of former players that helped bring head injuries to a focus, he is saying. It’s science that I’m going to argue back. Science isn’t impressed with anecdote and story. Science demands proof. Four brain samples are merely four anecdotes, and that’s out of the thousands who have played this game. Mine is the reasonable, responsible position. Mine is based on science. Science demands proof, and I demand proof, too. And when science gives me what science insists upon for itself, I will go where science takes me. In the meantime, even with science on my side, I will continue cooperating with doctors and researchers and generate rule changes where appropriate. That’s how reasonable I am.
By waiting for science, thousands of asbestos workers and millions of smokers died. The fact is, as a society we rarely have the luxury of waiting for science on big, difficult, potentially dangerous questions to meet its standard of proof. We need to take the best science we have, generate more and better information, then apply to it our best intuition and common sense — and decide.
Scientists are always disparaging of politicians and other decision-makers for being so influenced by anecdote. But an anecdote, well observed, thorough, rigorous, and truth-seeking (not ax-grinding), can tell a lot. At any moment, it may also be the best information we have. It is only by tragic fluke — his early death — that we have the Derek Boogaard “anecdote.”
Normally, we’d have to wait many more years to know what had happened many years before. But now we have this gift from Derek Boogaard.
Dewan has some data for us.
Batting Average by Zone, 2011
Non-Sacrifice Situations
Zone 1 .246
Zone 2 .412
Zone 3 .164
Zone 4 .139
Zone 5 .520
Zone 6 .720
Overall .438
So, a .438 batting average if bunting for a hit, with no one on base, or runners on base and two outs. What’s the breakeven point?
Well, a single with no one on adds around +.25 runs, while an out costs .16 runs. That gives us a break-even point of .390. That is, if you bunt for a hit with no one on base, and you have a .390 batting average, you are a league-average hitter.
Players are bunting for a .438 average, which means they are picking their spots pretty well, bunting when they think they have a .375 to .500 batting average.
***
Note that with a runner on base and 2 outs, the batting average breakeven point shoots way up. Here are some numbers (all with 2 outs):
runner on 1B: .500
runner on 2B: .670
runner 1B/2B: .580
As you can see, only the absolute very best bunters should EVER bunt with runners on base and two outs. Either that, or the fielders have to be playing very deep.
So, I’d like to see those numbers, of bunt batting average with no runners on base, and with runners on base and 2 outs. We should see that .438 be pretty different, something like .420 with bases empty and at least .500 with runners on base.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Non-sports post.
Last year:
The chief of the US Marine Corps said Tuesday that ending a ban on openly gay troops in the military could jeopardize the lives of Marines in combat by undermining closely knit units.
General James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps and an opponent of lifting the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prohibition, cited a Pentagon study saying Marines fighting in Afghanistan were worried that permitting gays to serve openly could disrupt “unit cohesion.”
“When your life hangs on a line, on the intuitive behavior of the young man… who sits to your right and your left, you don’t want anything distracting you,” Amos told reporters at the Pentagon.
“I don’t want to lose any Marines to distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda (hospital) with no legs,” he said.
He added that “mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines’ lives. That’s the currency of this fight.”
His comments were the toughest yet on the issue, after he testified at a congressional hearing that he opposed lifting the ban at a time of war.
Amos said Marines fighting in Afghanistan sent a “very strong message” in the Pentagon’s recent study, expressing opposition to the repealing the ban in an survey.
“I have to listen to that,” he said.
Today:
Since the lifting two months ago of a longstanding U.S. ban on gays serving openly in the military, U.S. Marines across the globe have adapted smoothly and embraced the change, says their top officer, Gen. James F. Amos, who previously had argued against repealing the ban during wartime.
“I’m very pleased with how it has gone,” Amos said in an Associated Press interview during a week-long trip that included four days in Afghanistan, where he held more than a dozen town hall-style meetings with Marines of virtually every rank. He was asked about a wide range of issues, from his view of the Marine Corps’ future to more mundane matters such as why he recently decided to stop allowing Marines to wear their uniform with the sleeves rolled up.
Not once was he asked in Afghanistan about the repeal of the gay ban.
One more phony outrage story put to bed.
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Comments • 2011/12/16
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News
A cool interview that shows that the NFL may very well embrace technology at a more in-depth level.
Great stuff from the NHL. The have their rule book online, in an interactive fashion, and with a video example for each rule.
Really, just a fantastic idea and execution on the NHL’s part.
(Note: video works for IE for me, but not Firefox.)
Or so The Common Man suspects.
Sounds outrageous, correct?
As the author of the piece points out, 25% of Americans have zero or negative net value (i.e., debt exceeds assets). That means that many of you dear readers, all by yourself, have more net worth than 25% of Americans combined.
In any case, as we’ve discussed this in the past, it’s not the top-end that’s the issue, but the percentage of people in the bottom-end. Norway, Great Britain, Canada all have means that were close to USA, but fewer people below the poverty line.
Here’s a recent discussion we had on that. Please, read through there first, in its entirety, if you intend to post about this issue. (I’ll delete any post that was too lazy to read there.)
Glove-slap: Peter.
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Comments • 2011/12/16
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Blogging
Patrick tries to come up with some value.
The one big hole in his valuation is that he keep IP constant. WAR per IP may remain constant in the lat 20s, but IP will go down. As a result, you need to drop a couple of wins in there.
Matt gives us his take.
I’d like to point out two things:
1. SolvingDIPS (pdf) has gotten to similar conclusions in terms of the split between pitching and fielding as it relates to BABIP.
2. The conversion from BABIP to runs is usually ignored in these DIPS talks. A GB pitcher gives up more hits, but fewer % of extrabase hits, but also gets more DP. Overall, and you may find this hard to believe, in terms of RUNS per batted ball in play, GB and FB are the same! (Excludes Pops, Liners, HR.)
So, even if you find a BABIP skill, it’s irrelevant to know that. What we really want is his RUNS skill on batted balls.
And in that case, Voros’s initial claim is much more realistic.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
You have a 66.7% chance of winning any game. You win the series if you win 3 games before your opponent wins 4 games. What are your chances of winning the series?
Try it yourself. Presuming I did this correctly:
Read More
Shelden Kennedy and Theo Fleury were long-time NHL players. Fleury especially is about as borderline to a Hall of Famer as there is. Fleury was often in the league’s substance abuse program. Kennedy and Fleury were child victims of their junior hockey coach, Graham James, in the 1980s. James was especially predatory in that he would trade for them, or otherwise make sure he was their coach, as they moved up the ranks.
One might think that reaching the NHL would free them from his grasp. But:
December 1994
Graham James calls Fleury and asks him to become partners in bringing WHL team to Calgary (Calgary Hitmen). Fleury invests $125,000. Sheldon Kennedy also invests $1,000 in the team.
I’m not going to pretend to know what that means, especially since two years later, the bombshell arrived:
Late summer 1996
Sheldon Kennedy contacts the Calgary police to formally charge Graham James with sexual abuse. Word soon leaks to the media that Graham is being investigated.
Who knows exactly what kind of silent or torturous hell a child victim of abuse goes through into adulthood, what kind of peace they have to make, what kind of re-opening of wounds they have to confront.
What does it mean for Fleury and Kennedy to invest in a junior team, to be owned by their abuser? Well, long-time Montreal Gazette journalist decided to GO THERE:
Nobody should question Fleury’s decision to remain silent. What should be questioned is Fleury’s continuing role in James’s life. At the time of Kennedy’s revelations, James was the coach of the Calgary Hitmen. He was one of the co-owners of the junior team in the Western Hockey League. One of the other owners was Theoren Fleury. Here was someone who had suffered abuse at the hands of Graham James. Here was someone who knew that James had abused other players. Here was someone who was exposing other children to the same sexual predator.
Fleury has been through enough counselling to know there’s a word for someone who acts in this fashion - enabler.
...
A TSN promo for the coming world junior championship spotlights Fleury. A better choice would have been his teammate on the 1988 gold-medal team - Sheldon Kennedy.
He followed that up with an explanation of what he wrote.
The journalist’s article was highly insensitive. In order to make the claims he did, specifically that Fleury was an enabler to a monster, the journalist needed some expert opinion as to why victims still associate themselves with their abusers, of why they get more entangled, even when they have a clear way out, and in Fleury’s and Kennedy’s case, seemed to have been completely out… until they were brought back in.
The journalist basically failed to make his case. He spouted a summary opinion with no evidence. This was a clear-case of a b-llsh!t article as there is.
It’s the kind of thing that Bill O’Reilly (the king of b-llsh!tters) has said when talking about a kid that never freed himself from the sexual abuse of his kidnapper, even when he was able to hang out with friends and go to school. (It happened within the last two years, maybe even last year.)
***
Can I make the case that since the Montreal Gazette PAID Pat Hickey, that they too are enablers of crappy articles? It’s one thing to give someone a platform, and quite another to pay for it. And while the Gazette doesn’t need to agree with Hickey’s opinion, they at least have to hold him to SOME standard for his opinion. In this case, there was no standard, other than a good writing style.
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Comments • 2011/12/16
Unfortunately, most of the rules are not playing rule changes. Those that are:
increases punishments for slow-moving hitters and pitchers, raising pace-of-game fines up to $10,000 each for the sixth violation and beyond.
That’s pretty much it. Possible changes in the replay rule to be expanded. No word on the “double-to-out” (or vice versa) if the ball is hit near the top of the wall has been clarified or not.
The rest of the rule changes have nothing to do with the actual game of baseball, but with the business of baseball, like not allowing changes to uniform numbers, unless advised well in advance. So, a guy gets traded, and wants to keep his number, and “buy out” his younger teammates’ number? Well, there’s going to be a time lag there. Players appealing scoring plays to the official scorer? Now, there’s a protocol to follow. Inter-league games limited to a maximum of 20 (I guess to ensure it’s AL v NL, and not American Conference v National Conference, like the other sports have, which is 20% to 25% of their games between conferences).
I would have loved to see something done about the mid-inning relief change, something as simple as any mid-inning relief change starts the batter at 2-0. Or, if you want to make it more progressive, make the first one at 1-0, the second at 2-0, and all subsequent mid-inning changes in the game at 3-0.
MLB really moves at a glacial pace in terms of game-changes, but is very fast in terms of business-changes.
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