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Minors_College
Thursday, February 14, 2008
John Sickels does what I think is required of ALL forecasters: a look back at shooting off your big mouth. Without any other forecaster doing the same, Sickels’ list looks pretty good here.
His top 50 nonpitchers averaged 35 win shares so far, according to his count. His top 40 pitchers averaged 12 win shares so far. Note that pitchers are severely undervalued by the Win Shares system. Basically, you should take 90% of nonpitchers totals to adjust them properly, and take 120% of the pitchers totals. That brings our nonpitchers to 31 win shares, and our pitchers to 15 win shares. So, given a group of top nonpitcher prospects and a group of top pitcher prospects, Sickels’ list would imply to pay the pitchers half as much as the nonpitchers.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Let’s see what happens if we turn the focus on college players’ fielding.
I got nearly 2000 ballots for the 30 MLB teams in 2007. I suspect I’ll get half that, but for a far greater number of teams, on the college side. The reliability simply won’t be as great, of course. I understand all the issues. But, let’s see how far we can take this.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Ben Badler checks in with the fastball speed of minor league prospects and their eventual ascension to the bigs. What I’d like to know is a similar list based on K-BB per BFP. That is, are the pure tools at that age more indicative of talent level, or is even the performance at that age and level more indicative.
UPDATE: And also a part 2 as he looks into lefties and relievers, with a The Book mention, too.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Ten years ago, Davd Bowie sold the rights to his royalties for a 10 year period for $55MM. Frank Thomas did, or was considering doing, the same thing, among other entertainers. Now, Randy Newsom, minor leaguer, is offering futures in his salary.
This idea happens because there is a great disparity between what a player earns now, and what he will earn in the future. This is unlike the NHL, where a guy that will make lots of money is just a year away. With minor leaguers in MLB, they serve rather long apprenticeships. And young players reaching the majors are at an all-time low. With so much time going on between him being in the minors and him finally making the majors, anything can happen. This issue can be solved by increasing the minor league contracts of all players, and lowering the minimum salary for all rookies. Basically, instead of the Fans paying the minor leaguers extra money (and getting their money back from rookies and sophs basically), MLB does it.
But, because of the gap, the idea is born. And it’s a fantastic idea.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Courtesy of KJOK.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
We all know about Boyd Nation. Here’s another one that came my way.
By the way, stay tuned for the Fans’ Scouting Report, For College Fans! I don’t know what kind of feedback I’ll get, but, let’s see. As a bonus, an MLB team has actually shown an interest in the results. There is of course the possibility of tainted ballots, especially if a college follower is going to rank his college friend. But again, let’s see. I can think of plenty of reasons not to do this, and a few to do it.
Monday, December 03, 2007
KJOK who has the best Parks database around, chimes in with Japanese translations, and the “redo”.
(Note: Part 1 was just an intro piece.)
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Chris Constancio takes a look at experience with MLE
If you want to think about these differences as multipliers that are commonly used in estimating major league equivalencies, the experienced hitters’ strikeout rate increases by 1.22 times and the inexperienced hitters’ strikeout rate increases by about 1.15. ...The implication is that minor league hitters adjusting to a new league should be penalized less than a minor league veterans’ performance when calculating minor league equivalencies.
As a blast from the past:
-Here is my position on MLE.
-Here is a long discussion on MLE.
-Here are MGL’s MLEs for 2001-2003 minor league ballplayers, as of 2004. There’s a good study for someone to do right there, as to the relevancy of MLE. You see some names (including Jack Cust!) at the top there, and others that a scout would be surprised to see there.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
A quick look at steals in college ball over at Baseball Analysts, with my comments reproduced here:
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Monday, April 30, 2007
Jeff and Kent look at college hitters, and do something exciting:
In short, a competition adjustment needs to happen on a plate-appearance-by-plate-appearance basis. So that’s what we did.
I think it’s fairly clear that if Preston Wilson and Derek Jeter (both drafted as 18-yr olds in the same draft year and round) face 16-yr old punks, we’re not going to learn much about which of these two hitters is better. Whatever holes these hitters may have can only be exploited by guys with the stuff to take advantage of that. As you go up the chain, this chasm in talent level is reduced.
Some people believe that there is still a chasm between AA/AAA and MLB, hence supporting their belief that guys that can hit minor league pitching can’t hit major league pitching. But, the reliability of MLE is strong enough to refute some (though not all) of that belief.
For people who really want to see this chasm, looking at PA-by-PA high school and college stats would be the way to go. If you can show that such a chasm does exist at those levels, and it doesn’t exist at the MLB level, then you have to ask to the extent that it exists in between. How much is the chasm in A, AA, AAA and the other post-college leagues? I think it’s fairly easy to say “not much”, but that’s not a real answer.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Nate Silver lays it all out for us. The good thing here is that we can actually come back in a few years, and see how well he and Kevin did, so when he says:
I might go so far as to say that it’s the best list of prospect rankings that you’ll find anywhere on the Internet.
We can actually verify the claim. Clay did something similar in BP2003 I think, and it was an excellent article.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
The NHL has a new draft order that is rather interesting. The non-playoff teams get seeded the same way: (a) reverse-order of points, (b) extra weight to the lowest-rung teams for a lottery, (c) maximum 4 slots moving up and 1 slot moving down. (Basically, based on the NBA model). For playoff teams, this is the new part: the first round losers get seeded in reverse-order of points, and then second-round losers, third-round, then the two Finals team are seeded 29th and 30th.
Why would they do this? Well…
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Friday, March 02, 2007
From the guy who brought you minorleaguesplits.com comes Jeff and Kent with collegesplits.com. Still more proof that the creative hardworking little guy is the one that shines. An interesting thing that I saw was:
Of the 4,500 or so pitchers in our database, only 1,300 are lefthanded.
That comes out to 29% of college pitchers are lefties. As
we know, that is very close to the MLB average. And that is puzzling. The lefthanded population is around 10%. If you look at the first 10-15 years of MLB, before we would learn about the platoon advantage, less than 10% of pitchers were lefthanded. Today, we are at 27%. It has always been my contention that as you move up in the leagues, from PeeWee to the bigs, the % of pitchers that are lefthanded starts to increase through Darwinism. It seem though, from the CollegeSplits data that this happens way before I thought. Perhaps Jeff or Kent will chime in on the % of IP thrown by LHP (as opposed to the % of pitchers that are LHP), and how it looks in the various minor league levels.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
David’s Fangraphs is starting to carry minor league data. There’s also Chris’ First Inning site, Jeff’s Minor League Splits site, and of course Gary’s Baseball Cube.
Notably absent are Baseball Reference and Baseball Prospectus. BP used to create some wonderful MLE, but that no longer seems to be the case. As for B-R, Sean seems to indicate that minor league data may be in the near future.
The big players, Yahoo, ESPN, MLB.com, are nowhere to be found here. It’s strange, but it seems the bigger they are, the less valuable minor league data is judged. And yet, the ones that earn our eternal admiration, the Davids, Garys, Chrises and Jeffs, are the ones that value minor league data as more than a passing fancy.
Here’s hoping the big boys with infinite resources, or the medium boys with some of it, treat the minor leagues as something of value. Until then, it’s the upstarts that rule the day.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Nate Silver is going gangbusters in blogging, and it’s a fun read. He talks about the latest Mets player fans can’t stand, Lastings Milledge. The interesting nugget is on how well he did on the road in the minor leagues (check out all those triples and home runs and also see how his teammates did. But, when he says:
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Thursday, December 21, 2006
Some insights into the development of young Dominican players.
(Hat tip: BTF)
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Rally does all the hard work, and we get to see the results.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. We need more hard workers like Jeff Sackmann.
The run value of a play is around 0.80 runs. I’ll post a clear illustration as to why this is so, in a few minutes.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
What happens when you take a guy who spends alot of time collecting and presenting data, and another guy who spends alot of time analyzing said data? You get great research, and potential for even more:
http://sonsofsamhorn.net/index.php?showtopic=12439
I will reiterate here what I said there:
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Monday, July 17, 2006
More great Edison-work being done here:
http://www.firstinning.com/articles/charts/
(Hat tip: studes)
One thing I would do is…
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