THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Plausible deniability of circumventing caps

Dave links to a Baseball America article on this issue of international signings.

Friday, May 04, 2012

Farm system rankings correlating to future wins

Matt goes through the Baseball America rankings, and see how many wins are generated by pre-free agents.  Good stuff.

MLB formally partnering with a feeder system

Since college baseball is akin to a minor league, it seems natural for MLB to finally be involved.

But, wouldn’t it be weird if the Dodgers draft a high school kid, and then that kid decided to go to Stanford, on an MLB scholarship (partially paid for by the Dodgers)?  Will this setup potential conflicts of interest, or at the very least, appearance of such?

I’d think, therefore, that if MLB is going to donate say one hundred scholarships, then the top high-school draft picks would get some sort of preferential treatment.  (Presuming there’s some sort of point-system in awarding scholarships, then the higher you are drafted, the more points you earn.)

Educate me as to how the current scholarships are awarded.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Pitching Rule 5 picks in high-leverage situations

Truly, there is no idea that a passionate baseball fan/historian/analyst won’t consider, and this is yet another example of one of them.  A fan rolling up his sleeves, manually compiling Rule V players, and then finding out any high-leverage outings in their Rule V season.  Well-done!

If I had my druthers, I’d get some venture capital firm to give me a million bucks, so I can dole it out a bit at a time to any researcher that shows initiative and inspiration.  This study, while trivial on the surface, shows a level of dedication that deserves to be rewarded so we can see more by the researcher in the future.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Dean Stotz

Great article by Eno about a college coach that uses stats.  The only quibble I have is about “low pitch-count innings” (because that’s a byproduct, not an objective).  Otherwise, great stuff throughout.

Friday, April 20, 2012

New bats lead to shorter distances

You can easily control the run environment of a ball game by controlling the configuration of the ball, bat, park, or strike zone.  We don’t need to look at PED as the primary culprit for anything (other than lazy reporting).

Monday, March 26, 2012

International draft issues

From Dan and Adam.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

How much should minor leaguers make?

Dirk Hayhurst talking with a teammate:

“Maybe I’m wrong for thinking this, but it makes me wonder why there is such a huge gap between the guys up here and the guys in the minors. I mean if you just spread out the smallest portion of all this to the guys below, it would make their lives so much easier, don’t you think?”

“That’s a terrible idea,” said Bentley.

Moments later, Bentley explains:

“This is the only level you can make an impact at. It’s the only one that matters—the only one people care about. All the rest of that stuff is just practice to get here.”

“But—“

“No buts.” He stopped me. “This is the only league that matters. Your career in baseball starts here.”

I don’t know how much money the minor leagues takes in.  If you figure about 10,000 home dates at 4000 people per game at 10$ per ticket, that’s 400MM$ for all the minor leaguers, some 8000 of them.  That’s 50,000$ of revenue generated per player.  Half of that to the players in salary, and that’s 25,000$. 

That’s why players get their signing bonuses when they are drafted, because that’s how they can make money (on their potential) before actually being called to MLB.  For the in-betweeners, guys who are not believed to have high potential and so are drafted low with a low signing bonus, and at the same time, also have a small chance of making MLB, those guys are going to get very little money for several years.

Presumably, this acts as an incentive to make them develop “better, stronger, faster”, like Lee Majors.

Let’s say you make the floor minor league salary 100,000$.  What would be the effect there?  Chances are, you have lots more competition, so alot of the bubble guys who would play for little money to begin with, get squeezed out by guys who are just as good, but would have otherwise chosen a profession of engineering or accounting or electrician.  Is this a good thing?  I don’t know.

I don’t know what the right answer is.  But whatever compensation system you derive will have some consequence, many expected (be it intended or unintended), and others that are unexpected.

What Dirk seems to be really saying is that the minor league players deserve some union, so someone can speak on their behalf.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Two players have the same stats: one is much younger.  Which one will be better next year?

Someone basically asks this question.

If we believe in humans learning and facing new environments, then it should be clear that we need to include the player’s age, relative to the age of his opponents, when forecasting.

I believe Brian/Oliver has specific translation numbers to this effect.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

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.”

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Can you walk off the island?

I’d like to see the BB and K rate for all leagues around the world.

It turns out that you can, in fact, walk off the island. The league-wide walk rate is a robust 8.3% against a 17.9% K rate. In this tiny sample that means marginally more walks and fewer Ks than the big leagues in 2011.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Farm system rankings

Courtesy of the one and only John Sickels.

Sunday, January 01, 2012

Ron Polk

Somewhere in this, I can easily find a common place to agree with Ron Polk.  Take for example:

Here are a few examples of the ‘math’ complaints and the ‘baseball’ answers: Why one point deducted for a strikeout swinging and two points deducted for a strike out looking? They’re both one out.: A perfectly legitimate math complaint, but the two strikeouts are different to ballplayers. With two strikes the hitters is expected to expand his zone, stop being picky and try to get the ball in play. A strike out looking does not give the hitter or his team a chance and is considered by many coaches to be bad baseball.

One way to think about this (and really, the way to think about EVERYTHING) is inference.  We don’t care about the results, when trying to figure out a player’s true talent level.  An out is NOT an out, when you think of his talent level. 

Now, is a caught looking strikeout somehow worse (or better) than a swinging strikeout?  Well, this is what we have to research.  What if most swinging strikeouts are on pitches outside the strikezone?  I have more faith in Tony Gwynn having a strikeout swinging than Andres Galarraga.  That is, a Tony Gwynn strikeout swinging is a better than for Big Cat, in terms of what it tells us about the hitters.  Indeed, maybe Big Cat needs to have more caught looking strikeouts, because he swings at so many pitches outside the strikezone with two strikes.

Anyway, there’s definitely legitimate viewpoints here, and it’s just a matter of trying to synthesize it into “truths”.

There is NO reason to argue here as if there’s a final opinion that is somehow some assumption of fact.  We are in the research and learning stage here.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Yu is: equal parts Felix, Zimmerman, Cueto

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.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

CBA: draft lottery

Fascinating, if not downright confusing.  I applaud the creativity here at least.  And you can see what it is they are trying to do.  But it feels more like a patchwork, the kind of thing you’d expect from changes to the tax code.  I’d expect the next CBA, or maybe the one after that, will have to streamline this whole process. Anyway, I like it.  I just don’t love it.

So, there’s a lottery for six teams from a group of 10-20 predetermined teams, and they get to pick just before the 2nd round.  And then another lottery of six more teams from the remaining group (plus more teams based on other criteria), and they pick right after the 2nd round.  Lottery picks can be traded, but not the regular picks.  (Obviously, a transitional-trial thing that will eventually lead to full trading.)

Finally, the interesting one.  We already know about paying above your pool allocation.  If Strasburg signed what he did, the Nationals would have not only paid around a 10MM$ fine, they’d also have to forfeit their first round picks in the next two seasons.  Forfeiture of those picks ALSO goes into a lottery.  I don’t know why they’d have to do that, instead of just moving everyone up 1.

And the whole lottery thing is all weighted based on some combination of winning percentage and market size, depending on which lottery we are talking about.

Like I said: love the creativity, like-not-love the implementation.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

At what point will baseball prospects leave baseball?

Matt makes the point that even with the draft pick cap limits, baseball prospects in high school will still choose baseball, because it’s the best game in town.  But, at what point would they actually start to leave?  How low a signing bonus would you have until baseball is shunned as an option?

The idea of “signing bonuses” is interesting, because that doesn’t exist in the NHL.  The reason you don’t need a signing bonus with NBA or NFL is that you are signing a major league contract right away and playing in the majors right away.  The NHL is setup like MLB, with minor leagues.  So, you are actually signing a two-way deal, like MLB would.

The NHL has a rookie cap at just under a million$, and is stuck there at 3 years (so the most you can sign is a 3 year 3MM$ deal from your draft, as long as you make it to the pros, with some bonuses, that used to be easy to attain, but they clamped down on that).  NHL 18-yr old prospects also have nowhere else to go.  There’s no such thing as a big-business college hockey, and the cost of education in Canada is far lower than it is in USA, so scholarships don’t have as much value.

So, signing bonuses exist in MLB as some sort of incentive to push you toward MLB, and away from college.  But the reality is that MLB can have no signing bonuses whatsoever, effectively making all the high school players choose college instead, and wait to draft players after college… and then have no signing bonuses at all… just like the NHL.

What would happen here?  Would Bryce Harper and the Upton boys choose football instead?  And when they graduate college, prefer NFL to MLB?

And even if all that did happen, how many players are we talking about?  1% of the star players?  5% even?  No one is going to notice that MLB doesn’t have all the best players in North America if 5% of them intentionally “pre-retire”.

So, why not simply do away with signing bonuses completely?

Let’s go even further.  We’ve established that a 1MM$ or 2MM$ signing bonus, or no signing bonus at all, will barely affect the talent pool eventually entering MLB.  What if the prospects themselves have to PAY TO GET INTO MLB?

If MLB provides access to so much future money to these players, and if these players really have nowhere else to go, how much would they be willing to pay to register to get drafted?  It’s no different from college, right?  I had to pay to go to school, as it was a gateway to getting a job in the real world.

What if MLB had baseball academies that you had to pay to get into?  (That is basically what each team’s minor league is.)

And you can go even further: what if a player, rather than paying, agrees to give up 50% of his first year salary (if he makes it that far), or 5% of his lifetime earnings?

Here’s my challenge to you: start with a clean slate.  Blow up everything you even thought of regarding MLB and its draft.  Explain to me the impact of having no signing bonuses at all (like NHL).  And explain to me the impact of making players pay (like NBA and NFL effectively are making them do by making them go to college).

Teach me.

CBA cap pool rules

I like the idea of having a pool of money for each team, based on where they draft.  But apparently, that pool of money is only for players you actually sign.

So, if you had 10MM$ allocated to you, and you only sign your #1 pick, but don’t sign your picks 2 through 10, then what you are actually allocated is only say 3MM$.  (Your allocation is based on where the player was selected, and if he signed.)

What’s the unintended consequence here?  Well, if you really really want a guy, and you are afraid he will go to college instead, you will intentionally tank the draft of picks 2 through 10, signing guys to 100,000$ deals, and taking the extra money allocated to those picks and putting them into your #1 pick.  So, you underslot picks 2 through 10 so you can overslot pick #1.

Now, the idea of underslotting and overslotting was always the idea here, so there was some wiggle room, but it wasn’t the idea that you would underslot to such an extent.

In the end, a team that makes a good-faith effort to draft a quality player that they can’t sign ends up losing the allocation money, but a team that makes a bad-faith effort to draft a subpar player that they do sign ends up gaining the remaining allocation money.

When you put in these kinds of artificial controls that goes against a free market, unintended consequences will rear its ugly head.

It’s sort of what Billy Beane was doing as detailed in Moneyball: drafting guys he knew he could sign.  So, if he knows he can’t sign the best player available at 3MM$, then he’ll go find a guy who will sign at 1MM$.  Every other team would have loved to get that guy at say 1.1MM$, but they’re still in the part of the draft where there are plenty of better players.  So, Beane gets assurances that the guy will sign for 1MM$ and drafts him in the first round.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Yu Darvish is Yu Darvish

And not anyone else that happens to be Japanese.  Presumably, we wouldn’t mistake Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson either.

Are slot bonuses like the speed limits on banks: warning only?

While the white speed limit signs are “regulatory”, the yellow speed limit signs are “warning”.  That is, if you go faster than the warning speed limit, you won’t get pulled over.  (At least, that’s how I think it works.)

It seems that Selig’s slot limits act the same way:

How much money each team spent in the first 10 rounds of the 2011 draft, and how that compares to its estimated slot allowance in those rounds from the commissioner’s office:

Basically, teams are paying 2.5 times the slot “recommendations”. 

Friday, October 14, 2011

Return on high school players drafted, by age

Rany:

(If you want the technical details: “Very Young” players were less than 17 years, 296 days old on draft day; “Young” players were between 17 years, 296 days and 18 years, 38 days; “Average” players were between 18 years, 38 days and 18 years, 120 days; “Old” players were between 18 years, 120 days and 18 years, 200 days; “Very Old” players were more than 18 years, 200 days old.)

I have a draft database with WAR all setup from my previous threads.  If I get a chance, I’ll try to perform some analysis as well.