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Scouting
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Dave describes the changes in fastball speed for Verlander. Yesterday, Josh shows us the standard deviation of a pitcher’s fastball speed:
I thought the average would have been 1.0, but it is actually 1.35. That’s on a pitch-by-pitch basis. On a start-by-start basis, the spread will likely be less than 0.5 standard deviations. If Verlander is really throwing 3 MPH different in two separate months, this is an enormous piece of information to have. Basically, we’ve got two Verlanders.
The question to ask: how transient is the lower fastball speed? Is it like a weather pattern, like a tornado, that would basically be random, and therefore, we don’t expect for the tornado to reappear at the same spot. Or say like lightning hitting the same spot twice. Or, could this possible recur, and therefore, we need to give say 90% weight to Verlander-we-know and 10% for the Verlander-who-sucks.
In similar spirit, but not as dramatic, is the drop in fastball speed of Barry Zito between 2005 and 2007: 2.8 mph in two years. That’s fairly sizeable. So, when you see his FIP go from 4.34 to 4.82, that is more “real” than someone else who had the same drop in FIP, but who did not have a change in fastball speeds.
Remember, all performance data really is a manifestation of the context and the talent level of the player. We are inferring the talent level of the player after understanding the environment in which he plays. We are presuming that the change in talent level of any given player follows the same pattern as any other player, if we don’t know any better.
But, we now know better. We know that something drastic changed in Verlander and Zito. We don’t know why it changed. We don’t know how persistent or transient it is. We don’t know if it’s a shift like global warming, or a blip like a bolt of lightning. All of these numbers we have, the tools numbers, like fastball speed, and curveball movements, are themselves just a manifestation of the core to the player: how strong, smart, and coordinated he is. That is, we infer from the fastball speed and curve movements certain things about the player.
It all comes down to tools. If we were god-like, we wouldn’t need to know about any performance results. That’s what scouting is all about: how god-like can we be in establishing a person’s core true talent, and how much do we need to infer based on the performance results, either at the toolsy-level (fastball speed, bat speed) or at the results-level (BB/PA, BABIP)?
The inference at the results-level gets us most of the way there. But, in some cases, like Verlander and Zito, it may fail us. So, we need to get down to the toolsy-level. And in even smaller cases, we need to get down to the core level (like Ankiel).
Monday, April 14, 2008
Rally and Sal talk about fastball speeds, and what they can tell us. I wrote on ballhype:
Age and injuries would be the biggest cause of a dropoff. I would guess that if you looked at pitchers only in their 20s, the fastball in 2006 would be almost identical to his 2007. Can you confirm? Simply put, you need an age parameter. I’d also love to see it for the other pitch types. And the “split” in pitches thrown (% of pitches that are fastballs, etc). Lots of great stuff here.
And in Rally’s study, selection bias will certainly play a part here (prospects who lose their fastball speeds are much less likely to get any playing time in MLB, thereby restricting our sample pool).
Sunday, March 23, 2008
By , 05:10 AM
Granted, it was not a formal survey, but shouldn’t scouts be able to do a MUCH better job than this? I mean, can’t your Dad or you uncle have done as good a job as the scouts in choosing these players? You can argue that the various defensive metrics quoted do NOT accurately represent the players’ true defensive value (yeah, right), but you can’t argue with the other metrics, like baserunning, basestealing, and bunting. The metrics discussed in this article DEFINE a player’s value in that area. Seriously, does/should any GM/team pay ANY attention to what scouts think of a player’s defense, arm, bunting, speed, baserunning, basestealing, etc., as in this list?
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Here’s the yapping, and here’s the lists.
No Adam Everett. And YuBet gets the love, but a year too late according to Mariner fans.
(Hat tip: Repoz.)
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Ugh:
Shame on the scout, who doesn’t use whatever stats he’s got available to help him formulate his total opinion of a player.
I do not want my scout looking at any stats. None at all. I’ve got the stats. Why do I need a scout to look at them too? It’ll simply bias his observations. (As Theo Epstein put it, scouts and stats are two lenses of glasses.) The scouts provide the observational aspect of what the player is doing, the inputs. The stats provide the outputs. The sabermetrician will merge the two, to get a cool pair of glasses. And the more outputs he has, he bigger that lens will get (and the less outputs, the smaller the lens).
Shame on the scout? No. Good for the scout.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Greg is right on. Good article, and is an excellent intro to his fantastic piece in the THT08 Annual. Along with Walsh’s article, these two articles are worth the price of the book by themselves.
I’ve long said that the pinnacle of sabermetrics will be the convergence of Performance Analysis and Scouting Observations. PITCHf/x and HITf/x are FIELDf/x will be front and center at this revolution. Thank you Sportvision: you will enter the Sabermetrics Hall of Fame.
Question to MGL: can you tell us how STATS codes these two plays that Greg references? And, if Appleman is around, how did BIS code those two plays?
I will disagree with Greg about only knowing the speed off ball (SOB) as not being good enough. If STATS and BIS correctly labelled the location of these plays, and if you have the SOB, and the angle off the bat, that would go a long way to tell you how fast the ball got there. It would be more helpful if you knew how many hops as well.
Friday, February 15, 2008
What baseball is all about.
(Hat tip: Batter’s Box.)
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I closed off balloting for 2007, and incorporated all the ballots, around 1900 of them, which is sensational as far as I’m concerned. The Internet Baseball Awards gets around that many ballots, and there’s much less to fill out. I’m really thankful that so many people dedicate so much time to filling these out. They are not only useful in terms of assessing players overall, and component-wise, they will also have historical value. In 20 years, half the people won’t know about Endy Chavez or Ryan Braun’s fielding, but they will now. One MLB team even told me that they were able to verify the results against their own scouts and came away fairly impressed. There’s definitely a certain amount of value here.
I’ve got a main page that has links to all 5 years. Soon, I’ll work on merging all the results so that each player will have his own 5-year page. See you in August for the 2008 edition.
Monday, January 28, 2008
John Walsh gives the Fans’ Scouting Report a once and twice over to see how well the Fans line up to his OF Arms system. Great job by John, and I’d love for someone to take on the Fans’ Speed numbers against their own Speed Score system.
One very tiny note: in the “Most underrated arms”, John shows Cuddyer and Francoeur, even though they ranked extremely high by the Fans. The trend line that John uses tops out at around +5 runs. Since these players were at +10 or +11 runs using John’s system, they had no hope but to be “underrated”. That’s just a very tiny observation, though, and is not a criticism. Otherwise, great work overall. Just the kind of thing that needs to be done.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Here you go. Ichiro is #1, once again. My goto guy is always Derek Jeter, as I’m interested in his comps. You will note one common name from last year is Michael Young. Both of these overrated players finally took a tumble among the Fans, so that they are now considered, officially, as below average fielding shortstops by their respective fanbases. It took a while, but the fans finally took notice. Troy Tulowitzki is the find of the year, this year. Of course, now that he’s in the playoffs, the surprise is gone. But, it definitely gives his UZR and other PBP stats much greater weight. Other big finds are Felix Pie and Shane Victorino. And every year, Manny always comes out smelling the same.
(Tech note: you can change the URL from “2007” to “2006” to flip between years.)
Monday, September 24, 2007
Here are some category results. The “All” is the simple average of the 7 traits (50 is average, 70+ is excellent, 30- is terrible).
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Monday, November 20, 2006
Someone asked me if I would run a pitcher scouting report. A little background first…
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Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Dial’s ZR hated Jose Reyes early in his career, and now it thinks he’s great. The data’s just not good enough - yet - to take one year of defensive performance and use it to evaluate a player’s defensive abilities.
-- David Cameron
To be fair, most mets fans i know think reyes has actually gotten a lot better, not that he wasn’t measured properly in prior years.
-- Kyle S
What to make of this?
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Monday, October 16, 2006
Placido Polanco is a league average hitter. He is on the other hand, an excellent fielding infielder. Derek Jeter is a wonderful offensive player. He is on the other hand, at best, an average-fielding infielder, and likely a below-average-fielding infielder. Which one do you want?
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Darin Erstad switched from CF to 1B back to CF. There is no more unusual position switch than going between CF and 1B, other than catcher. How did the fans evaluate Erstad, year-to-year?
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Zimmerman is one of those “finds” (or more like a stamp of approval) from the Fans’ Scouting Report. Before the season started, this is what was being written about him:
Jim Bowden doled out after he was drafted, saying Zimmerman had defensive ability comparable to the all-time greats at third base, to Brooks Robinson and Mike Schmidt and Scott Rolen, 32 Gold Gloves among them.
Now, you hear exaggerations all the time. However…
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Very. Here’s the evidence, using the Fans’ Scouting Report.
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Monday, August 21, 2006
UPDATE (Sep 19)
This is your last chance to vote, before the Globe Gloves are awarded at the end of the season. Voting has already surpassed last year’s total, but the more hardcore fans who contribute, the better.
INITIAL (AUG 21)
It’s the fourth annual fielding survey. I’m hoping for another great turnout this year. Please take a few moments, and participate!
http://www.tangotiger.net/scouting/
You can also check out the results for 2005. And if you have a blog, please, spread the word.
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