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Friday, July 13, 2007
Contact Rate by Pitch Type
Add yet another researcher to my hero list.
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Mixing pitches by leverage
This from Joe P. Sheehan is pretty cool too.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Not so Sweet Suites
Interesting article on the changing landscape of suites at sports stadiums. My favorite suite experience was at the Olympic Stadium, where the Expos had the ground-level enclosed area behind home plate (you can sit for a dinner while watching the game, or sit in the seats). Nicest guy was Vlad, who while on one-knee in the ondeck circle would turn his head around to let the kids (on camera day) take pictures of him with his big smile. Dude’s about to come to bat in 3 seconds, and he actually thinks about the kids 20 feet behind him before he goes to home plate.
Bunts, bunts, bunts
Dan Fox checks in with all things bunts. Let’s focus on this:
Median ERA?
There was a discussion on Baseball Fever about using median ERA, because one bad game can really kill you in ERA. I wrote the following:
Historical Win Probability Numbers
Thanks to Studes, I see that Jeff Sagarin has applied the Mills Brothers’ Player Win Average to the Retrosheet years, like here:
http://www.kiva.net/~jsagarin/mills/nl1987.htm
You can actually try to calculate Leverage Index too. For example, Steve Bedrosian had about 50,000 advancement points in 385 situations, or 130 points per situation. If you take say Mike Scott, he had 62 points per situation. Presuming that 60-65 is the standard number, then we can see that Bedrosian had an LI of around 2.0.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Where is the strike zone exactly?
Yet another in a long-series of great research pieces by John Walsh.
He points out to some obvious data quality issues like:
Michael Moore, Larry King, and CNN
Two out of three ain’t bad. I mostly love Michael Moore. I mostly respect Larry King’s professionalism. CNN.... well, I used to like them. Other than Anderson Cooper and Larry King, I tune them out. But, last night....
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Would you pay a non-free-agent free-agent money?
This happens in the NHL all the time. It’s really quite shocking. The latest recipient of this largesse is the NHL’s MVP, Sidney Crosby. Crosby is this generation’s Wayne or Mario. In his second season, at the age of 19, he was the league’s MVP.
The NHL has a rookie cap, meaning that for the first three years, a player caps out at 850,000$ per year for 3 years. (And there’s no signing bonuses either.) In the NHL, you become a free agent at the age of 27, or if you have 7 years under your belt. In Crosby’s case, that means playing just 5 more years. In short, something like A-Rod went through in Seattle.
The NHL cap is 20% of the team payroll cap, which is currently 50MM. Between the rookie cap and free agency, you have restricted free agency (meaning arbitration, or if some other team signs your player, you give up draft picks… topping out at four 1st rounders in the case of Sid). Crosby signed an extension of 5/45 (meaning 1 year of free agency has been bought out). This is a free-agent deal, for a guy who is still under the rookie cap. How does this make any sense? Crosby has no leverage.
Also note that the salary cap has been jumping like crazy each year, since the lockout. It started at 39MM, then jumped to 44MM, and now at 50MM. As you can see, the NHL is swimming in cash. If they keep increasing at say 5MM per year, the salary cap would go to 11MM next, 12MM after, 13MM, then 14MM. So Crosby, who as a free agent would have been able to sign single year 5yr deals totalling 65MM, or a 5yr next year at 60MM signs an extension for 5/45. So, he’s not getting the full free agent deal, but that’s awfully close for a guy with two years under his belt.
This causes problems for the rest of the league, since now Crosby can be used in arbitration for the elite players. And even if not, it sets the trend for other players to get near-free agent deals, and those deal will be used in arbitration. (Unless the arbitration process isn’t what I think it is.)
Monday, July 09, 2007
100% certainty
What happens if you take the best pitcher in baseball and give him only one pitch to throw (and that pitch is not Mo’s cutter)? That is, how much of pitching is the quality of the pitches and how much is the selection (mixing up) of the pitches? Unfortunately, no one is crazy enough to do that, to actually tell the batter that he’s going to throw nothing but fastballs. According to a sample at the ever-impressive USSM, we have something close. Felix Hernandex, a veteran pitcher already with unlimited potential (he’s 21 years, 3 months old !), throws 59% of his pitches for fastballs. But, if you look at his first 10 pitches in each game ("establishing his fastball"), he throws 84% fastballs. That is 3.6 SD from his mean, and is therefore highly significant. He’s not telling the batter what he’s doing, but he’s coming awfully close.
His season totals are: .277/.326/.421
His 1st inning totals are: .358/.404/.528
His pitch 1-25 totals are: .345/.383/.517
Friday, July 06, 2007
The real MLB HR record
A few years ago, I noted that Gordie Howe had 1071 North American Major League Professional Hockey goals. That’s NHL, WHA, regular season and post-season.
I was always irked that the WHA was treated as some sort of minor league, and even more, that the post-season is always discarded when it comes to career totals. When you have a superstar like Scott Niedermayer, contemplating retirement at age 33, who has already played 183 post-season games (17% of his regular season totals), those games count. And, if you are going to change their weight, change them UP to 2x or 3x or 5x and not DOWN to 0x!
Anyway, shortly after that, it was brought to the attention of Wayne Gretzky, and an article was written in The Hockey News. Wayne, who had the official regular-season NHL record from a few years earlier, ended his career with 1072 goals. Talk about a squeaker!
Babe Ruth has 729 HR, including his 15 post-season HR. They count, right? I mean, would you rather count them as ZERO?
Hank Aaron goes from 755 to the real 761.
Bonds? Goodbye to 751. He has 9 post-season HR. Say hello to Bonds at 760 MLB homeruns. Bonds needs ONE HR to tie the MLB record, and two to break it.
Note: I really don’t care what the official position of MLB, Elias or anyone else is.
(If you want to take this opportunity to discuss your take on PED, take it outside. This isn’t the place.)
Monday, July 02, 2007
Another article I have a problem with…
This time from a sabermetric web site. Where are their editors?
Sports Economic Papers
This was sent to me recently. I haven’t looked at any yet:
http://ideas.repec.org/s/spe/wpaper.html
Friday, June 29, 2007
Bad research by someone who probably should not be doing research
On ESPN.com, there is an article by Jayson Stark which, among other things, talks about a phenomenon known as “World Series Burnout.” I am not sure I have ever heard of it, but basically it postulates that pitchers who pitch in post-season play (I am not sure why only WS pitchers are inlcuded other than the fact that they had the opporunity to pitch more in the post-season) experience a dropoff in performance and innings pitched the next year, presumably due to extra stress on their arms (I guess). Now, I am not saying that this is not true (it could be I suppose), only that the evidence and conclusions presented by Stark are poor.
Sprint Ambassador
I was a Sprint Ambassador for six months. For those who don’t want to click the link, Sprint sent me a free phone with free premium services (including NFL mobile, that I never used) because I was recognized as a “top blogger”. I don’t know how they came to that determination, but I’m guessing there must be someone in the Sprint marketing department who must be really into sabermetrics. My wife and I were/are coincidentally actually already Sprint users for several years, so we’re predisposed to give them a favorable rating.
Anyway, the program itself, while a good initial idea, was poor in its execution. There really was no two-way communication. I wrote some comments once, and I got the feeling it went into the internet abyss. Plus, the phone had so many features, I didn’t really want to learn too much of a phone that I had to give up in 6 months. And even if let’s say I wanted to use all the services, I had no idea how much anything cost, since the bill was redirected to their marketing department. So, say I really like the services, and decided that, ok, I’ll join. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that I spent say 99$ a month? As it turns out, all we ended up doing was using our 3rd phone for pictures, MP3, and calling Canada while on the road. We weren’t going to give anyone else a phone number for 6 months, and we already had Sprint, so all we ended up doing is splitting the minutes over 3 phones instead of 2. I’d bet that out of all the bloggers, our phone use was dead last.
The presumption of Sprint is that their design team and focus groups created a fantastic product, and it was up to us, the bloggers, to spread the word. But, the phone and sevice, while good of what I used, was not the fantastic product that was Sprint’s presumption. In short, they didn’t use bloggers on the right product/service. They could have used us bloggers as a focus group, and set up a forum for us to blast away. That didn’t happen. What should Sprint do? Recontact all us bloggers, invite us to a forum, and ask us the best way to use bloggers. Sprint’s method of throwing things out and seeing what sticks is an act of cluelessness. A study requires controls and identifiable parameters.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Intentional Walks as Leadoff Hitter
One of the remarkable things about Tim Raines is how much he was intentionally walked. As a leadoff hitter, he was IBB a career total of 102 times, with a career high of 14 in 1987 (the year he missed the first month due to collusion, and actually batted 3rd often enough that he only started 58 games in leadoff!). From 1985 through 1988, he was IBB 43 times in the leadoff spot in 336 starts.
Here are 93 of those games (including multiple IBB games), thanks to Play Index. He actually had a stretch of 5 straight games with an IBB as the leadoff hitter of the game. I can’t tell if Raines is the career leader in the category of lifetime career IBB in the leadoff slot, but I’d sure bet on it.
Inferring Injuries
When you establish the true talent level of a player (or create a forecast, which is essentially the same thing), you want to know if he is healthy or not. And, if he’s not healthy, how unhealthy, and how persistent is his illness. So, you try to infer such things. If a player plays 159, 160, 154, 159, 161, 112 games, his OPS+ at any point in that stretch bottomed at 133, and the player is 27 years old at that point, we infer an injury. We don’t need to look more closely at the situation, though it could have been the case of someone even better usurping his playing time. You always have a certain uncertainty level. And if the player is 37 instead of 27, we may be more inclined to infer a longer rehab period. But, we still don’t know what kind of injury because the data doesn’t tell us much more.
John Walsh shows us the data for Curt Schilling. Now, we don’t need to infer if his performance was about balls falling in for a hit, or whether his true talent level was marketdly different. We remove that uncertainty level with the data. Depending on the nature of the illness, we’ll be able to either discount the data from this performance more, or place a greater premium on it. We’re always looking for the establishment of a new talent level, as opposed to randomness creating noise around the data. It’s data like this that we need.
And for MLB teams that are not doing this.... are you kidding me? What Walsh, Fox, Beamer, Sheehan, Appleman, et al are doing is the cutting edge of sabermetrics, the point where performance and scouting converge. This is the pot of gold that is being prospected.
***
Further research would go into the “mix” of pitches, and the “strategy” of pitches, based on the game state (inning, score, base, out) conditions… i.e., Leverage Index.
***
The data itself also has a certain amount of uncertainty, as can be easily seen with David Wells having a bunch of pitches being released from the wrong side of the mound (four feet from where it should be).
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Translating homeruns
Patriot gives us a good introduction on translating (rescaling) stats, focusing on the HR, which if you cut right to the chase is based on this:
New HR = HR/(PF*RPG)*9
In essence, Patriot is scaling it linearly to runs per game. So, 25 HR in a 2.5 RPG environment would scale to 50 HR in a 5.0 RPG environment. If we run the Markov calculator:
http://www.tangotiger.net/markov.html , we see that 0.66 HR hit in a 2.5 RPG environment (set AB=51, or multiply all the default numbers by 27/41) would be equivalent to 1 HR in 5.0 RPG. (Note: the run value of a HR, while fairly stable, drops by about 5%.)
What if we go to win values instead? Using PythagenPat, the win value of a HR is .133 wins in a 5.0 RPG and .21 wins in a 2.5 RPG environment. That 1 HR in a 5 RPG environment is worth .133 wins. And, how many HR in a 2.5 RPG would be worth .133 wins? 0.63 HR.
As you can see, both approaches give a fairly similar number, and is a bit different from the 0.50 HR that Patriot would propose. However, I chose rather extreme environments, and perhaps in more realistic extreme environments, we won’t find such differences. Trying a 3.5 RPG environment, Markov gives the equivalency as 0.82 HR, and PythagenPat says 0.79 HR. Patriot’s approach would have said that 0.70 HR in a 3.5 RPG environment would translate to 1.00 HR in a 5.0 RPG environment.
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