THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Yes, very nice job by BP. If anyone from BP is listening, it would be nice to have pitching and batting hands in the files!

He’s actually been doing this for several years.  Previously it was “hidden” on the main EQA page. 

A couple years ago I asked him in a chat why he had stopped updating it - I had forgotten where it was located - and he said something like - Oh no, it’s still there.

And so it was. I’ve been using it for at least the last couple of years.

This new found access is solely because they moved the link from within the EQA page to its own spot on the main stats page.  No clue why it took them so long to do so.

I was looking at the peak translations for SAL hitters the other day and noticed that Mike Stanton has a huge expected peak - 298/398/624 (331 EQA).

He was a young HS senior so he’s playing this year at age 18 and he has a pretty incredible 28 HRs in 376 AB to go a long with a 274/351/572 line.

The big red flag, howeever, is 125 Ks in those 376 AB.

I thought I recall that mgl’s minor to major translations pretty harshly penalized very high strikeout rate hitters.  Am I remembering that correctly?

And if so, does that great translation make sense or does it perhaps suggest that Clay isn’t handling high K hitters correctly?

You have to be careful with those peak projections since they are based on 2008 data only.

Yes that’s a good point, Phil.  I’ve thought about tracking players from year to year to see how dramatically players fluctate and if there’s anything that can be said about the pattern, but I’ve never done it.

But the one year only thing can cause some big shifts for players who change leagues and generate two peaks translations.  Someone on the Sox list posted these numbers for A ball catcher Luis Exposito.

His lo-A, SAL peak - 285/337/565 (295 EQA).

His Hi-A, CAL peak - 255/293/532 (270 EQA).

The first line is based on 191 AB and the second on 139 AB.

Obviously both are small samples, but the first line is a low level All Star and the second line works out to a pretty solid regular by EQA, but in this day and age you don’t see a lot of sub 300 OPBs coupled with 500+ SLGs.  I’d be shocked if Exposito would actually SLG enough to stay in the lineup with a 293 OBP.

So, yeah, how useful are these single line peaks if they really jump around that much for players who play in two different leagues?

I don’t do anything special with K rates for minor league players.  I simply take their K, S, D, T, HR, and BB+HP (and SB/CS) rates per PA and multiply them by a coefficient like .82 or whatever the historical data tell me is the “correct” translation.  I assume no cross-correlations or anything like that. I don’t try and do any kind of career projections or anything like that either. I simply take the raw minor league stats, park and league adjust them and then “convert” them to major league equivalencies on a per PA basis using, as I said, coefficients which are in the neighborhood of .6 to .9, depending on the stat.

My MLE calculator has Stanton currently at 279/333/609. 11.8% HR rate is excellent, but 57/294 bb/so is worrisome, suggesting poor stikezone judgement. Could go Brad Eldred. Only 477 PAs at this moment, another full year will give a more solid projection.