THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

If anyone wants to predict the “streakiness” of any player, I’ll gladly bet them on that…

Funny how the title of the book and its opening line both describe Ibanez’s season fairly well.

The only thing I’d quibble with is the argument that Raul is having a “career year.” He is having a very typical Raul Ibanez year.  According to Fangraphs, the entire difference between this year and the majority of his seasons as a regular in KC and Seattle is that he hasn’t DH’d and his fielding statistics have gone from absolutely atrocious to meh.  His batting line is indistinguishable from 2002, 2006 or 2008.

I’m not sure how you figure that Brian.  His wOBA this year is 30 points higher than in his 3 previous years.

I’m looking at his WAR and his RAR.  Even the 30 point differential in wOBA is in the same general ballpark.

1) Going by WAR, this is his career year.
2) The season isn’t over yet, so his 3.0 WAR will presumably go up if he performs to expectations.
3) It was a throwaway line, it’s not worth arguing about any further.

Raul has been a replacement level player since the steroid brouhaha because the attention scared him off the juice!

Sounds like someone’s gunning for a stern lecture from Professor of Ethics Ken Rosenthal.

you’d kind of expect his wOBA to go up hitting in citizens.

Sorry to carry on about this (since Dan’s right that it has nothing to do with the point of the article), but I would be careful saying he’s having a career year at the plate because his wOBA is up .030 points.  Moving from Safeco to CBP (as well as to the NL) likely has a lot to do with that.  His wOBA will go up considerably under those conditions if he performs at the exact same level.  Looking at wOBA for Ibanez without at least doing a park adjustment makes it hard to compare this year to previous years for him.

Additionally, he’s got at least a couple hundred fewer PAs this season than he’s had in the past few years, and his wOBA is likely to come back down a bit as the year finishes (and if he had 700 PAs again, would probably come down even more).

On point, nice article.  I really like the point about the overreactions to Ibanez’s start and how drastically different perceptions would have been if he had simply flipped the first and second halves of his sample.