THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I may be partial, but Harry Pavladis of Cubs F/X and Beyond the Boxscore is one of the best.

Er...Harry Pavlidis, I mean.

Yes, I would have mentioned his name, but I could not remember how to spell it.

...really? THAT Harry Pavlidis?

(I keed, I keed.)

Slyde at Red Reporter is making really cool hot zone graphs for hitters.

Here is a link:

http://www.redreporter.com/2009/3/23/801502/updated-hot-zone-graphs-no

Did he sign with a MLB team?  Seems weird to take off content if he did not.

Thanks, especially Colin.  He keeps mistaking me for the Australian actor.  I’m glad he’s learned the difference.

Re #6, Josh did indeed sign with a MLB team.  He’s made lasting contributions, which lessens the loss.  I’m honored to be one who makes you miss Josh each and every week, starting soon at THT.  Yes, as someone said recently, I am the new measure of the replacement level PFX analyst.

Like I said at Primer, I’m glad that I spent an evening recently reading Josh’s columsn and taking notes.  This is the essence of baseball, IMO; the batter-pitcher matchup.  He was starting to write some stuff about pitch sequencing that I thought was pretty interesting.

I keep forgetting to do the Captcha-esque thing at the bottom.

I made the rep-level joke on the THT mailing list. (And there’s a reason I started calling you Harry Pav.)

This is the essence of baseball, IMO; the batter-pitcher matchup.

You are being too kind in saying that it’s a matter of opinion. 

It is the essence of baseball.  The entire game revolves around this centrepiece.

Sorry, TT.  I have a tendency to qualify everything I say; likely because I’ve been wrong too many times in the past.

I’m not the most confident person.

Congrats to Josh, it would have been nice if was allowed to keep the old content up on his site, but that’s business. Maybe I should have gotten into pfx instead of park factors and mle’s...but one mlb team did tell me that my projections were ahead of anything they had at that time, so I can keep my fingers crossed.

Josh Kalk once put error bars on some of his graphs.  Error bars!

As someone who occasionally derides sabremetrics as “science without error bars” it made me smile.

I always thought the way he asked questions and presented his data was a cut above the other pitchf/xers (with all due respect to other folks who do a lot of great work too).

If I disappear, please contact my nearest of kin immediately.

Oh, and, whatever team is now paying Josh probably just made one of the best and cheapest investments in the history of their franchise.

My first reaction after seeing this was, “F***!” I loved reading Josh’s work, especially the more recent articles of the past few months.

There could be a pool for who gets snatched up next:

-Harry
-Mike Fast (unless he is already and I just don’t realize it)
-Dave Allen
Who else is doing this regularly?

Well, he can’t take all of it away.

Figure out what’s gone and hit the google cache for it. That should last a few months, so if you find something missing from the Kalk blog that was n’t generated by a script, you should be able to recover it and re-publish what you consider to be the gems under fair use.

I talked about this very subject with Mike Fast at last year’s PITCHf/x conference. Since he was my current favorite saber guy it was only a matter of time before he disappeared since Click and Fox were my previous two favs. So I was wrong since Josh was next to go.

But Mike has been laying low lately so I suspect he is already consulting.

Once Harry starts writing at THT then I would guess about 18 mos max before he gets snapped up.

But hey, at least I’ll know “people” in baseball.

And it is kind of cool in that these guys were doing what they loved and are now getting paid to do it at the highest level possible.

Josh is definitely a top analyst and the X will be glad they hired him.  I’m sad to see him go from the public research community.

I have been doing several consulting gigs over the last nine months, but I’m also doing some research for myself that I hope to publish occasionally.  My latest at THT on fly balls was the tip of the iceberg on that.  I’ve got stuff in the works on a ball-bat collision model.

I’m not particularly interested in working exclusively for a team at this time.  I like living in Austin and don’t want to move, and I also like the freedom to get feedback from the broader community on my work and to share some of my methods with others.

I agree with Mike on the preference for consulting.  It would have to be for major pay for me to sign an exclusive deal.  I much prefer the freedom otherwise.

I would be very happy to consult if a team were interested in me.  But I don’t think I could work directly for a team.  From what I understand the pay isn’t that good, and relocation would be next to impossible since I don’t think I could sell my house for an acceptable sum (guess that means only the Orioles or Nationals could hire me.)

As an employee I’d probably demand a 5 year, 500K guaranteed contract, and I’d worry that any team that met my price would have to be insane.

As a consultant I’d work for peanuts, though I would restrict myself from working for any team in direct competition with the Angels.

So far all I’ve been offered to do work for a team is goodwill. Which is nice, of course. But you can’t get a lot at Wal-Mart with goodwill.

Me too, CW.

Can you even get a lot at Goodwill with goodwill?

why is Sheehan mentioned?  how is he like Fox or Kalk?

There are two Joe Sheehans.

Tango comment #26 just exploded my head.

There was another Joe Sheehan years ago who was a NY Times sportswriter.  Chew on that!  I think that TT is typing about the swing mechanics guy.

The Joe Sheehan Tango referred to was a pitch fx guy who wrote at baseball analysts.  There was also a swing mechanics guy who wrote at baseball analysts, Jeff Albert.

That’s the bad thing about going inside… the new people won’t know about you, unless us outsiders keep you in the limelight.

This is Joe Sheehan’s work:
http://baseballanalysts.com/cat_commandpost.php

Were the NY Times Keeping Score pieces by Joe Sheehan not by BP’s Sheehan?

Kalk is pretty dumb if he thinks deleting posts from his blog will somehow keep all the information he previously shared hidden from other fans and teams.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071208071641/www.baseball.bornbybits.com/blog/blog.html

He might have been contractually obligated to do so by someone who does not understand Internet archiving.  That’s a simpler answer that being pretty dumb.

Archives sometimes disappear. Anything mentioned here probably will be purged in the not so distant future.

Everything in this blog will live on forever.