Filter posts by...
Scouting
Monday, September 29, 2008
I’m running the Fans Scouting Report for each player, giving him a valuation per position. Since speed matters little for a catcher, that component is underweighted if I put that player as catcher. Speed matters alot in CF, so I overweight that component. I simply put each player at each position, compare that to the position he played the most often this year (through games of Aug 20, 2008), and give you the list:
Read More
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Poz takes the Tampa writers to task about Bartlett. I noted the following:
From 2003-07, among the 45 SS with the most games, Bartlett’s UZR puts him 5th overall. #1 by far is Adam Everett, and then it’s a tight race between #2 through #7.
From 2006-08, he is #5 in Dewan’s Plus/Minus. #1 by far is Everett.
In the 2008 Fans’ Scouting Report, among the 30 SS with the most games, Bartlett ranks 3rd.
Whatever misgivings you can rightfully have of Bartlett should not carry over to his fielding.
Depodesta:
So, there we sit discussing the skills of a highly qualified and tested group where the distinction between players is very, very thin. However, what becomes clear is that for the players we want to keep in big league camp, we generally talk about what they can do. For the players we want to send down, we tend to focus on what they can’t do, so the decisions seem obvious (which they’re not). Understand, I keep using “we” because every one of us in the room is guilty - we can’t help ourselves!
Later on, someone commented on how Jeter is such an example, to which I replied:
Read More
Friday, September 19, 2008
Who are better fielders today: 2B or 3B?
I’m looking at the Fans’ Scouting Report, and looking to see who fans are more impressed with on their team between second basemen and third basemen.
Here are the teams that the Fans highly prefer their 3B to their 2B, with the glove:
Read More
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Endy Chavez is one of our generations best fielding outfielders. He also happens to throw lefthanded. Frank Thomas is one of our generations worst fielding infielders. He’s a righty. If you were to put each of them at shortstop, who would fare better? Whatever extra time it takes for Endy to set himself to throw is less than whatever time it takes for Thomas to get to the ball (if he can even manage to get to the ball in the first place). But, this one is easy.
The question is how much does being a lefty disadvantage Endy? How many plays does it cost him? If the difference between Adam Everett (pre-injury) and Frank Thomas playing shortstop is say an extra 100 plays made, and an average shortstop and Frank Thomas is 70 plays made, where does the lefthanded Endy Chavez fall in this continuum? Would he fare better or worse than putting Rickie Weeks at SS? Better or worse than putting Ryan Braun there? Take the worst-fielding 2B or 3B in baseball, and put him at shortstop. Say this player makes 40 plays more than Frank Thomas at shortstop. Is Endy better or worse than that guy?
The question therefore is: how many plays do you think being lefthanded costs an otherwise fantastic fielder? (My question is NOT whether a manager will ever do it.)
See, we can come to a reasonable agreement as to how many runs speed is worth, anticipation is worth, arm strength, accuracy, catching a ball, etc. I’m wondering how well can we agree on the throwing hand of an infielder.
Bonus: In the early days of baseball, I suppose when Frank Thomas-likes were more than an option, they did resort to lefthanded shortstops. Here are 42 of the 43:
Read More
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Some results, after the jump…
Read More
Friday, September 12, 2008
I just wanted to highlight that Joe Posnanski put up a link to the Fans’ Scouting Report. Hopefully, others in the mainstream with hardcore fans like Joe has can follow his lead.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I have an article up at Hardball Times, comparing the results of Mariner fans to Dave Cameron.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
It’s the 6th Annual Fans’ Scouting Report.
Every year, I get a jump in participation, from the first year where I had close to 500 ballots, to last year where it exceeded 2000 ballots. If you’ve enjoyed my blog, appreciated my work, or somehow wondered what you could do in return, this is it. All I ask from you is 5-10 minutes of your time, and we’ll call it even. And, if you have a blog, please, spread the word.
I am extremely grateful to all those who take a few minutes out of their lives to share their observations with the rest of the fans. Your contributions exceed whatever you think it may be worth. As we continue to build upon the past reports, this data now begins to take on historical value.
I know only of gushing reports about the fielding of Paul Blair. Mickey Stanley sounds like some cross between Darin Erstad and Endy Chavez. That is based on the writings of the generation that preceded me. In my generation, I can only attest to the fielding prowess of Gary Pettis. The new generation knows as little about Pettis, as I know of Blair and Stanley. When the next generation comes along, I want to be able to point them to the Fans Scouting Report as the contemporaneous view of the fielding talents of Ichiro and Rolen. And Manny and Dunn. We can breathe life into their fielding accomplishments.
Thank you for your invaluable time.
Tom
Read More
Sunday, July 27, 2008
By , 09:29 PM
I am watching Ponson pitch tonight. He is getting shelled. He throws a decent 92-93 mph fastball and a decent curve ball. About the only thing he appears to be lacking is another pitch. However, there are more than a few starters who are successful with primarily two pitches, although you would like to have more.
If you look at Ponson’s numbers, whether it be ERC, FIP, or even regular ERA, he has been terrible for several years. I mean terrible. Like he should be nowhere near a major league ball field.
Yet, the Yankees, a supposedly smart team, sign him to pitch every 5 days. STL signed him 2 years ago, even though I told them he was horrible (not that it wasn’t obvious). They eventually realized how bad he was and released him. MIN signed him last year.
What is up with that? What are scouts seeing? Can you really see anything as a scout that you can’t see in the stats with over 5 years of data? Apparently not.
I really think that you can easily see, as a scout or even as a regular informed fan, whether a pitcher has very good stuff or terrible stuff, although there are very few major leaguers with terrible stuff I think. Maybe none. Yet, there are quite a few pitchers who have decent stuff like Ponson, but if you look at their stats, you can see that they are horrible.
I don’t understand why pitchers like Ponson continue to pitch in the majors and teams continue to sign this guy (and guys like him). What do the scouts say that contradict the numbers, and do teams need scouting like that? If your scouts tell you to sign a pitcher like Ponson, shouldn’t they immediately be fired. Shouldn’t a smart scout say something like, “Well, he looks like he still has decent stuff, but from the numbers over the past 5 years, he is obviously terrible, so I guess there is something that I just can’t see that makes him a bad pitcher.”
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.
from Amazon
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 70 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date