THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, June 23, 2008

Time Zone change and effect on performance

Phil looks at it on the team level.

Phil: do you count the Expos games as “home” or “away” when in P.R.?

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Streaks: Has the whole world lost its collective mind?

This is the headline and a snippet from an MLB article on the Tigers page from yesterday:
Tigers waiting for Cabrera to bust out

DETROIT—The Tigers’ new $153.3 million man has not lived up to expectations. But that’s not to say he won’t eventually.

Leyland apparently agrees with that sentiment.

I just looked at my current player database as of a few days ago, and Cabrera had a +33 per 150 park-neutral lwts.  What the hell are they talking about?

Friday, April 25, 2008

Three straights great games

Rany says:

Since 1956, do you know how many pitchers had made three straight starts with 8+ innings, <=3 hits, <=1 walk, and 8+ strikeouts?  Here's the list, which I have put in alphabetical order for your convenience:
Cliff Lee.
That's it.

I thought maybe his definition was too strict, that maybe I can loosen it up a bit.  After all, there have been many great back-to-back great games pitched.  But, not 3?  So, I asked B-r.com for pitchers with at least 8 innings and at most 4 baserunners.  I get back just 5 pitchers.  Lee, of course, Koufax and Fryman as Rany noted.  Plus Jaime Navarro and Tom Cheney.  Navarro managed to give up 3 runs on those 10 baserunners.  Bad luck, relatively speaking.  If I loosen it a bit more to at least 7 innings, Pedro in 2002 comes in with 4 straight games (no runs allowed), along with 3 in 2005 (4 runs allowed).  Lee has a total of 25 IP.  So, if you make it at least 7 innings per outing, and 25 IP in total, Lee is tied for 6th.

You can shake it up any way you like.  But, Lee has done something quite remarkable.  Good job on Rany.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Are Consistent Batters Easier to Project than Inconsistent Ones?

In another thread, where we were discussing Nate Silver’s (BP) interview on SOSH, I mentioned that I thought that the notion that players (like Pierre) who had consistent historical stats were “easier to project” was hooey.  I may have been dead wrong!  Check out this (admittedly incomplete) study I did the other day.  I am lost as to figuring out what is going on and why the results.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Baseball Prospectus and Sabermetrics

BP is one of the most notable and manistream sabermetric sites.  I happen to like it.  It has its weaknesses (don’t we all), but I think it is generally informative and valuable, if not occasionally groundbreaking.  I also think Pecota is one of the best and most innovative forecasting systems publically available.

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Hot Hand?  Cold Brain?

Slumps.

A major conclusion of the study, in fact, is that movement variability is not primarily a mechanical phenomenon, as had widely been thought. After looking at neural activity and muscle activity, the Stanford researchers concluded that less than half the reason for inconsistency in movement lies in the muscles.

Hat tip: Chuck

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Streaks

Dave at USSM recaps the Streaks chapter from The Book and applies it to the Mariners.  This is the kind of stuff I’d like to see, applications of findings in The Book to real-life scenarios.  I think if you were to poll the fans, and give them the cases of Ibanez and Vidro (each over 30, each a career 110 OPS+, each with a 2007 OPS+ of around 110):
- Ibanez: OPS of 1.571 from Aug 7 - 20, with 9 HR in 13 games
- Vidro: OPS of .941 from Jul 12 - Aug 20, .395 BA in 33 games
- Adam Jones: rookie, career OPS+ of 49 with 100 PA, 37th pick in 2003, #10 MLB prospect by Baseball America

They might think: Ibanez has achieved a new level of performance, Vidro has turned the corner and become what he was in Montreal, and Adam Jones still needs to learn the craft. 

As Dave said, “because of our own biases, we’d make more correct decisions if we had less data”, or as MGL said, “One of the running themes of this book is that, very frequently, fans and analysts make too much from too little”.

The only thing I’d be confidant to say is that Ibanez and Vidro are probably not injured.  Unless these guys made a fundamental change in their skills (and this has got to be rare, otherwise half of the 750 players will qualify), I doubt we’ve seen any real change here.  My guess is that the OPS of these two players will be around their career norms, from Aug 21 to the end of the season. 

Of course, I can’t pin my hopes on just two guys.  It would be more interesting to run a poll on blogs for all 30 teams, and see which players fans think has “turned it around”.  I’d bet most of them would revert to their careers norms the rest of the way.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Is Vladimir Streaky?

Buster Olney quoted a scout:

“He’s on the slide,” said one scout. “He’s turned into much more of a streak hitter than he used to be. It used to be that if you tried to pitch him inside and you didn’t bury the ball inside, he’d hit it good. Now you can get away with a little more, and I think it’s because there are days when his back doesn’t feel so good. He seems to go through periods where any tweak in his back affects his swing.”

Is this true?  Here’s what I did:

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Hits?  How about Times On Base

Instead of a batting streak focusing on hits, how about times on base (H+BB+HBP).  Personally, I’d also include RBOE.  Anyway, here’s Tim Raines.  A 42-game “on base” streak.  Wade Boggs? How about 57.  I don’t know if Joe D got a walk before or after his hit streak.  If he didn’t, maybe Wade Boggs has the real record?  Or, maybe Ted Williams?  Rickey Henderson got himself a 46-game streak.  Pete Rose got himself a 48, 46 and 41 game on-base streak.  Paul Molitor had a 39 and 38.  And perhaps the greatest fielding / worst hitting MLB player of my lifetime, Angel Salazar?  A 6-game streak.  All meaningless, but all lots of fun.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Winning Streaks

Dackle gives us some great research.  Suppose you have a team that went 0-10.  And in the 5-games preceding that 10-game run, they were .358.  What would you expect their record to be after the 10-game run?  And suppose you have a team that went 10-0, and in the 5 preceding games they were .610, what’s your expectation for the games following the streak?  In short, does the hot/cold hand continue, or will teams simply revert to their previously established levels?

Then, dackle also shows the record game-by-game, leading up to the runup.  In essence, when you are hot, you are hot… until you are not.  There’s no runup, there’s nothing for us to see that the run would start, nor that the run would stop.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Streaks

http://thehothand.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-didnt-think-2006-l.html

The probability of these four Dodgers putting together a string of four consecutive homers is thus:

.04 X .04 X .03 X .04 = .000002, or 1 in 500,000.

In MLB history…

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Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Greinke, Pitch by Pitch

I love this stuff:

http://minorleagueball.com/story/2006/8/21/104540/892

Sickels puts alot of work, presents his data well, and gives it to us.  If only there were more Sickels.  Anyway, let’s take a quick look here…

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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Hot Hand

We all know about The Hot Hand.  But, would you bet on it?

http://people.ucsc.edu/~rgil/world_cup.pdf

Because these games are televised, all traders have virtually simultaneous access to new information in the form of goals, and it is also observable to the econometrician.

See commentary by Phil Birnbaum

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Adrian Beltre, Unlucky or Just Not That Good?

A second USS Mariner-inspired blog entry.  Dave presents some numbers for our amusement.

http://ussmariner.com/2006/07/23/fun-with-numbers/

The interesting set of numbers are these:

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Thursday, July 06, 2006

A great short term streak

Tim Marchman brought up the case of Reyes’ performance being so incredible that we are left to conclude that he must be the real deal.  What follows is what I initially thought, and it was followed by Andy’s more rigid work.

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Monday, June 26, 2006

Matt Clement, Bad or Unlucky?

Protrade, which embraces sabermetrics in its game, looks at Matt Clement, and sees a pitcher who is unlucky, rather than bad. 

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