Filed under: Awards, Baseball Statistics, MLB | Tags: Brewers, Chase Utley, David Wright, Guillermo Mota, Hanley Ramirez, Jimmy Rollins, Johnny Estrada, Matt Holliday, Mets., Omar Minaya, VORP
Yesterday, I made a post about how silly some of the voters for the AL MVP award were.
Today, we learned that Jimmy Rollins won, and the complaints of yesterday quickly faded away to a new set of complaints.
For example: Jimmy Rollins? He had a great season, sure, but really. His numbers were inflated by Citizen’s Bank Park. His team just barely beat the Mets. David Wright’s play was just as deserving of an MVP award as Jimmy Rollins. You could justify it by saying that the Phillies got into the playoffs, but it’s not Wright’s fault that the Mets didn’t get into the playoffs. According to VORP, Wright was second in the NL behind Hanley Ramirez, who’s team clearly was not close to the playoffs.
Meanwhile, J-Roll was ninth in the NL in VORP. Heck, even teammate Chase Utley had a higher VORP than him.
Both J-Roll and Wright play excellent defense, though J-Roll does it at a more difficult position. However, though they had similar numbers, Wright made nearly 100 less outs in a similar number of at-bats, and his OBP was far higher than that of J-Roll.
However, this year the writers were looking for a good story. What’s surprising is that they found it in J-Roll, when there was such an obvious feel-good story in Matt Holliday. He was fourth in the NL in VORP. His numbers may have been inflated by the Coors effect, but he was clutch and was a key to the Rockies getting to the playoffs. I fully expected him to get all the votes; he was far more deserving than J-Roll.
Thankfully, Holliday got second place by a very close margin, so most of the writers agreed with me, but it’s still disappointing to see him fall second. He may never have another season like this again.
In other news, the Brewers traded Johnny Estrada to the Mets for Guillermo Mota. And boy, did Omar Minaya screw the Brewers over and get exactly what he wanted. Find a catcher? Check. Make sure it’s a short commitment? Check (Estrada is under contract for one season). Lose Guillermo Mota? Check.Omar Minaya, for any faults he might have when it comes to getting prospects into his system, is a shrewd GM. He made a great move here.
Filed under: Baseball Statistics | Tags: BABIP, Baseball Prospectus, Brandon Webb, Chien-Ming Wang, derek jeter, Fausto Carmona, Ichiro Suzuki, Ichiro!, Jack Cust, jorge posada, Pdero Martinez, Pedro Feliz
I’d just like to make a comment on BABIP. BABIP, or batting average on balls in play, is a measure that was discovered a few years ago by a writer on Baseball Prospectus. He discovered with a bit of research that BABIP varies a lot for all pitchers, great ones, or not so great ones. The difference he discovered between the great pitchers and the not-as-great pitchers was that the great ones struck out more batters, walked less batters, and gave up less home runs. Good pitchers are able to compensate for a high BABIP, or some bad luck, by striking out more batters, walking less batters, and giving up less homers. That’s what made Pedro Martinez so good. In addition to coining the term BABIP, he coined the term “peripheral stats”, which are stats like K/9, BB/9, and HR/9, which indicate how well a pitcher should be able to compensate for BABIP. This lead to the creation of peripheral ERA, or ERAp. This was a stat that indicated how well we should have expected a pitcher to perform given an average BABIP. (more…)
I found the articles with the data I was looking for:
In Theory, Diamondbacks Are Winning Way Too Often (New York Times – Dan Rosenheck)
No Mirage in Arizona (The Hardball Times – Chris Jaffe)
This is a small sample of data and it could be luck. But the point is, there does appear to be a reason for their overperforming their Pythagorean record.
And, the point still stands: A whole seasons worth of run differential and statistics should be thrown out the door come October – the D-Backs, if they catch fire, could do just as well as anyone else in the playoffs.
TwentySeven
Hey, TwentySeven here. I’d just like to respond to Red’s last post.
The Diamondbacks actually haven’t been as lucky as it seems, to be honest. Part of the reason why their run-differential is so bad is actually because their bullpen is so polarizing. I don’t have a link to put up, but I know someone at The Hardball Times did an article about this very topic and showed that when the Diamondbacks start losing, they put in their worst relievers, who are ridiculously bad, but when they are winning, they put in their elite relievers (i.e. Jose Valverde & co.) and they don’t give up a lot of runs. It hurts their run differential. They are a good team.
Besides of which, just because they are theoretically a bad team, it doesn’tmean that they couldn’t take it all. A bad run differential might mean that you could expect a seasonal regression, but certainly not a regression over a few playoff games.
-TwentySeven
Filed under: Baseball Scouting, Baseball Statistics, Baseball Strategy, Mike Pagliarulo, Mindless Twits, New York Yankees | Tags: Blue Jays, Mike Pagliarulo, Yankees
This article was one I found after I posted before, and I thought that this was as ridiculous, if not more, than the other…
As the New York Yankees begin an all-important four-game series with the Toronto Blue Jays today, let’s take a look at how individual Blue Jays pitchers have fared against the Yankees. Yes, it’s a small sample size, so individually it’s difficult to read too much into these stats. But, collectively, we see a trend. Let’s go behind the stats and understand them.
The Yankees are a great offensive team. They lead the majors in team runs, batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Yet within this dominance, there are weaknesses.
The Yankees are an aggressive low ball hitting club, especially their power bats A-Rod, Giambi, Cano, and Abreu. And, they are an excellent off-speed hitting team, led by their captain Jeter, Damon, and Matsui. It’s not a surprise then, that when the Yankees play against “command” types who throw a lot of offspeed pitches, they can run up the score. On the other hand, the Yankees are susceptible to hard throwers. Looking at the Blue Jays pitching stats from 2007 (diagram above [look on the actual link]) versus the Yankees, you’ll see that generally the pitchers who have done well are those with above average fastballs. Those pitchers are highlighted.
Given that the Blue Jays will be throwing three pitchers (Burnett, Hallady and McGowan) with plus fastballs against the Yankees, and only one command guy this series (Marcum), look for the Yankees offense to be mitigated.
Again, in the last paragraph they call him Hallady instead of Halladay. Copy editing, please.
So… A.J. Burnett, Roy Halladay, Dustin McGowan, Jason Frasor, and Jeremy Accardo have all been good against the Yankees? And, this can somehow be explained because they have plus fastballs? Damn! It’s genius!
Maybe this is just me, but don’t most teams have trouble against pitchers with good fastballs?
But the general idiocy of this is that those are all good pitchers. Sure, the Yankees have trouble with them, but maybe that’s just because they’re good. Take a look at their stat lines:
A.J. Burnett: 153.3 IP, 9-7, 3.40 ERA, 136 ERA+
Jeremy Accardo: 65.3 IP, 28 SV, 2.20 ERA, 210 ERA+
Jason Frasor: 54.7 IP, 3 SV, 4.28 ERA, 108 ERA+
Roy Halladay: 218.3 IP, 15-7, 3.71 ERA, 125 ERA+
Dustin McGowan: 159.3 IP, 11-9, 3.84 ERA, 121 ERA+
The irony is that the post is title, ‘Using and Understanding Stats’. It’s kind of sad, really. If the people on this site stuck to just scouting, and only focused on the main elements, i.e., what pitches so-and-so throws, or where in the zone certain batters can hit well, it would be a great blog. But no, they have to go into the ’stats’ that aren’t really stats and they have to try to actually provide analysis.
TwentySeven here! I liked my post the other day about Phil Hughes, the format specifically. So, I’m proud to present you with:
The Top Ten Reasons why the Colorado Rockies Will Be Serious Contenders in ‘08
10. The NL West is a mediocre division. Sure, it’s not NL Central territory, but there are no real powerhouses in the division and the only really bad team in there are the Giants.
(more…)
Filed under: Baseball Scouting, Baseball Statistics, New York Yankees, Player Draft
Hi all, TwentySeven in today with a few minutes of spare time! Yay! So anyways, I was thinking it might be interesting to talk a bit about some ways to analyze players and stats.
First the word on scouting. One thing you have to consider that isn’t always considered is whether the “name value” of a player is making him look better. Recently, I watched Jeff Samardzija pitch for the Cubs in the minors, and I’d been watching a couple of starts. He wasn’t all that bad, but he wasn’t great either. If I had been less talented, I might have said, “Oh, he’s Jeff Samardzija so I’m probably just looking for the wrong thing”. But the truth is, most of us can recognize a pretty decent pitcher. What you need to say is “If I didn’t know the name of this guy, would he be all that impressive? Would I ask myself, ‘Who is this?’?”… That sort of thing. It’s really good to put it in perspective.
Now, for stats. An important thing to recognize is what the stat is actually measuring, and what actual value the stat holds. For example, recently my friend made some bizarre statistic like “Average pitches in an at-bat per strikeout divided homers” or something weird like that and said, “And Sean Casey is the leader in the majors, so he’s really more valuable then anyone recognizes. I think he should bounce back over the next year.”
Really? What does that stat really mean? What are you measuring? That ridiculous stat that I made up just now because I don’t remember what my friend said really doesn’t measure anything at all. Just because you got it by multiplying baseball stats, doesn’t mean it measures anything valuable.
In addition, you need to consider the actual value of the stat. For example, consider the strikeout. You might say that some minor leaguer is really good because he never strikes out, and his strikeout/at-bat ratio is 0.001 or whatever. Because, the truth is that strikeouts really aren’t all that bad. For that matter, players who rarely strike out are often sacrificing other, more important, stats for their strikeout prevention. This season, the players who are striking out the least include Placido Polanco, Juan Pierre, Luis Castillo, Paul Lo Duca, Kenji Johjima, Dustin Pedroia, Jason Kendall, and Casey Kotchman. Of those, Pedroia, Kotchman, and Polanco have been good hitters and Johjima has been decent for his position. Pierre, Castillo, Kendall, and Lo Duca, have all been pretty poor hitters. Just think about it.
By the way, this info on strikeouts really leads into what I plan to write about next – strikeouts and walks. I want to look at correlations between them, the actual negative value of a strikeout (which I suspect is really low compared to what people typically say), that sort of thing. Cheers!
Finally, I want to talk a bit about a new rule that MLB has instituted for the draft which I suspect really harms teams like the Yankees and Red Sox who are high salary, high wins, draft at the end of the round.
The new rule says that if a team doesn’t sign a pick, the next year they get the following pick in the draft as compensation. If Team A drafts 1st overall and doesn’t sign their first pick, the next year they get the second overall pick. This rule is intended to give the teams more leverage against guys like Scott Boras and also is supposed to make the bonuses given to players more in line with what the MLB recommends. Unfortunately, this creates a dilemma for teams at the end of the round for two reasons. For one thing, teams that are consistently among the top winners are also consistently at the end of the draft, which means that the overall talent of their drafts will get worse and worse as more and more compensation picks come up at the beginning of the round.
In addition, it actually lowers the team’s leverage for signability draft picks. The way the rule is intended to work is that if a player has huge demands, the team can just say, “Well we won’t sign you and next year we will just draft a player of equal talent”. Unfortunately, players who fall in the draft (like Rick Porcello did this year) due to signability issues, will get a huge advantage in leverage. Rick Porcello was expected to be a top-three pick until he picked Scott Boras as his agent, which made him fall to pick number 27 for the Tigers. You would think that the new rule means that he would have less leverage. Unfortunately, the Tigers aren’t likely to find a player as good as Porcello is next year with the 28th pick. So, the Tigers had less leverage and thus had to give Porcello a bigger contract. Hence the tie for the record contract for a high school pitcher.
Bud Selig has good intentions, but he fails miserably.
-TwentySeven
Filed under: Baseball Statistics
The Fallen Phoenix here, and it’s time for my first blog post–which is either going to be rather exciting or rather anticlimactic, depending on your point of view.
I’m opting for the latter. (more…)
