Nail-Tinted Glasses

Pitch Counts

Joe Sheehan may have a valid thesis in his recent discussion of pitch counts, but his introductory example, maybe it needs some work.

1) Three run lead with one inning to play.
2) Pitcher due to bat with only one out, right in front of the top of the batting order
3) Which of course means that even if you pitch hitter flubs it, you are probably looking at the strongest part of your lineup appearing in the last of the ninth.
4) The spots due to bat in the top of the 9th are the 6-7-8 hitters.
5) And it's a Tuesday game; the team had Monday off, and the bullpen threw but three innings on Sunday, two innings on Saturday.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the case against pulling the starter is a bit too subtle to be accepted without the prosecution at least bringing out a few exhibits.

He's good, but he's no Willie Mays

Jay Bruce: 26AB, 15H, 3 doubles, 3 HR
Willie Mays: 26AB, 1H, 0 doubles, 1 HR

Lol-Bot: Invisible Magic Carpet

I say again

SNOOPY DANCE.

Boston vs Cleveland, Game 6

Was I the only one to see an older version of this kid in the stands at Fenway this evening?

Breaking: Blood Sox

This just in: forensics specialists have completed their tests of the famous 2004 sock, and have announced that the blood does not match that of Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. Preliminary reports contend that the blood was in fact lifted from French labs charged with investigating doping charges leveled against Lance Armstrong.

Developing....

So Swift Forgotten

Will Carroll: "Martinez is the type of player who remembers Curt Schilling’s bloody ankle start and would love to add that type of mythology to his resumé."

Sigh.

An Apology

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

With the Mets in town, the Redsox are hosting a reunion of the 1986 Team. I've got no problem with this - that was a damn fine team, and liked in this town. It had popular veterans, popular youth, a couple home grown Hall of Famers.

The celebration included a rewrite of the ending to the 1986 series. Williams Tiant Foxx?! Yo - the team won two years ago. Let it go, people!

Anyway, to any and all of those whom I have previously upbraided for accusing Sox fans of Wallowing in misery, I offer an unconditional apology.

I'd really like to blame this all on the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, but I can't muster the energy. Phagh

Roger Clemens and John Hancock

Wow.

Bob Halloran thinks Roger Clemens doesn't have a signature moment.

It's not that Halloran doesn't recall the 20K games (though he seems to have forgotten that Roger pitched both games without walking anyone). It's just that those don't count.

The playoff one hitter? Nope, that doesn't count either.

Nine up, nine down against the NL All Stars? Not interested.

Nice to see that somebody remembers Pedro's relief appearance in 1999, though.

Beta Distributions

Suppose that you wish to model a continuous, non-deterministic process, where each outcome is within a finite range [0,1]. Further, suppose that you wish to be able to specify the mean and the variance.

The beta distribution is a reasonable starting point.

MVP: AL 2005

In surfing the various discussions, I noticed at least one comment that the number of votes for Ortiz indicated that the writers were not discriminating against the DH.

I'd call that conclusion questionable. There is reason to believe that the second place on the ballot operates under different "rules" than the first. For reference, see the arguments against McGwire in 1998.

Comeback, baby, comeback

Bill Simmons asks "By the way, can you remember anyone who has ever been Comeback Player of the Year?"

Lee Trevino?

Run Scoring by Lineup position

Today's question: how does the number of runs scored depend on where in the batting order the inning starts?

My first guess was to look at the percentages of runs scored, but this is a clear error, as the #1 spot in the lineup gets so many more chances than the other positions. What we really want is the variation in scoring rate - how does the average number of runs scored when this hitter leads off compare to the average number of runs scored overall.

Now, one could look at offenses - but there's some concern that efficient offenses are shaped differently than inefficient ones. So for my baseline, I decided to turn the question about and look at runs allowed - facing an assortment of lineups over the course of a season is a rough approximation of facing an average lineup.

Obviously, the designated hitter looms as a distortion that we need to worry about. In collecting the data, I aggregated AL and NL results independently, but limited my tests to those years when the DH rule was in effect. Interleague play threatens to add another hobgoblin to the mix, but fortunately the dataset I obtained from retrosheet stopped at 1992 anyway.

How to buy a baseball team

Thomas Mulligan, of the LA Times
describes how Frank McCourt purchased the Dodgers.

Steroids change handedness

Tony Auth demonstrates the subminimal awareness that is so typical of the press any time they address a topic you actually know something about.

How do you think the conversation went?

Editor: Hey TA, can you do me up a nice one on Barry Bonds and the steroid controversy?

Auth: Who?

Editor: Barry Bonds.

Auth: Who is he?

Editor: Left Fielder for the San Francisco Giants.

Auth: and steroids? Yeah, I can do that. Will a Thursday run work for you? I can have it ready by then.

Editor: That's great, thanks.

Auth: Pleasure doing business with you.

Editor: Oh, Tony?

Auth: Yeah?

Editor: Bonds is black.

Borderline HOFers

Just a quick survey, noting those players honored by the BBWAA or the VHOF, with the object of identifying which candidates you would be likely to toss if you were trying to select the top 100 players of all time.

Note that the BBWAA and the VHOF draw from different pools of players.

Washington Nationals

The official primary logo of the Washington Nationals: a top view of a toilet.

Flush twice, it's a long way back to Montréal.

Quality Starts

Thought for the day: "Quality Starts" tend to get a bit of abuse as a stat because the accomplishment it measures (a start longer than 6IP allowing no more than 3 runs), isn't really all that spectacular ("that's a 4.5 ERA!").

Of course, a Win requires even less than that, needing only 5IP and fewer runs allowed than the other guy.

Yeah yeah, I didn't claim it was a new thought.

Wow

SNOOPY DANCE

HR Derby

What is the Vegas line on Bonds receiving an intentional walk during the Home Run Derby?

Update: and did Bond's dump in the second round, with the idea of fooling some manager into pitching to him (hey, he only hit three during the derby, maybe we can get him .... oops).

A DIPS Study

If you aren't already familiar with DIPS, Futility Infielder has a pretty good collection of links on the subject.

The motivation of this study is one done by Tom Tippett. What he found was a definite trend: "The pitchers with longer careers were progressively better than their shorter-career counterparts in every respect."

The "every respect" bit bothered me. If there's any sort of correllation at all among the different skills, you would expect that those pitchers better at every other aspect would also be better at preventing hits. Can we factor that out?

Rush to Judgment

So, place yourself 'neath the cap of the major league manager, who calls up his young phenom, who has spent the first two months of the season tearing minor league pitching apart. Bat him third, that seems pretty reasonable, if's he's been all that so far this year.

The team responds by winning three straight: he goes 0-5, 0-3, 0-4. Now you head back home, and the next game features your opponents ace.

Screw it, leave him in. Your phenom gets things rolling in the bottom of the first with a home run, but nobody else can get anything going and the winning streak comes to an end. Phenom was hitless after the first, and is now 1-16.

Leave him in, you say? Two games the same day. He's 0-3 in the first game, and when he has to be taken out of the second game he's 0-2. Hmm, maybe you should give him a game off, rest his cramp, settle his head, perhaps take some of the pressure off.

Screw it, plug him back into the lineup. 0-5.

You gotta think that, were this to happen today, nitwit radio would be all over the manager to ship this kid back to Minneapolis, or at least bench him. Not Durocher - Leo just drops him down to the 8th spot in the lineup. And Willie finally starts to hit like Willie Mays.

A number of the biographies I tracked down had Willie's start at 1-25, but 1-26 is consistent with the box scores that appeared in the New York Times (I spent an hour in the microfile room at BPL fact checking).

Something to keep in mind the next time a slow start "proves" that a hitter doesn't have what it takes to hit in the major leagues.

Pythagorean Formula

A discussion on Baseball Primer prompted me to look into the pythagorean model for wins.

Ben has a nice summary of the math, and the Wikipedia offers two formulas for the co-efficients.

I used David Smyths, and looked at the seasons from 1961 through 2003, comparing actual wins to predicted wins. Seasonal data came from the Lahman database, and the number crunching was done in excel.

Actual wins is always an integer, predicted wins generally isn't. I used the square of the difference as a measure of the error of the predictor.

First, I plotted the error against the predicted winning percentage. That graph looks like a big circular blob around (.500,0). Taking a linear trendline showed a small bias in the data - the estimator is, on average, a little bit high for good teams and a little bit low for bad ones. This is consistent with Ben's remarks that there's a higher order term to consider.

Next, I took the errors and rounded them to the nearest whole number. With this, I created a simple bar chart - x axis is games from estimate, y axis is percentage of population. No big surprise, it looks a bit like a normal curve.

.100495 * e ^ - .030926 x^2

if you believe in that many decimal places. 62% of the population is within 3.5 wins of the estimate, 91% within 6.5 wins, 99% within 9.5 wins.

Base Running: Two outs

We've seen that, in the situation of a batter reaching third with two outs, that all runners score at the same rates for each of the subsequent events, and therefore that the variation in run scoring from that position reflects the variation in talent of the subsequent hitters.

What happens if we keep the outs constant, but advance the batter to a different base?

Run Scoring: Another Control

Having looked at runners on third with two outs, I turned my attention to the case of a runner on third with no outs. Clearly, we should still expect any hit to score the runner, but we have the additional possibilities of sacrifice hits and sacrifice flies to consider.

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

When examining run scoring for this case, I found that the top two spots in the order were scoring significantly more often (87%) than the rest of the lineup (81%). What's different?

Run Scoring: Testing the model

It seems reasonable to assume that, to first order, the chances of scoring from third with two outs won't depend a lot on the talent of the runner. Obviously, speed will matter on a passed ball or wild pitch, but we'll represent that these events are relatively infrequent, and can be dismissed in our early approximations, and can limit ourselves to the cases where the batter reaches base.

In this study, I'm tracking runners by the base they reached as a batter. So the cases I'm looking at are unlikely to be influenced by free passes (because the bases behind them are known to be initially empty, and it would take three passes to bring the runner home). So we can concentrate on the relationship between batting average and run scoring.

Run Scoring: About the Data

The data for this project comes from the event files provided by Retrosheet. You'll be seeing a lot of the following notice.

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

Retrosheet offers game logs for the AL and NL from 1969-1992; these were all used. There are also logs available for earlier years in the AL, but I choose not to incorporate these because of the lack of a matching NL set. Thus, they remain viable for any who wish to test the conclusions of this study using independent data.

For each of the event files, it is a relatively simple matter to run the BEVENT utility to extract the desired information. The BEVENT output is saved into working files, and the working files processed into reports for each season. These can then be manipulated as desired.

Run Scoring: Introduction

How much does baserunning matter in run scoring?

It may seem that way, especially if one looks at runs scored as a function of times on base. Are the lumbering sluggers clogging the base paths, and failing to score as often as they should? Does this suggest that OBP overrates these players, crediting them for scoring more often than they do?

There are a few obvious sources of noise that should be considered when addressing the question. The probability of scoring is certain to be dependent on the number of outs, and not all runners will see the same distribution - leadoff hitters get more than their fair share of chances to reach base with no outs. Similarly, the probability of scoring must be dependent on the hitters behind a player in the lineup.

The purpose of the study is to get a sense of how large this noise is relative to the signal, to attempt to control for it, and to get some sense of how many runs a player should score, given the context he is playing in. From there, it may be possible to put an estimate on the scoring variation caused by running skills.

Professors Reinvent Wheel

A recent article in ScienceDaily summarized the work of a pair of Associate Professors from Montclair State University who discovered a linear replacement for the pythagorian method.

The original press release, from the American Institute of Physics, was kindly dug out for me by Ben Stein of that organization.

The central figures are Dr. Michael Jones, a mathematician specializing in game theory, and Dr. Linda Tappin a statistician with an interest in "statistics and sports".

I wanted to get upset....

HOF: Rice? Part 3

See also Part One and Part Two.

Next part of the question: as a hitter, how does Rice rate compared with his peers? That is, where does he rank as a hitter among the other players during his time. Does he deserve a reputation as the most feared hitter of his time?

Quote of the Day

When the man universally accepted as the team leader refuses to switch positions for the good of the team, even though he clearly cannot handle the position he has got, then it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you've got a team badly in need of leadership.

Dominant Athletes

I need a bit of help, here.

Steve suggests that Mariano Rivera is the penultimate dominant athlete of his lifetime.

My immediate thought: this guy hasn't been paying attention - Barry Bonds, Michael Schumacher, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky (if he is old enough), Roy Jones Jr. Pedro Martinez probably belongs in that list.

But those are only in the sports I follow - who are the most dominating athletes in the sports I don't know about?

Christ, I can't believe I almost missed Lance Armstrong.

Update: Freddy Adu?

Formiddable

Dennis Eckersley, 1991: 73.3 innings, 5 earned runs, 4 walks, 73 strikeouts.

Mariano Rivera, career post season: 96 innings, 8 earned runs, 12 walks, 77 strikeouts.

Yeesh.

HOF: Rice? Part 2

Part one was filed oddly, so you may have missed it.

There's a singularly important question that should be asked when discussing a players candidancy: how big should your hall be?

The blind squirrel spitting out the acorn

A Baseball Prospectus roundtable session on the ARod trade gave me a hint that helps explain the motivation of this from the Rangers' perspective.

Joe Sheehan notes that "The Rangers' problem is Chan Ho Park, and Jeff Zimmerman, and Rusty Greer." But it is a lot easier to acknowledge one "mistake" than many, especially if the many aren't high enough profile to generate publicity.

It's still a Helpless choice.

HOF: Jim Rice?

I'm a Redsox fan, by breeding and by choice. Which means that every year I end up reading yet another series of arguments that Jim Rice does, or does not, belong in the Hall of Fame.

The earliest team that I recall for certain is the 1977 team, and the home run binge. When I began attending baseball card shows, I discovered that I already had some from 1977, and a very few from earlier years.

Which is to say that I first really started paying attention to baseball when Rice was at his peak. This no doubt distorts my perspective to some degree. Nevertheless, I think I can be objective in assessing Rice's credentials.

OPS+ through the years

Courtesy of baseball-reference, a quick assessment of OPS+ (on base plus slugging, normalized), by examining the trends of the top hitters in the league each year.

Of the players in the top 5 per league, the average OPS+ is 163, the median 159. The leagues are quite comparable in this measure - best hitter in the league gets distorted wildly, when a god is about, but the 4th and 5th positions hold fairly steady.

5th is generally around 148, with a std. dev of about 8.

National League #5 has been better than his AL counterpart since time began. The exception is the period between 1909 and 1926. b-r's OPS+ calculation is supposed to weed out the pitchers, and it's a league normalized thing, so I don't have an explanation.

Weekend projects

My project for the weekend was to create a simple program to model the flight of batted baseballs. This really is a perfect weekend project, in that it has the ability to spiral completely out of control, with learning about drag and lift, choosing spin models, deciding what Reynolds number to use (lots of papers out there; executive summary: nobody else knows either).

More on Rose

What's the over/under on the number of write-in votes Rose receives next year?

HOF: Paul Molitor

Where does Molitor stand, relative to other career achievers.

Applause for the BBWAA

506 ballots cast, only 19 included Joe Carter.

I had much lower expectations.

By any other name

And sure enough, the Pete Rose story breaks before the HOF tally is announced. [via OffTheKuff ].

David Pinto points out that there has been an admission of wrongdoing. So far, I haven't noticed any reports that Rose has admitted betting on the Reds (which is the transgression that would call for the "lifetime" ban). I'm looking forward to the BP take.

Does Rose deserve a second chance? Perhaps - but I'm inclined to say that he already had one. He had the opportunity to not break the rule (chance one). Having broken the rule, he had the opportunity to beg the mercy of the court (chance two). Rather made a mess of that one. What has he done to earn another?

Copping to a lesser charge doesn't meet my standard.

Now, perhaps the rule he broke really is an obsolete artifact of an earlier age - and that his actions are not worse than those of Gaylord Perry or Kirby Puckett. So if you want to lift the rule first, then remove Rose from the ineligible list, then allow him onto the HOF ballot, perhaps I'll listen to the argument.

An interesting question: if Rose is reinstated, and added to the HOF ballot (I don't see any argument to keeping a reinstated player off the ballot - I don't believe the Hall has any basis for making baseball judgments, though I think they could be allowed their discretion on criminal matters), can voters legitimately omit him from their ballots? That is, would leaving Rose off the ballot be a violation of the Rules for Election to the Hall of Fame

Rose hasn't yet received the minimum 5%, so in order to be added to the ballot, so he has to first be nominated by the Screening Committee. This, I presume, is a no brainer - you would need five of the six screeners to withhold nomination during his first year of reinstatement.

So then it will come to the voters: "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."

Record, ability, contribution to the teams are gimmies. Sportsmanship is an interesting one - injuring players in an exhibition game isn't all that sporting, but that should probably slide.

Which leaves character and integrity. Has Pete really showed much of the latter?

But his induction looks inevitable. I need to get to Cooperstown before that happens.

HOF: Joe Carter?

One thing I like to look at with possible HOF candidates is to see how their numbers stack up against others in their neighborhood. Let's consider Joe Carter as an RBI man, and see how he stacks up.

Spahn

"We knew Mays was having trouble. I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out" -- Warren Spahn

Let's give em something to talk about

Oh Wow. Boston places Manny Ramirez on irrevocable waivers, pushing the stories about ticket prices below the fold.

I so do not have time to follow this.

Ignore the Boston press, start with Art Martone at projo. The go to Baseball Primer, where you'll have to check Sox Therapy, Transaction Oracle, and Clutch Hits to keep up.

Hot Stove

Just a quick note to let people know that I did not stick my head in the oven last night.

Tea for Two

Glenn Stout with a tale from the Frazee era that I had missed.

In spite of having read Redsox Century, I still have trouble with the notion of the Sox and Yankees as allies. Wrong doesn't even begin to describe it.

Charlie Brown

Bob Halloran: "No doubt about it, Charlie Brown was a Sox fan."

He may have been a Redsox pitching prospect, but Charlie Brown was certainly a Giants fan.

via Boston Sports Media Watch