I promised a second part to the study in which I would analyze team bullpens in the same manner, and I spent a good chunk of Wednesday doing the research and preparing the data. I used Michael Wolverton’s Adjusted Runs Prevented, and separated team bullpens into current core relievers (five or six per team) and everyone else.
Now, even as I was doing the work I kind of thought ARP might not be the best tool for the job, because it’s not a pure rate stat. It is a value metric that has performance, context and playing time components, the latter two of which make it a poor analogue for Support-Neutral Winning Percentage. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the research because I thought using ARP would still be useful while being a much simpler calculation than Runs Responsible Average, the rate stat from which ARP is derived. (Calculating RRAs for the core relievers and the others is a manual task, and no small one.)
I was wrong. The playing-time effect dominates everything, so much so that using ARP in this manner only really tells you which teams are using pitchers who they haven’t used all season. It’s a worthless data set that clouds, rather than illuminates, the issue of which teams have the best bullpens right now.
The Diamondbacks’ Brandon Webb should be a lock for Roofie of the Year, and a contender for Cy Young. The Royals add Rondell White to their All-Boy Power Lineup. The Phillies have overcome Jose Mesa’s awful season. These and other news and notes out of Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia in today’s edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
I’ve been thinking about the way I use advanced performance metrics such as Michael Wolverton’s Support-Neutral pitching statistics. In evaluating a team, I’ll often quote aggregate data such as their relievers’ Adjusted Runs Prevented or their starters’ Support-Neutral Value Added as a way of showing how effective they’ve been, and as shorthand for what we can expect them to do going forward. This can be deceiving. Of course I know that past performance isn’t an exact predictor of future results, and that a group of players can be over or under their heads in the short- or medium-term. That’s not necessarily the problem; the problem is that the aggregate totals have been compiled by a group of players who are not necessarily representative of the team at the present time. For example, just last week I mentioned that the Expos’ starters ranked sixth in the National League in SNVA. That’s true, but it’s past performance, and it includes six wretched starts by four pitchers who aren’t going to be used again, as well as the good pitching of Claudio Vargas, who may not take the mound again this year due to a shoulder injury. The SNVA figure is useful in letting us know how the Expos’ rotation has performed to date, but to get an idea of its current quality, it’s best to look at the pitchers taking the ball every fifth day. Isolating the performance of the current five Expos starters yields an SNPct of .569, 20 points higher than the team’s seasonal .549 mark. The Expos aren’t special in this regard. Twenty-five of the 30 major league teams have current rotations with better SNPcts than their seasonal numbers, which you’d expect in a game so fiercely Darwinian.
My e-mail box was bursting when I got power back this morning, all wanting to know what I thought about the 130-pitch outing of Mark Prior. (Hey, Keith Woolner is the PAP expert around here!) One of my best Velocity Project sources sent me a stunning report and luckily, I had multiple sources (and a gun) on this one. Prior is establishing himself as one of those freaks that actually gets stronger as a game goes on. While he would hit 93 in the first couple innings, he was as high as 97–the highest I have him recorded–in the eighth. While I’m glad Dusty overrode Prior’s desire to complete the game, I’m not tremendously concerned with Prior’s health. I am more concerned about his short-term effectiveness, with short-term in this situation meaning the next two to three weeks. While flags fly forever, I think Kerry Wood should be required to stand in front of Dusty on every pitch Prior or Carlos Zambrano makes over 120. He doesn’t need to say anything, just point to that fading scar on his right elbow. I think Dusty will get the point. I think.
The Twins have been a problem area all year–banged up, poor roster construction, odd decisions–and yet they remain close in the AL Central. With Doug Mientkiewicz having a recurrence of his ongoing wrist problems and Jacque Jones dealing with a painful lower back (and Astroturf on his home field), the Twins will be juggling players around and making use of some of their callups, like Michael Cuddyer. They are closer to getting Eric Milton back–he’s made his first rehab start in Ft. Myers, a team in the FSL playoffs–but his effectiveness remains a big question mark.
As I sat in the upper deck at Jacobs Field last Saturday, taking in the Indians-Blue Jays tilt and shivering in the Lake Erie breeze with our Cleveland Pizza Feeders, the conversation turned to Texas Hold ‘Em. Poker is a natural fit for baseball fans, especially the sort that are likely to attend our events. Like baseball (or at least the ‘game’ of baseball management), poker is a game that’s grounded in mathematics, and in optimizing the use of limited information. Like baseball, it’s also a lot of fun–at least when you’re winning. Just a bit of background here, which will be unnecessary for some readers and inadequate for others (if you’ve never played poker at all, this probably isn’t your column). Texas Hold ‘Em is a variant of poker in which each player is dealt two ‘hole’ cards face down, and makes the best five-card hand he can between his own cards and five common cards that are dealt to the entire table. The ‘face down’ part is the key: a player’s hole cards are never revealed until the last round of betting has been completed. In fact, in a tight game, the hands are often not revealed at all–every player but one will have folded before the showdown occurs. I’ve always found that last bit fascinating: players are willing to risk (sometimes large) sums of money on hands that they’re never able to see. While a good player can pick up plenty of information between observing the table’s betting patterns, running and rerunning the odds of particular hands occurring, and observing the other players’ “tells,” there’s always the lingering possibility of a bluff, which as a game theorist can tell you, will occur just often enough to keep a bettor on his toes. Lest you think this is a Bill Simmons-style off topic diversion, there are lessons that can be drawn from Hold ‘Em and applied to baseball. Let’s take a break from the usual dose of number crunching and look at those this week.
The Braves’ post-season roster looks already to be set. The Brewers experience one of the first brights spot in their season with a 10-game winning streak. The Twins have finally decided to act in their own best interest, putting Grant Balfour in the rotation. And the Rocco Baldelli is no longer running away with the AL Rookie of the Year–surprise, surprise. All this and much more news from Atlanta, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay in your Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple (uh, we mean, Quadrupule) Play.
This is something I like to call the All-Surprise Team. By surprise, I mean the pleasant variety as opposed to, say, an IRS audit or a trans-Atlantic plane ride seated next to Bronson Pinchot. Now to classify something as a “surprise,” you’re wallowing in the subjective. It’s a bit like calling someone “underrated” or “Democratic presidential candidate”–loosely defined and perhaps without any value at all.
In order to apply a standard more firm than my own capricious notion of the word surprise, I’ve turned to Nate Silver’s PECOTA projection system. In isolation it’s enough to give a liberal-arts buffoon like me that monkey-opening-coconut feeling, but fortunately it’s laid out right here in all its easily digestible glory. Know that it rawks, and that I’m leaning heavily on it for this little ditty.
In any event, with a shout-out to PECOTA, here’s my 2003 All-Surprise Team…
We’re in Philadelphia today for a one-game makeup. I forgot entirely about the game and barely caught our charter flight. I wasn’t alone–there were four of us charging down the concourse, to be faced with all the kids who’d been trying to get autographs from Pedro, and had started to walk back to their buses or scooters or whatever. They recognized us, and started flipping through their card books to match names to unsigned cards. Then you’ve either got to go through the kids, and that’s a disaster either way because Abbie Markham of Action 6 News is live from Logan Airport, where a young kid who just wanted an autograph got a mark of an entirely different kind…
Fortunately, Mirabelli was first and had this scowl on that made him look like he might enjoy eating well-fed children. Dude is huge, and he’s used to having very large people try to knock him down to win games, so some 50-pound kid’s going to bounce off him like a quarter off J.Lo’s ass. The kids parted in front of us and we made our gate. I was a little out of breath carrying my luggage, and told a trainer I might have strained a rib cage muscle. He made a note of it.
Continuing the bill of indictment chronicling the Pirates’ trading habits over the last century. In this fourth and final installment, four more bad trades and 12 good ones.
Roberto Alomar’s done little to help the White Sox, despite Jerry Manuel’s praise for him. The Morgan Ensberg snafu remains the lone glaring blemish on Jimy Williams’ managerial record with the Astros this season. The A’s may not miss Mark Mulder as much as initially feared. Bo Hart has turned into a pumpkin as the Cardinals’ leadoff hitter. ARod’s performance would only win him a much-deserved MVP if he didn’t play for the Rangers. These and other news and notes in today’s expanded version of Prospectus Triple Play.
The A’s have ripped off nine straight wins, taking the lead in the American League West in the process. It’s not the most impressive streak ever–the nine wins have come in equal parts against the Blue Jays, Orioles and Devil Rays–but it has allowed them to regain their balance after losing Mark Mulder for the season to a hip injury. Beating up weaker teams going into September has become something of a rite of passage for the good teams in the AL West. Last year, the Angels took advantage of a similar stretch to leap over the Mariners and become the team to beat in the Wild Card race. They went 10-2 in a two-week run covering late August and early September in which they played only the D-Rays and Orioles. At about the same time, the A’s were winning 20 consecutive games, helped in part by a schedule that had them playing 21 in a row against the shaky AL Central. The practice of the teams in the game’s best division inflating their records against the AL’s weak sisters in August was actually set in 2001. The Mariners went 9-3 against the same bottom-feeders in the AL East in the same part of the season, setting up their September push to 116 wins. The A’s did even better that year, going 11-1 against the Devil Rays and Orioles in the middle of their 58-17 second half. The point is that when judging the performance of teams in the short term, it is essential to look at the schedule. With the unbalanced schedule in the unbalanced American League, teams can go through extended stretches of playing only good or only bad teams. It’s not enough to see that a team has won 15 of 18, or that they went 11-17 in a month. It’s imperative to look beyond that, because the AL schedule largely sets up in four-week stretches of home-and-homes against blocks of opponents, and in the AL, those blocks are often widely disparate, say, two weeks against the Yankees and Red Sox, followed by two weeks against the Tigers and Indians.
I’ve had a number of discussions over the past week or so that center around QuesTec, and all the issues associated with the company–their financial viability, the role of their technology in the administration of games, the aesthete and on-field consequences of usage, etc. I wrote a piece about the problem of asking umpires to handle ball/strike calls two years ago, and my views haven’t changed since then. Simply put, given the operational needs of the game on the field, (e.g., limitations on the options available for positioning of umpires), it’s just not possible for home plate umpires to do an adequate job of determining whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.
Whether in person, by e-mail, or on the phone, I’ve been listening to a number of arguments, recently, regarding QuesTec as part of a comprehensive system of umpire review. Eventually, most people come to agree that the job of accurately calling balls and strikes is simply too difficult for someone to do well. From there, however, nearly everyone who opposes QuesTec’s use falls back on the “It’s part of the human element of the game” argument.
The thing is, if you take that argument and drill down, you end up with the following call to action: “Hey! Let’s go out to the ballpark and watch umpires @#$% up calls!”
As I get ready to head to Cleveland and meet everyone at the first Cleveland Feed–and due to cancellations, we have ONE slot open (first come, first serve)–and I resist the urge to throw solid objects through my TV screen, I’m also excited about Baseball Prospectus Radio. If you haven’t heard the latest show in the archive, check it out: Scott did a phenomenal job with the Fay Vincent interview. The upcoming show is going to be exciting as well. Tonight, I had the chance to speak with one legend, and tomorrow I’ll speak with another. I hope you’ll like the results.
Powered by Oaken Barrel Gnaw Bone Pale Ale, onto the injuries…
I’m a baseball guy; some people even call me The Baseball Guy. But this chaotic week culminated in my fantasy football auction last night, and I’m pretty excited about a three-day weekend that includes the USC opener on Saturday, so I’m having trouble focusing on my first love.
Here’s a brain dump for you to take to the beach, the mountains, the ballpark, or wherever you’ll be waving goodbye to the summer over the next few days.
The Expos have come back from the dead to land in a tie for the NL Wild Card race. The Giants keep having trouble with right-handed pitching. The Blue Jays’ Roy Halladay’s in the mix for the AL Cy Young Award. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Normally, I try to avoid being baited by a hapless demagogue like Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star, but this waste of trees/bandwidth was too much to abide.
You see, Griffin, in a column delightfully free of facts, is wringing hands over how “sabermetricians” are forcing traditional scouts to the margins of the industry or, in some instances, taking their jobs altogether. And Griffin’s bang-spoon-on-highchair tone suggests statheads are also stealing the wives of scouts and rounding up “good baseball men” everywhere in internment camps.
Unfortunately, this sentiment is somewhat common these days. Toronto GM J.P. Ricciardi cut back on his scouting staff after taking over for Gord Ash, and Oakland GM Billy Beane–at least according to Moneyball author Michael Lewis and his license to dramatize–likes junk food, working out, screaming at Grady Fuson and ignoring his scouting staff. Then comes Theo Epstein in Boston and his subsequent hiring of Bill James. Ever since, Griffin and his ilk have been vociferously defending scouts and G.B.M. (Good Baseball Men) everywhere from a cabal of imaginary enemies. That is to say, the animus that Griffin is so damned sure stathead types have for scouts and other purveyors of traditional methods isn’t really there. And it doesn’t need to be.