Not so many years ago -- even then Warren Buffett was a skajillionaire encamped in Omaha -- musical artists recorded "albums" of songs, sometimes themed, that were copied from master recordings onto pressed vinyl and sold to adoring masses in record stores. Radio stations, at intervals dictated by record companies, played individual songs from the albums to whet fans' appetites for the larger recordings. Consumers learned about music almost entirely from the radio and often purchased the albums without the benefit of hearing most of their contents.
If the music business was an apple then, today it is a platypus. We listen to streaming songscapes on our phones these days and procure, often for free, individual songs directly to our playing devices. We have innumerable options for test-driving the music before owning it. Radio has become irrelevant and is disappearing like Jimmy Hoffa.
Because baseball has evolved a lesser distance since the 1970s, say from great apes rather than from single-celled organisms, the differences have been easier to ignore. But the rise of the uber-athlete has transformed the game, and it's time to start accounting for it.
In the days of albums and radio stations, itinerant athletes with opposable winter jobs roamed the infield at 11 or 12 stones soaking wet. Many of these players arrived in Spring Training for their first calisthenics in months and even by the dog days couldn't reach the outfield wall with two swings. The local team of my youth, the 1970 Mets, one year after Amazing the world, sported a starting lineup of Jerry Grote, 185 pounds and two home runs; Ken Boswell, 175 pounds and five home runs; and Bud Harrelson, 160 pounds, one home run. Utility infielder Al Weiss, 160 pounds and one home run, backed them up.
It was a hurler's delight. The opposing moundsman could ease up against these Lilliputians, allowing pitchers the equivalent of an inning's repose every third frame. Throwing with less ferocity and resting more often allowed starters to double as finishers and accumulate innings like corporate titans with summer homes.
Ironically, everyday players today are presenting attendance issues. As this excellent article in Beyond the Box Score notes, the number of regulars appearing in 150+ games has descended below 9% for the first time since the schedule expanded to 162 games in 1961. (Fourteen times before that, with just a 154-game schedule, more than 9% of regulars reached the 150-game mark.) I leave the wherefores to wiser analysts, though the increasing prevalence of platooning, match-ups, defensive replacements and more older players requiring episodic breathers probably play a role.
The result, as author Scott Lindholm articulates in the BTBS piece, is that many of the old records will prove as resistant to change as a Congressman. Measured against a 300-win standard, or even a 20-win standard, today's pitchers will prove as endlessly wanting as the Oscars. Benchmarks for innings pitched, complete games and strikeouts; and for everyday players, consecutive games played, hits and perhaps even home runs will prove more difficult to reach than heaven for a TV preacher. Not withstanding that, like the oily religio-salesman, many of the records in question are poseurs to begin with.
You've probably noticed that the units of measurement above rarely tickle the ivories of Hall of Fame compositions in this space, and the artificial thresholds of 3,000 hits, 300 wins, 500 home runs and their ilk are as welcome here as Palmetto bugs at an oyster roast, which is a quaint Southern way of saying filthy cockroaches on performance enhancing drugs doing the cha-cha at a fancy Epicurean tradition. Going forward let's just banish them from our consciousness, even from our sub-consciousness, and lean instead on the sturdy frames of wOBA, TAv, FIP, WAR and their many cousins, step-sisters and other kin.
And then someday we'll examine why the greatest athletes in history (today's) can't stay upright the way their ballplaying ancestors could.
Showing posts with label Beyond the Box Score. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beyond the Box Score. Show all posts
16 March 2015
30 April 2014
Your Team Needs to Strike Out More
Do a web search on "2014 strikeouts" and you will find a parade of articles postulating about a jump in Ks this year.
"Seattle Mariners: Strikeout problem stalling offense"
"Where are all of the Johnny Cueto strikeouts coming from?"
"What's behind all those strikeouts for Joe Mauer?"
"Strikeouts galore for the 2014 Mets"
For the seventh consecutive year, the strikeout rate has risen in April, to more than one every five plate appearances. Roughly 16 batters whiff in an average nine-inning game.
Theorized reasons for this trend are myriad. Fastball velocity has risen over the years, from an average of 89.8 mph in 2008 to 91.4 mph this season, according to Beyond the Box Score. Chris Moran notes in this BTB article that 12 pitchers had averaged 94 mph in an April start last year. That number was 25 with half of April to go in 2014.
There are other factors as well. Batters are swinging more at balls outside the strike zone and less at pitches inside it. That may be due to improved catcher framing, which has become a subject of much more emphasis now that cameras are observing every pitch and recording the result. Analysis has discovered that catchers can alter a significant number of ball/strike calls in the course of a game because umps are more likely to call strikes on pitches caught by the catcher if he doesn't move to retrieve the throw.
From an aesthetic standpoint, most fans are not enamored of this development. Few people pay to see a lot of wind-making. From a strategic standpoint, it seems obvious that strikeouts are a negative event for the team at bat -- after all, they are outs. But in a more general sense, the evidence suggests that strikeouts are very necessary evils.
In fact, strikeouts are often a tradeoff. Batters who swing hard and wait for their pitch -- i.e., pass on pitches they don't like even if they're in the strike zone -- tend to whiff frequently. But that strategy yields more walks, fewer double plays and more home runs.
New research from the Hardball Times illustrates the actual correlations between strikeouts and other events. As you can see below, batters who fan more get on base slightly less (OBP) but hit for more power (SLG, ISO), ground into fewer twin killings (GIDP) and have a slightly higher batting average when they do make contact (BABIP), presumably because they hit the ball harder. On balance it's a positive tradeoff; more whiffs correlate with better overall hitting (wOBA).
Obviously there's a limit to that relationship; if every batter struck out there would be no OBP, SLG, HR or scoring at all. And Major League baseball may have reached that tipping point. Scoring has declined more or less steadily during the seven years that strikeouts have risen.
All this may be premature -- a blip on the season's radar. But as part of a larger trend, it's probably not. And that means more Ks and fewer Rs the rest of the way. You've been warned.
"Seattle Mariners: Strikeout problem stalling offense"
"Where are all of the Johnny Cueto strikeouts coming from?"
"What's behind all those strikeouts for Joe Mauer?"
"Strikeouts galore for the 2014 Mets"
For the seventh consecutive year, the strikeout rate has risen in April, to more than one every five plate appearances. Roughly 16 batters whiff in an average nine-inning game.
Theorized reasons for this trend are myriad. Fastball velocity has risen over the years, from an average of 89.8 mph in 2008 to 91.4 mph this season, according to Beyond the Box Score. Chris Moran notes in this BTB article that 12 pitchers had averaged 94 mph in an April start last year. That number was 25 with half of April to go in 2014.
There are other factors as well. Batters are swinging more at balls outside the strike zone and less at pitches inside it. That may be due to improved catcher framing, which has become a subject of much more emphasis now that cameras are observing every pitch and recording the result. Analysis has discovered that catchers can alter a significant number of ball/strike calls in the course of a game because umps are more likely to call strikes on pitches caught by the catcher if he doesn't move to retrieve the throw.
From an aesthetic standpoint, most fans are not enamored of this development. Few people pay to see a lot of wind-making. From a strategic standpoint, it seems obvious that strikeouts are a negative event for the team at bat -- after all, they are outs. But in a more general sense, the evidence suggests that strikeouts are very necessary evils.
In fact, strikeouts are often a tradeoff. Batters who swing hard and wait for their pitch -- i.e., pass on pitches they don't like even if they're in the strike zone -- tend to whiff frequently. But that strategy yields more walks, fewer double plays and more home runs.
New research from the Hardball Times illustrates the actual correlations between strikeouts and other events. As you can see below, batters who fan more get on base slightly less (OBP) but hit for more power (SLG, ISO), ground into fewer twin killings (GIDP) and have a slightly higher batting average when they do make contact (BABIP), presumably because they hit the ball harder. On balance it's a positive tradeoff; more whiffs correlate with better overall hitting (wOBA).
| Individual K rate and offensive statistic regression analysis | |
|---|---|
| Stat | Correlation (R) |
| OBP | -0.07 |
| SLG | 0.19 |
| ISO | 0.40 |
| wOBA | 0.10 |
| GIDP | -0.22 |
| IFH | -0.27 |
| HR/FB | 0.53 |
| IFFB% | -0.16 |
| GB% | -0.28 |
| FB% | 0.31 |
| BABIP | 0.08 |
| BB% | 0.28 |
Obviously there's a limit to that relationship; if every batter struck out there would be no OBP, SLG, HR or scoring at all. And Major League baseball may have reached that tipping point. Scoring has declined more or less steadily during the seven years that strikeouts have risen.
All this may be premature -- a blip on the season's radar. But as part of a larger trend, it's probably not. And that means more Ks and fewer Rs the rest of the way. You've been warned.
15 June 2013
A New Way to Credit Pitcher Wns
Pitching wins are a team event credited to an individual who may have actually inhibited a team win. They too weakly correlate to good pitching to serve as a proxy when pitching acumen is being analyzed.
Efforts to find a single statistic that encapsulates good pitching have proved elusive and have been completely disengaged from the ultimate goal of a starting pitcher -- winning the game. They've also become a tangle of higher mathematics incomprehensible to the average fan.
Suppose we could invent one simple statistic that credited pitchers when they pitched sufficiently long and successfully to give their team a better-than-even chance of winning? That would trump mere pitching wins and be easy to use. You can see the whole discussion here in Matt Hunter's piece in Beyond the Box Score. We'll call his stat Quality Wins.
We know that since Year 2000, teams whose starting pitcher goes at least six-and-a-third innings and allows three runs or fewer win their games more than half the time. It's the reason that six-and-three is considered a quality start.
We can expand that matrix, starting with at least five innings of work, to create a continuum of Quality Win performances:
Go at least five innings. Give up two or fewer runs.
Pitch 6.3 innings and give up three runs or fewer.
Pitch eight innings and give up four runs or fewer.
Pitch 9.7 innings and give up five runs or fewer.
Keep in mind that this is runs, not earned runs. Defense is an issue on every ball hit, not just the errors.
Let's examine how that might have worked in the games of of June 14:
In the Brewers-Reds tilt, decided in the 10th inning, neither starter was credited with a win, though Cincinnati starter Bronson Arroyo earned one. He got through two outs in the eighth inning and surrendered three runs. His opponent, Kyle Lohse, pitched six full frames but allowed three runs to cross the plate, saddling Milwaukee with a better-than-even chance of losing (which they ultimately did.) He would be charged with a loss.
Chris Sale threw an eight-inning complete game for the White Sox in their 2-1 loss to Houston, allowing five hits and one walk while fanning 14. Under the Quality Win system, he gets a win for his effort. His counterpart, Eric Bedard, also earns a Quality Win for lasting six frames of one-run ball.
No Quality Win for either starter in the Phillies' come-from-behind 8-7 win over the Rockies. Kyle Kendrick and Juan Nicasio escaped without losses despite four-inning, seven-run and six-inning, five run debacles. Under the new system, each is charged with an L.
In four other games the losing pitcher would get credited with a Quality Win and in the Indians-Nationals contest, where both starters were gone when the outcome was settled, each would be credited with a Quality Win.
In all, on this low-scoring Friday night:
Five starters charged with losses would instead get credit for pitching well and giving their team a good chance of winning.
Three hurlers who no-decisioned would instead get wins.
Three others with no decision would instead take responsibility for a loss.
The seamheads would justifiably complain about various shortcomings of this statistic.
All true. This is not a leap towards the Holy Grail, just a refinement that gives us won-loss records that relate to actual performance.
Since no pitching stat is foolproof, and since this is replacing pitching wins, which is nearly useless, the standard is not perfection but mere relevance and ease of use. Moreover, statheads can refine it to account for many of those issues. For example, a pitcher could be credited with only the percentage of a win he provides in every game he starts. And the stat could be adjusted for ballpark, defense, etc., just as others are. These enhancements would strengthen the "win" statistic but render it difficult to calculate. The result would be a fielding-independent stat represented not as ERA, as is currently the case, but as a won-loss record.
It's a small step, but it would expose the starters with great records despite lousy performances (I'm looking at you, Jason Hammel of Baltimore, 7-4, 5.24 with a 1.5 WHIP; would be 5-9 in Quality Wins) and exonerate high achievers with bad teammates (Chris Sale, 5-5, 2.43 and a 0.9 WHIP; would be 10-2 in Quality Wins).
Efforts to find a single statistic that encapsulates good pitching have proved elusive and have been completely disengaged from the ultimate goal of a starting pitcher -- winning the game. They've also become a tangle of higher mathematics incomprehensible to the average fan.
Suppose we could invent one simple statistic that credited pitchers when they pitched sufficiently long and successfully to give their team a better-than-even chance of winning? That would trump mere pitching wins and be easy to use. You can see the whole discussion here in Matt Hunter's piece in Beyond the Box Score. We'll call his stat Quality Wins.
We know that since Year 2000, teams whose starting pitcher goes at least six-and-a-third innings and allows three runs or fewer win their games more than half the time. It's the reason that six-and-three is considered a quality start.
We can expand that matrix, starting with at least five innings of work, to create a continuum of Quality Win performances:
Go at least five innings. Give up two or fewer runs.
Pitch 6.3 innings and give up three runs or fewer.
Pitch eight innings and give up four runs or fewer.
Pitch 9.7 innings and give up five runs or fewer.
Keep in mind that this is runs, not earned runs. Defense is an issue on every ball hit, not just the errors.
Let's examine how that might have worked in the games of of June 14:
In the Brewers-Reds tilt, decided in the 10th inning, neither starter was credited with a win, though Cincinnati starter Bronson Arroyo earned one. He got through two outs in the eighth inning and surrendered three runs. His opponent, Kyle Lohse, pitched six full frames but allowed three runs to cross the plate, saddling Milwaukee with a better-than-even chance of losing (which they ultimately did.) He would be charged with a loss.
Chris Sale threw an eight-inning complete game for the White Sox in their 2-1 loss to Houston, allowing five hits and one walk while fanning 14. Under the Quality Win system, he gets a win for his effort. His counterpart, Eric Bedard, also earns a Quality Win for lasting six frames of one-run ball.
No Quality Win for either starter in the Phillies' come-from-behind 8-7 win over the Rockies. Kyle Kendrick and Juan Nicasio escaped without losses despite four-inning, seven-run and six-inning, five run debacles. Under the new system, each is charged with an L.
In four other games the losing pitcher would get credited with a Quality Win and in the Indians-Nationals contest, where both starters were gone when the outcome was settled, each would be credited with a Quality Win.
In all, on this low-scoring Friday night:
Five starters charged with losses would instead get credit for pitching well and giving their team a good chance of winning.
Three hurlers who no-decisioned would instead get wins.
Three others with no decision would instead take responsibility for a loss.
The seamheads would justifiably complain about various shortcomings of this statistic.
- First, it fails to credit a pitcher any more for giving his team a 97.6% chance of winning (nine shutout innings) than for giving them a 50.5% chance (six and a third innings; three runs).
- Second, it is divorced from actual wins, so a pitcher could be credited with 20 "wins" even if his team ultimately lost every game. (And both starters could be credited with wins or charged with losses in the same game.)
- Third, it fails to take into account all the other elements that affect run scoring, like defense, ballpark, relief pitching, weather conditions and luck.
- Last, it has no predictive value because it doesn't examine how the pitcher performed, just what resulted.
All true. This is not a leap towards the Holy Grail, just a refinement that gives us won-loss records that relate to actual performance.
Since no pitching stat is foolproof, and since this is replacing pitching wins, which is nearly useless, the standard is not perfection but mere relevance and ease of use. Moreover, statheads can refine it to account for many of those issues. For example, a pitcher could be credited with only the percentage of a win he provides in every game he starts. And the stat could be adjusted for ballpark, defense, etc., just as others are. These enhancements would strengthen the "win" statistic but render it difficult to calculate. The result would be a fielding-independent stat represented not as ERA, as is currently the case, but as a won-loss record.
It's a small step, but it would expose the starters with great records despite lousy performances (I'm looking at you, Jason Hammel of Baltimore, 7-4, 5.24 with a 1.5 WHIP; would be 5-9 in Quality Wins) and exonerate high achievers with bad teammates (Chris Sale, 5-5, 2.43 and a 0.9 WHIP; would be 10-2 in Quality Wins).
14 June 2011
And You Thought Jackie Robinson Broke the Color Barrier
I remember riding the subway as a teenager with some friends -- all Caucasian -- when a very inebriated black man got into a discussion with us.
"You're white, right?" he asked, clearly on the way to making a Kumbaya statement about race.
"How did you know?" I asked perkily. "Roy White!" I leaped across the aisle and shook his hand.
"No, no," he stammered. "I mean you're white and I'm..."
"Do you know my friends?" I interrupted cheerily. "This is Vida Blue, Dick Green, Alvin Dark and Red Ruffing! Say hi, guys."
"Wait, no, I mean I'm a black man," he enunciated through the Thunderbird haze. "And you are white boys. But we're all here together getting along."
"Well sure, we're getting along," I said, "but I'm the only White boy here. Alvin isn't a White, he's a Dark. And even though he stays over my house a lot, Dick's not a White, he's a Green. Vida's a Blue, though a lot of kids at school say he's yellow. Ruffing is a...well...a Ruffing, but he's Red. Not a Red like Brezhnev, if you know what I mean. He's as American as apple pie. More like red, white and blue."
The poor guy just folded into himself at that point, overwhelmed by a torrent that seemed to him disconnected from whatever point he had been trying to make. He remained sullen until we bid him a hale adieu at our stop, reminding him which color of the wheel we each represented. I'm not sure if we advanced or set back race relations that evening.
That scene was brought to mind again by this fanciful post penned by Jacob Peterson at Beyond the Box Score, in which he calculates what color name produced the most, best players.
Here are the concluding paragraphs:
After tabulating the results, "White" came out on top. While "Brown" had the top two color-named players in MLB history (Kevin Brown and Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown), there were no other star players with that name. "White," on the other hand, had 8 players with at least 25 WAR, led by Roy White, Deacon White, and Devon White. All of this despite there being more than twice as many players named "Brown" (86) than [sic] "White" (40). "White" was also helped by having relatively few players who came in below replacement-level: 30%, compared to around 50% for most other names.
Coming in a distant third was "Green," which featured solid careers from Shawn Green and Danny Green, but not much else. There have been only 7 fewer Greens than Whites, but the Whites have accrued 227 more WAR.
Right on the heels of "Green" was "Blue," which finished in 4th place despite only having 3 MLB players to its name. Of course, two of the three players were Vida Blue, the longtime A's ace, and Lu Blue, the 1920's 1st baseman who was sort of like that era's John Olerud, though with a bit less power. By average or median WAR, "Blue" easily comes out on top.
The accompanying graph is pretty neat, so see for yourself.
b
14 August 2010
Under the Radar, On Top of the League
I was just noticing, with the help of beyondtheboxscore.com, what a special year Rafael Furcal is compiling completely under the radar. At first glance -- .316 BA, 8 HR, 36 RBI -- the 5'8" Dominican is hitting for average and not much else. In fact, that considerably under-values him.
At .316/.381/.492 with 18 of 22 steals and plus defense, Furcal is authoring a deceptively historic season. Add to that the offense-dampening effect of Chavez Ravine and Furcal climbs a few rungs on the impressive ladder. Despite missing 35 games with injuries, the former Rookie of the Year is nonetheless the most valuable Dodger position player in 2010 and the most valuable shortstop in the NL, with a WARP (wins against replacement player) of 3.3 in what amounts to only half a season of work. (In both cases, this is damning with faint praise -- like being the warmest city in Siberia. Dodger position players and NL shortstops have reached a level of underwhelment unusual for both.)
Here's the most shocking news: according to baseball-reference.com, this is the best offensive season ever by a Dodger shortstop with at least 250 plate appearances, in percentage terms, as measured relative to league averages. He has performed 37% better offensively than the average National Leaguer, which is pretty amazing for a shortstop. Pee Wee Reese made the Hall of Fame without reaching these heights once, though by playing in a more congenial park and answering the bell for every game, he certainly posted more impressive numbers, such as 132 runs scored in 1949.
Of course, players contribute nothing to their teams when they're on the shelf, so missing a fifth of the season has to count against Furcal at least a little. But if he maintains this pace, his 2010 will rank among the most sublime, and least recognized, of all time.
b
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