One of the hallmarks of the annual Hall of Fame debates is the comparison to players already enshrined. It can be a very good exercise in determining the merits of a particular player, especially because after so many years, there are now a lot of players in the Hall of Fame. There are plenty of players at every single position. There are pitchers. There are power hitters, average hitters. There are great fielders. One area where the present Hall of Fame lacks in providing a good comparison is the Closer situation.

As Wendy Thurm’s post indicated in evaluating Lee Smith’s candidacy*, it is difficult to judge because the only full-time relief pitchers in the Hall of Fame are Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter. Hoyt Wilhem is not an apt comparison, having retired in 1972 with 500 more innings pitched than even Rollie Fingers. Wendy reached the conclusion that Smith was better than Sutter, not as good as Fingers and Gossage, and put Smith just on the other side of the Hall of Fame. It feels like the right call, but if Sutter is in the Hall what exactly is the standard for relief pitchers?

Read the rest of this entry »

This past October, David Laurila conducted an interview with Zach Britton, the 23-year-old lefty who just finished up his rookie season with the Orioles. As a highly touted prospect, Britton didn’t put up impressive strikeout totals, but his groundball-inducing heavy sinker allowed him to enjoy much success in the minors. When Laurila asked Britton for his thoughts on his underwhelming major league 1.56 K/BB ratio, Britton responded as follows:

“I know that it could be better, obviously. I’m not going to be a guy who strikes out a ton of people; I’ll never lead the league in strikeouts. And with the movement I have, I’m going to walk guys. That’s something I can improve upon as I get older and more experienced, though. I can learn to make better adjustments… I pitch to contact. If I get a guy 0-2, I’m not necessarily looking to strike him out; I’m looking to get him to hit a ground ball. It’s a mindset. I’m not a huge believer in having to strike guys out in order to be successful. I’d rather keep my defense on their toes and get outs. Most times, when I strike guys out, it’s not on three or four pitches; it usually takes five, six or seven. Pitching to contact allows me to be more efficient.”

My first instinct was to be a bit skeptical of the effectiveness of this “mindset.”  Numerous studies have indicated that is issuing walks, not striking batters out, that ultimately increases pitch count to the point of being “inefficient.” Yet in sabermetric analysis, it is not uncommon to find outliers in these aggregate models — some players simply don’t fit the mold of generally accepted principles. Britton, after all, ought to know his own tendencies better than anyone else.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a runner on first, a pitcher’s approach to a batter changes in many ways. The most obvious is the delivery out of the stretch. More subtly, the pitcher can be distracted by the runner potentially stealing a base. To mitigate the runner’s chances of stealing a base, the pitcher has the option to throw over to first, thereby keeping the runner closer to the bag.

After a few throw overs, I often hear announcers remarking that the pitcher is “distracted” by the base runner, implying that the pitcher is compromising his effort to get the batter out. By expending his mental, and maybe also his physical, energy on the base runner, he commits less towards the batter. In this article, we attempt to demonstrate this proposed effect with a statistical analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »

With apologies to Michael Lewis, what if everything you thought you knew about baseball was wrong? As our collective understanding of advanced statistical analysis in baseball grows exponentially with each passing day, we are now among a generation of baseball fans that has done more critical thinking about and retained more esoteric knowledge of the game than our parents could ever have dreamed of. Anyone who has seen MLB Network’s show on the evolution of statistics would think that between Henry Chadwick’s invention of the box score and Branch Rickey’s hiring of Alan Roth as a statistician, baseball fans in the 20th century consumed baseball metrics in only the most rudimentary of ways — via the dreaded batting average, home runs and RBI triumvirate.

However, what if I told you that one of the most advanced analytical discoveries — one that sabermetricians hold near and dear to their hearts — was actually discovered before Babe Ruth ever played a game?

Read the rest of this entry »

Searching for and appreciating the “Cinderella” team is a pervasive feature of American sports. Our love of the Cinderella might come from some uniquely American fascination with heroes rising from nothing, or from a basic human desire to recognize and value unexpected outcomes. Whatever the cause, we pay special attention to moments (the Miracle on Ice; the 1966 Texas Western basketball squad; the 1955 Dodgers or 1969 Miracle Mets or 2004 Boston Red Sox) where teams seemingly overachieved or overcame great adversity to come out champions.

Generally, there are three ways of thinking about Cinderellas:
1. A team winning after a long period of failure.
2. An objectively untalented team winning despite their flaws.
3. A team succeeding despite having the odds stacked against them, such as a talented team overcoming objectively more talented opponents.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post was born out of a conversation randomly started by Ronit Shah on Twitter. He asked me:

“Is there a more interesting player page than this one? #CoorsEffect”

The page links to Dante Bichette and I did a little research, eventually concluding that Bichette’s slash line was .360/.397/.642 at home and .268/.303/.431 away from 1993 to 1999. He also had a HR/PA of 0.06 at home versus only 0.03 away and hit 1.5 times more extra base hits at home than he did on the road.

Satchel Price decided to chime in, asking the question I asked in the title: “Has any player ever benefited more from triple crown stats? Bad defense, rarely walked, played in Coors during the steroid era.”

I was interested to see what I could find on this, so I made up an analytical tool. I downloaded all player careers for all qualified batters from Fangraphs. Then I found the average and standard deviation for home runs, runs batted in and batting average for all of these players.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been nine months since the trade that brought Ryan Theriot to St. Louis, and the shortstop picture for the Cardinals is no clearer today than it was then. With their playoff hopes all but officially extinct, the prospect of another offseason spent looking for up-the-middle help looms large.

The trio of players who have garnered playing time at short for the Cards this season have been unimpressive, producing a combined 0.4 WAR in approximately a season’s worth of plate appearances. Theriot is an obvious non-tender candidate, while newly acquired Rafael Furcal will almost certainly have his $12 million option declined and become a free agent at the end of the season. This leaves the Cards with only Tyler Greene as an internal option, and the free agent market for shortstops is about as thin (the obvious exception being Jose Reyes, who the Cardinals have almost no hope of signing if they expect to keep Chris Carpenter and/or Albert Pujols). While the Cardinals will likely either give Greene a shot to hold down the job, or pick up another bargain during the free agency period, I’d like to propose that the Cardinals consider a radical alternative that could provide the team with a definitive edge: Albert Pujols.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Bautista is in the midst of a historic year. Jose Bautista will in all likelihood not make it into the Hall of Fame.

Much has already been said about the unique career arc of Joey Bats, with a particular focus on how ridiculous the number’s he’s putting up this season really are. Through Sunday the Blue Jays had played in 85 games. Jose Bautista has accumulated 5.8 fWAR over that time. Extrapolating that pace (and also taking into account a proportional number of missed games the rest of the way) over the course of the year would give Bautista about 11.1 fWAR.

That is a really large WAR number. In the history of baseball only 37 position players have recorded a season of 11.1 fWAR. Albert Pujols has never amassed such WAR in a single season; Hank Aaron never came close to that.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Opening Day to April 20th, Red Sox pitchers posted a 7.14 ERA when Jarrod Saltalamacchia was behind the plate versus a 2.40 ERA when Jason Varitek started. The resulting hubbub about this split made one fact extremely clear, when comparing the influence of different catchers, sample size is really really important.

Already by June 24th, Varitek and Salty’s split has been greatly reduced, with pitchers now throwing a 3.44 ERA to the veteran captain and a 4.36 ERA to the new guy. I would bet that these numbers will continue to converge as the season drags on, but even after 182 games it’s unlikely that either catcher will have enough innings to statistically test whether one is calling a better game. This is the difficulty of assessing catcher performance: comparing catchers between teams is near impossible (because the pitching staffs are different), and comparing catchers within teams is difficult (because sample sizes are small and different pitchers use different catchers). Nevertheless, many still believe that catchers do influence pitcher performance. Where can we find the data to support this hypothesis?

Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published on WahooBlues.com.

No one likes to travel. Vacations are great and changes of scenery can be nice, but that doesn’t make the cramped bus trip or the bumpy plane ride any more pleasant. The destination may be worth it, but when was the last time you stood up after an hours-long voyage with your good mood still fully intact?

This sentiment is shared even by multimillionaires who make their livings playing a children game and are cheered by thousands of adoring fans every time they go to the office. In baseball, “getaway day” is dreaded, and while jet lag alone wouldn’t make the Indians fall to the White Sox (who’d’ve thought that would be a good example this year?), a team that just got in after a long flight is seen as being at a real, if relatively small, disadvantage at the start of a series.

Read the rest of this entry »