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Also curious how pitches per plate appearance factor if at all
The Werth Deal has me thinking of a comparison between JRoll and Werth probably two ends of this spectrum but over a season this could be the difference of a few extra bullpen pitchers...
How well do these metrics really predict the future? Just curious
Shawn Smith who created one of the leading projection systems, CHONE, was recently hired by a major league organization. Here's a link to what was his site.
Shawn Smith who created one of the leading projection systems, CHONE, was recently hired by a major league organization. Here's a link to what was his site.
And Keith Woolner (a major contributor to BPro, and the creator of VORP), along with prominent analysts Russell Carleton, Jason Pare and Sky Andrecheck have all gone to work for the Cleveland Indians.
And we know how well that is working out (hint, I know it isn't a stat that you like, but check wins and losses for the past couple of seasons).
Last year, as spring training began to ramp up, we got the annual collection of articles about players reporting to camp in “the best shape of their lives”. While it’s a phrase so overused that it is easy to mock, I figured it would be worthwhile to catalog the players who were noted to have worked hard over the off-season, giving us the chance to look back and see if we can spot any performance differences from guys in the group. Thus, “The Good Shapers” post was born. Today, we fulfill the second half of the purpose, and look back at whether these guys actually performed better than expected.
So, what can we conclude from the position player side of “The Best Shape Of Their Lives” group? It’s just one season of 17 different players, so it is nothing like an exhaustive study, but there doesn’t appear to be strong evidence that it is a significant predictor of a strong season on the way. These guys did slightly better than expected, but the overall bump was small, and it almost entirely disappears if you remove Miguel Cabrera’s sobriety from the sample.
Those are just the hitters, of course. What about the pitchers? We’ll tackle them later in the week.
Most readers of FanGraphs probably understand that as a strategy for scoring runs, bunting is usually a bad idea. There are times when bunting is appropriate: whether for purposes of “game theory” (getting the infield to play further in) or, in certain game situations, to play for the win rather than for overall run expectancy. In other words, while bunts are mostly a bad idea for increasing run expectancy, they can sometimes be a good idea for increasing Win Probability (WPA).
1. Adam Wainwright‘s bunt for .403 WPA on Aaron Heilman‘s error in the Cardinals’ June 28 6-5 win over the Diamondbacks on June 28. With no outs in the top of the ninth, the Cardinals were down 4-5. After Yadier Molina (!) and Brendan Ryan (!!) singles to put them on first and second, Wainwright came to the plate and bunted. Heilman fielded the ball but threw poorly to third, scoring the pinch-running Jaime Garcia (ah, Tony La Russa) to tie the game and moving Ryan and Heilman to second and third. A big play on an error, but actually not the biggest WPA play of the game. That play would be Skip Schumaker‘s (!!!) game-winning single to win the game later than inning.
Qualls had the following miserable line last year: 59 innings, 85 hits, 56 runs, seven home runs, 21 walks, 49 strikeouts. That’s just not good, no matter how you slice it.
Millwood had the following miserable line last year: 51 innings, 86 hits, 54 runs, 11 home runs, 25 walks, 36 strikeouts. That’s even worse than Qualls’ performance.
The difference? That awful stretch of pitching represents just a portion of Millwood’s 2010 season – June 3rd to August 1st, specifically. For two months, he was every bit as bad as Qualls, but because he’s a starting pitcher, those 51 innings didn’t represent his entire season’s body of work. While he was brutal for that stretch, he got a chance at redemption through a larger sample size, and he took advantage of it.
Here’s Millwood’s line from immediately after August 2nd through the end of the season: 66 innings, 60 hits, 25 runs, 7 home runs, 23 walks, 38 strikeouts. After posting a 9.18 ERA in the middle two months of the season, he finished the final two months with a 3.26 ERA, despite not improving his peripherals much at all. The only real difference? His BABIP during the first stretch was .410, and his BABIP in the second stretch was .262.
In the middle of the night, when his mind was racing again, Voros McCracken decided to share his discovery with the world. Before the celebrity and the job and the diagnosis and the drugs and the wristwatch, he had the idea. Had he realized it would forever change the way people look at baseball, perhaps McCracken would've chosen a better time to post it than when most people were asleep and a better place than an obscure online newsgroup.
For three months toward the end of 1999, McCracken spent his nights huddled up to a computer, married to spreadsheets and formulas, determined to prove to himself he wasn't crazy. He'd spend days bleary-eyed because the data he crunched into the wee hours was going to be his savior. Nobody would believe him otherwise. McCracken was working on a premise so radical that even he sometimes laughed at it...
MOD CUT
"If I give DIPS away for free once, that's fine," he says. "I came up with an idea that was monetized to the hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm broke. I'm glad I did it. Can't do it anymore. I've done enough to prove I can at least do something. Boy, that's a revolutionary idea that changed baseball. Can you do it again? No. I can't do it again unless you pay me.”
And there's the deepest, most hurtful part of all: Voros McCracken hasn't worked in baseball since the game chewed him up and spit him out five years ago. In an industry where progress moves by the inch, the man who sent it forward a mile can't get a job. And he's not quite sure why.
Last edited by NewToCA; 01-31-2011 at 08:46 PM..
Reason: copyright
I had read that article on McCracken, I found it unsurprising. I taught school for two decades plus and now and again I encountered exceptionally bright students. I do not mean high achievers or class valedictorians, I mean ones who would startle me with the originality of their thinking, deep insight into the human character, or complex grasp of some difficult subject matter. None of these people were socially well adjusted, several of them were the objects of cruel peer ridicule. The article suggests that McCracken belongs in this classification. This makes me suspect that McCracken is the sort who has great ideas to sell, but is terrible at selling himself.
Assuming that last is true, if McCracken had attempted to sell DIPS rather than popularize the concepts, he might have wrecked DIPS chances of being accepted. It is one thing to embrace an idea after it has been floating around in public and vetted by others, it is another thing to try and get someone to pay to take a chance on it before it has gone through peer review and gotten confirmed.
McCracken contributed for free, a GLF idea. Great leap forward ideas are of course quite rare, and to expect multiple ones from a single individual is unrealistic, although of course, it is possible. McCracken's worth as a sabermetric employee of a ML team would lie in his coming up with the next GLF idea and the team for whom he works being able to enjoy a monopoly on its benefits. Between McCracken's social misfit personality, and the improbability of his coming up with something as revolutionary and valuable as DIPs, he does not provide the ML teams with great motivation to hire him.
I hope that there is a happy ending for McCracken down the road, but I would not bet that it happens.
Heat maps show the location and relative frequency of pitches. For example:
Roy Halladay is amazing at avoiding giving up walks.
We can see the frequency of his pitches in, or near, the strike zone. Especially when compared to, say, Jonathan Sanchez
http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/456043_R_FA_2010_100_25_2_20101003.png (broken link)http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/456043_L_FA_2010_100_25_2_20101003.png (broken link)
whose fastball is about as likely to be out of the strike zone as it is to be in it (at least against right-handed batters)
By altering the settings a bit we can see how Halladay approaches left and right-handed pitches differently (or the same, depending).
http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/136880_R_FA_2010_50_15_2_20100927.png (broken link)http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/136880_L_FA_2010_50_15_2_20100927.png (broken link)
The maps are from the catcher's point of view and we can see how he pitches to the outside of the plate.
Conversely, we can see how Mariano Rivera pounds lefties inside and righties outside with his cutter.
http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/121250_R_FC_2010_100_15_2_20101002.png (broken link)http://www.fangraphs.com/hgraphs/121250_L_FC_2010_100_15_2_20101002.png (broken link)
I remember you had posted the pitch chart on the perfect game earlier and some of the key at bats.
Always good stuff, thanks for posting it!
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The Best Shape of my Life: Part 1
