SABR/sabermetrics thread 2014

Tomorrow is SABR Day! The NYC chapter annual meeting program for tomorrow is here (includes Koufax/Mantle biographer Jane Leavy):

http://nyc.sabr.org/2014ProgramSABR.pdf

Non-members can go to all chapter meetings. Find yr local meeting here:

http://sabr.org/sabrday

Oh great there is a Montreal event, I'll go.

'Quebeck Chapter program: The meeting is intended to focus primarily on the future of our SABR Quebec Chapter. All are welcome to attend, and we hope our gathering will provide an ideal opportunity for members to exchange freely with one another on how we see our future unfolding.'

I meant to strike the k.

President of the HOF got a number of challenging questions at the NY meeting.

The Quebec chapter meeting was mainly administrative, also they dealt with some sort of querelles between members, but they were all happy to see two young lads joining them. The work they do is really cool and I'm looking forward doing some research with them!

NYC author event:

"The Sabermetric Revolution" with Andrew Zimbalist Tuesday, January 28 @ 7:00 PM Bergino Baseball Clubhouse • 67 East 11 Street, Greenwich Village NYC • 212-226-7150

From the front office to the family room, sabermetrics has dramatically changed the way baseball players are assessed and valued. Rocketed to popularity by the 2003 bestseller "Moneyball" and the film of the same name, the use of sabermetrics to analyze player performance has appeared to be a David to the Goliath of systemically advantaged richer teams who could only be toppled by creative statistical analysis. The story has been so compelling that, over the past decade, team after team has integrated statistical analysis into their front offices. But how accurately can crunching numbers quantify a player's ability? Do sabermetrics truly level the playing field for financially disadvantaged teams? How much of the baseball analytic trend is fad and how much fact? "The Sabermetric Revolution" sets the record straight on the role of analytics in baseball, correcting common misinterpretations and developing new methods to assess the effectiveness of sabermetrics on team performance. While the conclusion is optimistic, there is also caution that sabermetric insights will be more difficult to come by in the future. Be part of a lively Clubhouse discussion with Andrew Zimbalist on January 28th for our first author event of 2014.

Please RSVP to: berg✧✧✧@a✧✧.c✧✧

that's bergino at aol

my Prospectus annual was delivered yesterday, in plenty of time for my colonoscopy prep.

The Pros and Cons of Pulling the Baseball

intersting

Starting in Fall 2014, BU will offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) through edX.org.

Senior lecturer of natural science and sabermetrics expert Andy Andres will engage in the data-driven analysis of baseball performance in Baseball Analytics.

http://www.bu.edu/dli/projects

great article, if you haven't seen it:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-strike-zone-during-the-pitchfx-era/

i wonder how much of the decline in offense in recent years has been due to umpires shifting strike zones rather than the other reasons that are commonly cited? this single table kind of makes a convincing argument:

AVG. SIZE OF CALLED STRIKE ZONE
Year - Square Inches
2008 : 436
2009: 435
2010 : 436
2011 : 448
2012 : 456
2013 : 459

on average, the strike zone is 5% larger than it was in 2008

Chadwick winners include Cory (PITCHf/x) Schwartz

http://sabr.org/latest/sabr-announces-2014-chadwick-award-recipients

For those of you who will be in the New York area next weekend, Baseball Prospectus will be hosting a two hour event on Saturday, February 8 from 3:00 - 5:00 PM at Foley's Pub and Restaurant to discuss the 2014 top 101 prospect list.

Jason Parks, Nick J. Faleris, and Chris Mellen will be the guests of honor. We'll discuss the process for selecting each team's top 10 list and this year's top 101 prospects, the work that goes into the evaluations, and hit on various players and their standing. We'll also spend a good amount of time taking questions from all those in attendance.

Oh and there will be plenty of free pizza for all!

Foley's NYC

18 W 33rd Street (Between 5th and 6th Ave across from the Empire State Building)

New York, NY 10001

check this out (esp. the video): http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mlbam-announces-new-data-stream-the-future-is-almost-here/

this could be an amazing tool.

hopefully it's accessible

rip pitchfx ;_;

This looks cool but I'm not clear about how they calculate the "direct path" for fly balls. Fielder run in curved paths because of the visual cues that our eyes use for tracking the ball in the air. The exact reasons for this are still not totally understood. So I don't know if they assume the "direct path" is a straight line (which would be unrealistic) or based on some kind of other model.

after watching Jon Jay run routes like this for the last few years -

)
(
)
(

- i can attest that some outfielders run more directly than others, and of course the more direct the path, the faster you'll get to the ball (and the better your range)

the direct path *is* a straight line, it's just unrealistic to expect outfielders to match it

I'm saying its unrealistic because its physiologically impossible because of how our eyes and brain track fly balls, so using it as a baseline would be unfair.

I dunno about that. No one argues that getting a hit every time at bat is realistic or even remotely possible, but a batting average measures how close a hitter comes to that standard.

Similarly I'm not saying it's possible to run an exact straight line every time is possible, but the better fielders get closer than the poor fielders, and it is measurable.

Sorry for typos, iphoning it

I guess route efficiency could be like O-Swing%, where for some hitters a high number is indicative of poor plate discipline and for others it's indicative an ability to hit outside the zone. For some (I would assume faster/more agile?) fielders "inefficient" routes will lead to superior ball tracking, for others it will lead to not getting there on time. Either way, I hope we get the data so we can find out if metrics like that are useful.

the direct path *is* a straight line, it's just unrealistic to expect outfielders to match it

I'm saying its unrealistic because its physiologically impossible because of how our eyes and brain track fly balls, so using it as a baseline would be unfair.

...and tracking a fly ball is often done while getting into the best possible position to make a throw.

so will the fielding data kill Oakland and Tampa Bay's advantage?

http://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2014/3/7/5473304/mlbam-advanced-defense-rays-athletics

tech team behind the player tracking system is doing a reddit ama at noon et

http://www.hardballtimes.com/of-pluses-and-minuses/

putting this here because i don't have time to read it now, but looks good

spreadsheet of ~600 tommy john surgeries, courtesy of jon roegele at the hardball times

some team bought a supercomputer

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/03/supercomputers

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkLL7oUCIAAJISM.png

from the cardinals after game show last night:

http://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/imported_assets/2130713/4eNAhRe_medium.jpg

which...if you waste any minutes of your life listening to the terrible cardinals announcers, you'll know that they can't bring up any stat that's not wins and ERA without hedging a bunch and making it clear to the audience that they're really old fashioned that they're not sure about all of these newfangled stats and they're a little scared

are they really cranky about it tho? i don't have any memory of those announcers but a lot of old baseball guys are gonna be like that in a self-deprecating "I'M SO OLD I DON'T UNDERSTAND SELFIES" sort of way and i don't mind that, like of course they're gonna respond that way. long as they don't sound bitter.

nah, what's really embarrassing about the cardinal announcers is that they're relatively young and still have no idea what's going on

see problem there is that announcers should never be young

it's cool, i'm sure the best fans in baseball already know that stuff

why i oughtta

the SFG announcer just made a joke about bunting (the decoration on outfield walls):

"Sabermetrics fans obviously not a fan of bunting..."
"ah...I see what you did there!"

2014: the year SABR broke?

Haven't had a chance to read this yet--and can't link to it because of the paywall--but from James's "Climbing the Stairway to Sandy Koufax":

http://www.billjamesonline.com/assets/1/7/Pitcher_Steps.gif

Since 1900 there have been only three seasons by a pitcher in which the pitcher had 25 wins, 300 strikeouts, an ERA under 2.50 and a winning percentage of .750. Those three seasons were by Sandy Koufax, 1963, Sandy Koufax, 1965, and Sandy Koufax, 1966.

Not really sabermetrics, I know. But written by the guy who invented sabermetrics, so I'm putting it here.

tsk tsk, bj not big on acknowledging ginormous park factors?

And era. He's written about that lots; pretty sure it was James himself who first pointed out how much Koufax's great awakening was a product of switching parks...I think he's just looking for a rough model of dominance. It's not perfect--Pedro was almost certainly the most dominant post-war pitcher for a concentrated 4-5 year period, so he should be at the top of the pyramid. But as a rough tool, going down the ladder, I think it makes sense.

i don't believe in podcasts, but perhaps someone would be intersted:

Ben Lindbergh @ben_lindbergh
Not only does Cuba have a sabermetric movement, but in some ways, it might be more advanced than MLB's. Podcast here: bbp.cx/a/23283

def worth a listen! mook, it's like radio.

SI article:

Alejandro Aldama, 25, clings to a few rolled-up sheets of computer paper like they are a map to hidden treasure. He paces in the underground section of stands behind home plate. Watching the game from here, sunk below the infield grass, is like watching from a foxhole.

Aldama is cofounder and vice president of the Independent Group for Baseball Investigation (GIIB), Cuba's first official sabermetric organization. The treasure map in his hand actually contains rosters and advanced stats. This year the GIIB is working with Industriales manager Lázaro Vargas, providing advanced statistical analysis, a first in Cuba for any team....

But information remains hard to come by in Cuba, and slow to spread. Serie Nacional teams don't have massive budgets or unlimited front-office resources. Fans are not equipped with computers and access to the Internet. And although major league teams view Cuba as a talent pipeline, Cuba itself is not hung up on the American conception of baseball. Players who play beautifully and rise to grand occasions are called guapo, or handsome, brave. In Cuba baseball is like art or love or faith—meant to be felt as much as understood.

To the 17 full-fledged members of the GIIB, the feeling and understanding of baseball are inseparable from one another. They're intellectuals, empiricists, the kind of guys who believe that the best way to express your love of something is to spend years studying and arguing about it. They talk about sabermetrics in the context of classic economists: "Marx's economic theories are basically sabermetrics," says Aldama. "It's the elimination of subjectivity." But before they organized into a formal group, they were just buddies—philosophers, engineers, computer scientists centered around the University of Havana—with a shared passion for baseball.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1210053/index.htm

Ben Lindbergh wins Spira Award for Grantland pitch-framing article

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=23421

i haven't had a chance to look at this too much yet, but this seems like a great resource: http://saberarchive.com/

Should we make a thread for this guy a la Mike Trout or is it too soon.

http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post?id=88501

Traditionally, the two-hole was the domain of contact hitters with good bat control, with premiums placed on the ability to hit behind the runner, to sacrifice bunt, and to generally move the leadoff man over (even if it meant making an out)....

But research by (Tom) Tango and his compatriots suggests teams have been doing it wrong. After examining how important each batting event (single, double, walk, etc.) is to each lineup slot — based on factors such as how many runners are likely to be on base and how many outs they’re likely to hit with — the data says a team ought to bat its three best hitters in the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 4 slots, with the most balanced hitter occupying the two-hole. That’s a far cry from the conventional wisdom of slotting the best hitter either third or fourth, and putting a weak contact specialist at No. 2.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-spot-in-mlb-lineups-where-managers-are-still-ignoring-sabermetrics/

Long piece by James today (he's gone for a month and left some writing behind) called "Potential" that will be seen as sabermetric heresy by many. I've only skimmed, but the thrust seems to be that potential can be measured, and that the gap between potential and actual performance is a gateway to understanding team chemistry, which is real and can also be measured.

The other side of this argument was ridiculing "chemistry", ridiculing the notion that Gil Hodges contributed heavily to the success of his teams by his contributions to the team’s chemistry. That line of argument traces back, I know, to things that I wrote in the 1980s. In the 1980s, I also ridiculed chemistry and character in assessing baseball players; I wrote essentially the same things that I now disagree with. It wasn’t that I was wrong, exactly, but that I wrote about these issues with a lack of understanding and with a lack of clarity. By so doing, I held back the development of clear thinking in this area.

I feel like one way general managers account for 'chemistry' these days is when choosing between statistically insignificant players.. like this is the reason dudes like Jerry Hairston, Nick Punto, etc have careers.

u kno punto's been worth 2.4 WAR/600 PA? and that if u try to get to jerry hairston jr on FG you end up at an error page? thanks a lot dad

Surprise NL leaders in fWAR over the last calendar year:

C - Jonathan Lucroy
1B - Freddie Freeman

positionally, that is. I didn't think FF would be ahead of Goldschmidt.

Love seeing Altuve ahead of Beltre, Bautista (though it appears that Ks are factored):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bq0tx3ECAAEtzHw.png:large

This is happening in Boston next month, but it's long sold out. Coulda gone if I'd known my medical schedule in advance.

http://saberseminar.com/schedule/

btw Lindbergh has moved fulltime from BP to Grantland.

https://twitter.com/msimonespn/status/491971589437931521

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtPVjabCIAAiNQA.png

Houston convention under way, but rather than highlight Clemens or Reid Ryan....

Another panel discussion centered on the history of the Colt .45s, the first Major League team to call Houston home. Four former players for the Colt .45s -- Bob Aspromonte, Hal Smith, Jimmy Wynn and Carl Warwick -- spoke about what it was like to be part of an expansion team in Texas.

Smith, a catcher who had hit a key home run for the Pirates in the 1960 World Series, said that he welcomed the chance to play for an expansion team because it means regular playing time and a chance to play in a warm climate. But perhaps he didn't know the full extent of what he would get.

"It turned out to be a fantastic year for me," Smith said. "I'll never forget, the first doubleheader I caught was on July 4. It was about 104 degrees. They carried 87 people out of the stands, and I lost about 13-14 pounds that day. I thought, 'Maybe there will be two-thirds of me after the year.'"

Mickey Herskowitz, a reporter who covered the Astros for four decades, said that the Colt .45s were one of the most entertaining teams you'd ever see. He spoke about the team's travel attire -- light blue cowboy suits -- and said the team's Spring Training facility was a story in and of itself.

"Apache Junction was the strangest place any baseball team had ever held Spring Training," he said of Houston's first Spring Training home in Arizona. "It was out there in the desert, 19 miles away to Mesa and that was the nearest anything. ... The Red Garter saloon is where everybody did their serious training. There was a supermarket, and that was it. You couldn't get into any trouble unless it came to you."

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article/mlb/roger-clemens-stars-at-sabr-gathering-in-houston?ymd=20140731&content_id=87331642&vkey=news_mlb

Ton of video already up at sabr.org.

Sorry to be missing it for the first time since 2000... I was distressed to learn of this member's death, as he was one of the few I talke dto and hung out with nearly every year.

http://sabr.org/latest/memoriam-paul-hirsch

Last night they went to the Sugar Land Skeeters game, and Tomo Ohka took the loss for Bridgeport! Dontrelle Willis is also pitching for Bridgeport.

‏@MikeBatesSBN
BREAKING NEWS: Roger Clemens is a 52 year old man with frosted tips. #sabr44

research winners

To what extent should an organization build their roster through homegrown players, or through acquisitions? Sanderson and Crownover examined the rosters for all playoff teams in MLB for the 5-year period from 2009 – 2013, using variables for player position, league affiliation, and how the player was acquired, and also incorporated the player’s WAR value. Using regression analysis and sampling, they explore whether having homegrown at certain key positions does, in fact, correlate with better performance.

http://sabr.org/latest/sabr-44-haupert-sanderson-crownover-win-2014-presentation-awards

Harry Pavlidis reviews the altcast on FS1:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=24846

https://twitter.com/statcast

it was interesting though I think just using the game feed with these guys instead of the regular announcers would've been way better

lol @ me for thinking that was the only broadcast of the game during Game 1

i think the mother network wd've balked at that, as it could imply the only problem w/ the usual game coverage is the yapping. Plus they wanted to use charts stats etc.

Thoughts on Bannister being hired by the Rangers? What type of guy are they getting?

David Schoenfield (3:18 PM)
Don't know a whole lot about him but I think this is the key: The Pirates are one team that not only uses sabermetric analysis in the front office but the coaching staff probably applied it more than any other organization. Clint Hurdle and the coaching staff would have daily meetings (or close to it) with their analytics department. One of the stats guys even traveled on most road trips. So I think Jon Daniels figures he's going to get a manager who is willing to take that approach to managing.

If anything, that's the next big step in sabermetrics. All front offices have the data now. It's figuring out how to get the important pieces of information to your field staff and from there to the players.

One example for the Pirates, besides the fact that they shifted a lot the past couple of years. Their numbers suggested pitching inside is very important. They stressed this to the pitchers. I believe they led the league in hit batters the past two years, but it was something the stat guys and the Hurdle believed was important. That's an easy message to relay to players.

Jonah Keri argues that Bochy is one of the great all-time managers:

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/bruce-bochy-best-manager-san-francisco-giants-baseball/

He seems specifically made for the post-season era.

Bochy was never handed a spare no expenses 100-win juggernaut like Torre had with the Yankees year after year. He seems to get the best out of what he's given with clubs whose "true talent level" is around .500, where the difference between a good manager and a bad one can be significant. The difference between an 85 win team and a 90 win team is huge in terms of how likely they are to make the playoffs, and Bochy makes his living out of maximizing what you can get from that kind of collection of talent.

Chili Davis's career pitching record: he got in two innings at the age of 33, didn't walk or strike out anybody, didn't give up a hit, hit one batter. ERA: 0.00; FIP: 4.49. I realize there's some quirk there caused by an extremely small sample, but as a practical matter, I don't get that. If a pitcher hits one batter every couple of innings but retires the other six guys, where do the four-and-a-half runs come from? Here's the actual game, and 18-2 loss to the Rangers:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CAL/CAL199306170.shtml

http://ken.arneson.name/2014/11/10-things-i-believe-about-baseball-without-evidence

^^^this is v. intersting btw

for some reason the link isn't working for me