Cybermetrics

Players With Three Or More Consecutive Seasons With 7+ WAR

2012-01-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

One idea I have about the Hall of Fame is that worthy players should have at least some significant peak value. Maybe something like 3 straight MVP caliber years. Baseball Reference suggests that a WAR of 8 or higher is an MVP type season. So I lowered it just a bit to 7. This would actually make for a very restrictive Hall. I found only 36 players in this group. They are listed below.

The co-leaders are Henry Louis Aaron and Henry Louis Gehrig. Their two streaks were exactly 30 years apart. Gehrig's was 1926-37 and Aaron's was 1956-67. Some great players did not make it, including Frank Robinson and George Brett (who are definitely Hall of Famers, probably in anyone's book). Ron Santo had 4 straight years, 1964-67. Jackie Robinson had 5 straight from 1949-53. That is incredible. Andruw Jones and Jim Edmonds are two of the more interesting surprises.

Who Had The Flukiest Seasons? (Part 2)

2012-01-02T13:11:00.000-08:00

Part 1 was actually Which Players Had The Most Uncharacteristically Good Seasons? What I did there was to find all the players who had 10+ seasons of 400+ PAs and then see who had the biggest difference between their average (offensive winning percentage) OWP and their highest. Here I simply looked at their best OWP vs. their 2nd best. Jeter actually had .715 in 2006. That would drop him down to about 87th place out of about 500 guys. So there could be some other big ones since then but I will need to look into that. I also looked at this including everyone with 3+ seasons of 400+ PAs. I will post that if I get a chance or you can email me about it.

Who Had A Season With WAR ≥ 10 But Is Not In The Hall Of Fame?

2011-12-30T08:18:00.000-08:00

The table below shows all the position players who had at least one season of WAR 10 or higher (from Baseball Reference).

Of all the players who are eligible, the only one not in the Hall is Norm Cash. Now it might seem like his 1961 season when he batted .361, hit 41 HRs, drew 132 walks had a .487 OBP and a .662 SLG was the flukiest season ever. He never batted .300 again (his last year was 1974) nor did he ever reach 40 HRs or 100 RBIs. He never reached a .400 OBP again or a .600 SLG (he only reached .500 3 more times-he was pretty much a full-time player until 1973).

But his 1961 season was not the flukiest. I have written about this before. See Which Players Had The Most Uncharacteristically Good Seasons? Cash had the 25th flukiest season.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the voting for some of these other guys. Bonds, Giambi, Sosa and AROD might be penalized by some voters for using PEDs. Pujols should get in easily. It is probably too early to tell for Kemp. But Beltre is interesting. His yearly performance has been inconsistent. But he now has 47.6 WAR and he will be 33 starting next year. He is 189th in career WAR among position players but if he could get up to about 62, he would be in the top 100. His last two years were 6.1 and 5.2, so another 14.4 seems possible. Being in the top 100 would make him a legitimate candidate.

Now a WAR of 10 gives an edge to guys who played after 1961, when the season went to 162 games (in the AL, 1962 in the NL). So I looked for guys who had 9.5 or more before then (covering about the 5% difference in games from a 154 game season). There were a total of 82 seasons of WAR ≥ 10 and another 21 ≥ 9.5 before the 162 game season came in. Of the guys in that group who are not in the Hall of Fame we have George Stone (9.8, 1906), Joe Jackson (9.5, 1912), and Al Rosen (9.7, 1953, the year he missed the triple crown by losing the batting title to Mickey Vernon, .337-.336).

Click here to see George Stone's stats at Baseball Reference. He did not have a long career, ending at 33 with 3600 PAs. His next highest WAR was 5.2. Click here to read his SABR bio by John McMurray. This passage discusses his decline:

"After his great initial success, Stone held out for $5,000 to start the 1907 campaign. In order to make sure that team owner Robert Hedges met his demands, Stone did not report to the team until right before the start of the season. The holdout, as one publication put it, "seems to have been the turning point of his career." On one level, "the papers aired the case and naturally by some Stone was censured for what was termed unreasonable demands." Moreover, "when he was finally granted the amount he asked, the fans figured that a player getting such big money should never fail to deliver the goods. Any time Stone failed, and unfortunately for him he had a rather tough year in 1908, he was roasted to a turn by the fans. Stone began to show signs of slowing up that year."

Stone's statistics fell off in both 1907 and 1908, though he was still an outstanding hitter. One account indicates that he contracted malaria in 1908, and Stone's production plummeted in 1909 when he suffered an injury to his ankle. That injury cost Stone his speed, which had enabled him to beat out many infield hits. He also had problems with his arm, and "any time a ball was hit into his territory the opposing base runners advanced almost at will. The worry over all these things caused Stone's batting to suffer and as a result the sensation of the American League of 1906 was a near joke in 1910." Stone never hit higher than .300 after 1907, and his average fell to .256 in 1910, his last season in the major leagues. Stone returned to the Milwaukee Brewers in 1911, batting .282, but injuries led him to retire from professional baseball just 12 games into the 1912 campaign."

Why Didn't The Writers Vote Johnny Mize Into The Hall Of Fame?

2011-12-28T09:56:00.000-08:00

He got in, via the Veterans Committee, in 1981. So it might seem a little late and silly to complain about it.

But he never he even got 50% of the vote from the writers (he topped out at 43.6% of the vote in 1971 and he got 41.3% in 1973, his last year of eligibility). If we went strictly by WAR, it seems like he should definitely be in. Even now, about 50 years from when he first became eligible, he is 55th in career WAR among position players with 70.2. He had 8 top 5 finishes and one first place. He was in the top 5 each year from 1937-40.

So he had very high career value and peak value. In Win Shares, he also had 8 top 5 finishes among position players, including 3 first places finishes. He was 104th through 2001 in career Win Shares (338) including pitchers. He also missed 3 seasons due to WW II. Bill James ranked him as the 6th best 1B man in the 2nd Historical Abstract.

We certainly cannot fault the writers in the 1960s and 1970s for not being up on sabermetrics. He did seem to have very good conventional stats, though. He hit 359 HRs and easily would have made 400 if not for the war (he was 10th in career HRs through 1960, his first year of eligibility). He had a .312 career average. He lead the NL in HRs 4 times, RBIs 3 times and AVG once. He was selected to 10 all-star teams. The writers seemed to like him when he played. He had 4 top 5 finishes in the MVP voting and even now he is 57th in MVP shares with 2.46 (of course, there was not much MVP voting before 1931, but that is still a pretty good rank). If a guy was the 57th best player since 1931, that would be a good case for being in.

So why didn't the writers vote him in, never reaching 50% of the vote? His bio at SABR by Jerry Grillo has one interesting quote: "Broeg and others have indicated that Mize’s defensive liabilities probably cost him..." Yet his career defensive WAR is a positive 2.6. He also finished in the top 3 in fielding Win Shares 7 times among NL 1B men (and 1st in 1948). Bill James gave him a B as a fielder. The SABR bio mentions that he got his nickname "The Big Cat" due to his fielding, scooping out bad throws.

The Baseball Reference Bullpen article on Mize says this:

"For a player with such notable sabermetric statistics, he was also quite late in being inducted into the Hall of Fame, finally being chosen by the Veteran's Committee 28 years after his retirement, in 1981. There are at least two possible explanations for this. One, during his playing years, he apparently did not enjoy particularly good relations with the baseball sportswriters, from whose ranks are chosen those members who vote on candidates for the Hall of Fame. Two, his power, his fine batting average, and his extremely good On-Base Percentage were not as evident to his contemporaries, who were more impressed by Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial, as they are today in the light of sabermetric analysis.

Another couple reasons are quite powerful, too. First, his lifetime stats are not very impressive compared to most Hall of Famers - he barely had 2,000 hits, he had 359 home runs (currently # 65 on the all-time list as of 2006, one below Gary Gaetti), and he had 1,337 RBI (currently # 76 on the all-time list as of 2006, four below Gary Gaetti). Second, he played in his early years in a ballpark that favored hitters. So he was a top-notch player, but one that didn't put up numbers as large as most Hall of Famers. Since he missed three years to World War II, the Hall of Fame rightfully adjusted for the numbers."

I don't know anything about his relationship with the writers. But as I mentioned earlier, he did well in the MVP voting (a point Bill James has made about Ted Williams).

On the park effects, those are taken into account in WAR and Win Shares. Now it is possible that park effects are not always fair to individual hitters. It was only 250 feet down the line in the Polo Grounds. Yet the park factors for the Giants in the years Mize was on them are pretty neutral. Click here to see them at Baseball Reference. So maybe his hitting stats don't get adjusted downwards as much as they should.

Here are his AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS both home and road:

Home: .320/.406/.598/1.004
Road: .305/.389/.527/.916

So a big split, but not that bad. His road stats are very good. Again, the writers might not have had access to this, but it seems like there should have been a general sense that he hit well everywhere, given that these guys watched him play all the time.

In fact, if we only used his road OPS, it would be the 37th highest of all-time through 2009 (relative to the league average) of players with 5000+ PAs (using the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia). His road OPS was about 25% higher than the league average. He is 9th among 1B men (guys who played at least 50% of their games there). One of the guys ahead of him is Todd Helton, who benefited even more from his home park.

In his first year of eligibility, 1960, he got only 16.7% of the vote. Click here to see the voting that year at Baseball Reference. Twelve guys got more votes than he did that year and he had more WAR than all of them. He beat 8 of them buy 20 or more WAR. Edd Roush, Sam Rice and Eppa Rixy all got over 50% of the vote that year, a level Mize never achieved. None of them had even 52 WAR (Mize had 70.2). All but one of the 12 got in before Mize (except Lazzeri). Most were by the Veterans Committee. So they too, did not give Mize the credit he deserved.

I think the writers, and to a lesser extent the Veterans Committee, did a poor job in evaluating Mize. I hope the writers have been, and are getting, better. But when I see the voting for guys like Raines and Bagwell, not to mention Lou Whitaker being gone after just one year on the ballot, I am not sure.

More discussion at Baseball Think Factory

Don Mattingly’s Peak vs. Fred McGriff’s

2011-12-23T05:21:00.000-08:00

See HOF Story 2: The Holdovers by Joe Posnanski. (Hat Tip: The Book blog)

POZ wrote:

“Don Mattingly’s career was too short, but few would say McGriff was as good a player as Mattingly at their best. I wouldn’t.”

From 1984-86, Mattingly had an OPS+ of 158. From 1988-90, McGriff had an OPS+ of 159. McGriff’s 1988-91 OPS+ of 156 also beats Mattingly’s 1984-87 OPS+ of 155.

But in WAR, Mattingly is ahead over three years 19.6-16 and ahead over 4 years 25.3-20.6. Over the 4 years Mattingly had 0.7 more defensive WAR, so that is only a small part of the difference, meaning Mattingly’s offensive WAR advantage was 4.0. He had about 157 more PAs. It does not seem like that would give him an edge of 4.0. I can’t tell what accounts for it.

I also found Mattingly’s best 4 year period for Win Shares was 14 better than McGriff’s (122-108). Mattingly had 2.3 more fielding Win Shares, so most of the difference is due to hitting. Again, when their OPS+ is so close, this is surprising.

How Well Might Pujols Hit After Age 35?

2011-12-21T09:54:00.001-08:00

The first thing I tried to do was create a set of comparables. So I found all the 1B men who had 4000+ PAs before the age of 32 since 1920 who also had a relative slugging percentage of 120 or higher (that means their SLG was 20% better than the league average-I used the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia). These guys had to have played at least half their games at 1B. I also included any DHs that fit (that added in Frank Thomas). So I was trying to set up a group of power-hitting 1B men to use in comparison. I went up through 2009.

This made for a total of 35 players. Three are still active (Thome, Giambi and Helton). But, of the 32 who were not active, just 8 of them had 1000+ PAs after the age of the 35. Here they are with their RCAA, or runs created above average (it is park adjusted):

If we assume a full season is 700 PAs, then none of these guys reached even five full seasons after the age of 35 and only two reached four full seasons (although you could argue that McCovey and McGriff are also at 4+ full seasons if you use 500+ PAs). But that means out of the 32 comparable players, only 4 could be said to have played at least 4 full seasons after the age of 35 and Pujols has a contract calling for 6 seasons after 35.

Now the best performer here seems to be Palmeiro. We don't know how much of his performance was due to drugs. Again using the 700 PA for a full season, he gets 4.43 seasons. If we assume a -2 wins below average for a replacement player, that gets him 8.86 WAR. Then if we assume about 10 runs per win, his RCAA gets us about 12 wins. Then we are at about 21 WAR for Palmeiro as the best performer among Pujols' comparables (of course, I am assuming no negative WAR from defense).

Of course, Pujols is better than the average of these guys. This group collectively had only about 38% as many PAs post-35 than pre-32 and their average RCAA per PA fell from about .069 to about .022 (I added 1000 PAs and an RCAA of 100 to Mize for ages 30 and 31 which were missed due to the War). That means that Pujols, if this goup is an indicator, will get 2846 PAs after age 35 and get about .0338 RCAA per PA (he has average about .10 RCAA per PA so far in his career (I estimated his RCAA for the last two years since I don't have the latest Sinins data yet).

I assumed that Pujols' dropoff in RCAA per PA will be the same as this group. So he would get about 96 total RCAA. So that is 9.6 wins. Then he gets about 4 full seasons so we had another 8 wins, again assuming -2 wins is replacement. So that would be 17.6 WAR for Pujols after age 35 (again assuming no negative defensive WAR). Remember that he has 6 contract years at $25 million a year. So the Angels will be paying $150 million for 17.6 WAR or $8.5 million per WAR. Maybe with inflation, a championship or two and extra ticket sales that might be worth it.

Now the three guys who are still active are Thome, Giambi and Helton. He are their PAs and OPS+ after the age of 35 so far

Jim Thome 2236/138
Jason Giambi 1601/113
Todd Helton 964/103

I assume Helton will get past the 1000 PA mark. So combining this group with the others would mean that we have 11 out of 35 of the comparables getting at least 1000 PAs. I don't have their RCAA for the last two years and I don't know how much more they will play but my guess is that if I added them to the other 8 guys and re-did the analysis it would not change things much.

One thing to remember though is that Pujols is a very unusual player. He started playing full-time at age 21 and in 11 seasons has not missed many games. Only 20 players since 1920 had more PAs under the age of 32 than he did and only 3 had more WAR. So maybe looking at other power-hitting 1B men is not the way to go. One interesting thing here is that some other all-time great 1B men did very little after the age of 35. That includes Gehrig, Foxx and Greenberg. But perhaps each of them has highly unique reasons for not aging well that won't necessarily apply to Pujols. Gehrig had ALS, Foxx was a drinker and Greenberg had the chance to move into the front office.

So the last thing I will do here is compare Pujols to all the players who had 6500+ PAs since 1920 under the age of 32. Through this year, there were 65 players in this group (I took out some guys who are still active and are not yet 36-see list below). Of these 65, 23 had at least 1000 PAs after the age of 35 (that includes Jeter and Damon who might keep getting more PAs). So just about one-third of these comparables ended up with at least 1000 post 35 PAs. That is similar to what I found for the power hitting 1B men. They got about 33% as many PAs post 35 as pre-32 and about 17% of the WAR. If Pujols gets 17% as much WAR, he will get about 15.4 WAR after age 35. Maybe 16 if Damon and Jeter are taken out.

Here is that list:

Adam Dunn
Albert Pujols
Adrian Beltre
Jimmy Rollins
Andruw Jones
Carlos Beltran
Edgar Renteria
Alex Rodriguez

Batters Who Had 7+ Seasons With A 150 Or Higher OPS+

2011-12-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

The PA minimum was 400. Here is the list of those 38 players. I highlighted Elmer Flick because he is the answer (or maybe an answer) to a trivia question: name a player who led the NL in RBI's and later went on to lead the AL in SBs. I don't think there are any others but I am not sure.

Flick was finally voted into the Hall of Fame in 1963 by the Veterans Committee. He was 87 but luckily still alive. He only got 0.4% of the vote from the writers in 1938 and that was it. In an 8 year period he had 7 top 10 finishes in WAR among position players including 5 in the top 5. Even now he ranks pretty high in career WAR (133rd) with 56.7. Through 1938, he was 36th. He had 9 top 10 finishes in OPS+ including 6 top 5 finishes and a first.

Health problems cut his career short. He played only 99 games after the age of 31 (when he had a 153 OPS+). See his SABR Bio by Angelo Louisa. Here is an excerpt:

"Despite his short but highly productive career in the majors, Flick remained largely forgotten by the baseball community in general and the Hall of Fame voters in particular until Ty Cobb's death in 1961. Some articles written about the Georgia Peach mentioned the aborted 1907 trade and thus revived interest in who Flick was and what made him worthy of being suggested in a trade for Cobb. The renewed attention, in turn, led to Flick being voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1963, an honor he treasured until he died from congestive heart failure at 8:25 A.M. on January 9, 1971, only two days before his 95th birthday. Flick also suffered from mycosis fungoides, a malignant lymphoma, which contributed to his death."

Those who just missed with 6 were

Alex Rodriguez
Billy Hamilton
Gary Sheffield
Harmon Killebrew
Harry Heilmann
Harry Stovey
Jeff Bagwell
Larry Walker
Mike Piazza
Pete Browning
Reggie Jackson
Vladimir Guerrero

Ron Santo Finally Makes It To The Hall of Fame, As He Should Have

2011-12-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

He got 15 votes from the 16 member "Golden Era" committee. I read a couple of stories about it but I did not see any statements from the committee or its members on why they picked Santo and no one else. I think Santo definitely deserves it. It might have helped that a former teammate, Billy Williams, was on the committee along with long time Santo supporter Brooks Robinson. I have written some posts on Santo in the past. Here are their links:

What Might Explain Ron Santo's Low Hall Of Fame Voting Percentages?

I used some voting formulas I had come up with and it seemed like Santo just did not have the kinds of stats and accomplishments that the voters (writers) liked.

Did Santo Play In An Era Of Poor Third Basemen?

I showed that he didn't. Sometimes our advanced sabermetric stats might be a little mis-leading since we compare players to the league average at his position during his time period. If Santo had been up against many weak 3B men, that could make his value look greater. But I don't think that is what happened.

Santo Was Valuable Outside Of Wrigley Field

I showed that although he hit much better in Wrigley Field than elsewhere he was still very valuable in road games (his career OPS in home games was .905 while it was .748 on the road-this includes the 117 game season for the White Sox in 1974). This was based on the run environment of his era, which was generally low. So although his road stats don't look like much, they were highly valuable.

Was Ron Santo The Best Player In the National League From 1964-68?

I looked at various sabermetric measures. If we was not the best, he was close.

Ron Santo vs. Brooks Robinson And Hall Of Fame Voting

I showed that Santo's performance compared favorably to Robinson even though Robinson did much better in the voting.

Peak Value And Hall Of Fame Worthiness

I showed that Santo's performance from 1965-67 might have been tied for the 24th best 3-year run in baseball history.

Teams That Won The Most Post-Season Games Over A Two-Year Period Yet Failed To Win The World Series In Either Year

2011-11-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Rangers won 18 post-season games over the last two years but did not win the World Series in either year. In fact, they won more post-season games than 11 of the World Series winners since 1995 (using both the year before and after). The Rangers' 18 wins is the 6th highest two year total and all the teams with more did win the series in at least one of the years. Here are the leaders for each two year period and the teams that failed to win the series in either year are in red. There were some ties so all of those teams are listed. I think I counted and entered everything right. Let me know if you spot any mistakes.

Does Yahoo Sports Have Mistakes In Its Baseball Data?

2011-11-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

The table below shows the discrepancies between Yahoo and Baseball Reference

It seem like SLGA is supposed to be slugging percentage allowed. Yahoo may have divided TB by TBF instead of AB. Buehrle has allowed 4011 TB in his career and 4011/10317 = .389. But if they used that for SLGA, what is OBSA? I thought it might be OPS allowed, but then Buehrle should have .704 using Yahoo's numbers. But they show only .689. So it is not clear what is going on.

Here are the links the Yahoo pages for these three pitchers.

Buehrle

Halladay

Lincecum

Now for Baseball Reference

Buehrle

Halladay

Lincecum

The Pirates were lucky to win the 1971 World Series, but how lucky?

2011-11-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

This came up on one of the SABR bulletin boards.

Their OPS differential for the whole season was .073. That translates into a winning pct of .592 using my equation Pct = .5 + 1.26*OPSDIFF. The Orioles had a differential of .096, good for a pct of .621. That means that the Orioles would have 53% chance of winning any given game using Bill James' Log 5 method. I came up with the Orioles having about a 56.5% chance of winning the series, taking into account all the different ways they could win a series of a given length. They also had home field advantage, which should have increased things about 2% (2% more than 55.7% so about 58%)

7.9% of the time it is an Orioles sweep

14.8% of the time the O's win in 5

17.4% of the time they win in 6

16.4% of the time they win in 7

So the Pirates had a 42% chance of winning

Did The 2002 A's Of "Moneyball" Fame Win More Games Than Their Stats Might Predict?

2011-11-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Maybe. I plugged their OPS differential into the following equation for winning percentage:

Pct = .5 + 1.26*OPSDifferential

The A's had an OPS of .771 while their pitchers allowed an OPS of .699. So their differential was .072. The equation predicts a pct of .591 or about 95.7 wins. They actually won 103. So they won about 7.3 more games than expected. The standard error of the regression that generated the above equation was 5.04, so the A's were 1.44 standard deviations above their expectation. Not huge, but not small either.

They did have a 32-14 record in 1-run games for a pct. of .696. They had a .612 pct. in all other games. If they had that for all games, they would have won 99.16 games, alot closer to what their OPS differential predicts.

I don't see anything in particular that explains why they outperformed their projection. The table below shows how both their hitters and pitchers performed in various situations followed by their differentials in those situations (data from Retrosheet).

Nothing really jumps out. Their differentials with runners in scoring position (RISP) are a bit higher than with none on and to a lesser extent with bases loaded. Their OBP differential looks good in close and late situations but their SLG differential is much lower than normal. Their overall OBP differential was .024 while for SLG it was .048.

The A's grounded into 128 DPs, just one more than their opponents, whom they out OBPed .339 to .315. Their GIDP rate was 10% while the league average was 11%, the rate the A's allowed (some data also from Baseball Reference).

The A's only had 20 sacrifice hits while their opponents had 50. So they saved 30 outs that way. The A's were46-20 stealing while their opponents were 68-46. So they saved 26 outs there. All of that is about two games worth of outs.

The A's out homered their opponents 205-135, by 70. They only hit 10 more 2B's than their opponents and had the same number of 3B's. So their advantage in SLG was almost entirely determined by this big HR advantage and HRs have one additional edge over other hits in that they guarantee at least one run.

Has Starlin Castro done things offensively that guys who go on to be ten-time All-Stars and Hall of Famers did?

2011-11-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

New Cub GM Theo Epstein recently said of Castro:

"Offensively, the things he has done is what guys who go on to be ten-time All-Stars and Hall of Famers do."

See Theo Epstein Loves Starlin Castro and Other Bullets at "Bleacher Nation."

The list below shows all 2B-SS who had 500+ PAs through the age of 21 and their OPS+.

He is close to two Hall of Famers, Alomar and Ripken. He has done better so far than two frequent All-Stars, Whitaker and Randolph. But Delino DeShields and Gregg Jeffries did better and are not in the Hall and Jeffries had just two All-Star teams.

Here are three SS he is ahead of who made the Hall:

Travis Jackson 92
Robin Yount 86
Rabbit Maranville 78

Teams Overdue For A World Series Appearance

2011-10-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

A team is overdue if the number of years since their last appearance is greater than the number of teams in their league. The table below lists all such teams as of now in no particular order. Once we get into 2012, the Indians will be 15 years from their last appearance.

Some are very overdue. Some not only have not been making it to the World Series, but they have been doing poorly otherwise, too. This may seem like alot of teams, but at the conclusion of the 1958 season, 11 of the 16 teams were overdue.

We have always had hapless teams. The Phillies went 35 years without a pennant before finally getting one in 1950 but then went another 30 years. The original Senators did not win one in their last 27 years in Washington. The St. Louis Browns went only once to the Series in over 50 years before moving to Baltimore. The White Sox went 40 years without one until 1959 and then went another 46 years.

It is probably hard to quantify "overdueness" over baseball's history to accurately assess how bad things are now. In the pre-1960 years, you could be overdue in just 8 years so it may not have felt so bad to the fans. Now it means a longer time period. Right now, it would take 7 years to clear out the back log of teams overdue and it would require all of the hapless teams to get in over this stretch (it does not seem likely).

The following table shows the teams that are at least half way to being overdue.

OPS Differential Gives Big Edge To Rangers

2011-10-19T11:33:00.001-07:00

The Rangers hitters had an OPS of .800 during the season and their pitchers allowed a .698 OPS. So that is a .102 differential.

The comparable numbers for the Cardinals are .766-.717-.049.

The following equation gives a good estimate of winning percentage.

Pct = .5 + 1.3*OPSDIFF

That gives the Rangers a winning percentage of .633 and the Cards .564. Using the Log5 method for predicting the probability of winning by Bill James and Dallas Adams (and posted by Tangotiger)

W%(A v. B) = W%(A)*(1 - W%(B))/(W%(A)*(1 - W%(B)) + (1 - W%(A))*W%(B))

we get the Rangers having a 57% chance of winning any given game (this leaves out home field advantage).

The Rangers were even better in September, with a differenital of .298 (.916 - .618). The Cards had .125 (.807 - .682).

The Rangers, however, have a negative differential in the playoffs so far of -.017 (.764 - .781) while the Cards have .096 (.793 - .699). Combining the September differential and the playoff differential in a weighted average by games gives the Rangers a differential of .208 and the Cards .116.

Not The Year Of The Pitcher In The Playoffs

2011-10-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

In all playoff games, the AL teams averaged 4.87 runs per game. The AL runs per game this year was 4.46 during the regular season.

The NL average so far is 4.63 (not counting tonight's game with the Cards leading 11-6 in the bottom of the 7th). If it ends up with that score, the NL average will be 4.88. If the Brewers could win 12-11 and tomorrow's game ends up 1-0, the NL average will be 4.82. The NL runs per game this year was 4.13 during the regular season.

Only 10 of the 30 games so far had both teams scoring 4 or fewer runs. Only 5 games had both teams scoring 3 or fewer runs.

Carl Yastrzemski's GDP Rate In 1967? 3%

2011-10-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

That was by far the lowest of his career. So another reason why that season was so great. I did not see very much on this. See The Great Forgotten Season: Carl Yastrzemski, 1967 by Cody Swartz of "Bleacher Report."

Yastrzemski's only season when he had a higher AVG against lefties was 1967. He also hit especially great after August 31. He batted .417 (40 for 96). He ended August with a .3085 AVG. He slugged .760 after Aug. 31. Through that date it was .594. See Was The Left Hand Of God Responsible For The Red Sox Miracle In 1967?.

That season was also one of the most indispensable seasons ever, meaning his team really needed him to have a great year. See Indispensable Seasons Go To WAR!

The table below show's his GDPs and GDP rate for each year of his career. 1967 was much lower than any other year. I also show his SO rate for each year (using PA - IBB - SH). Data from Baseball Reference. I thought maybe if his strikeout rate had been alot higher that year it would account for the lower DP rate. But it does not look that way. The one thing Yaz did that year that he never did before was hit alot of HRs, 44. His previous high had been 20. So maybe putting the ball in the air more helped. Baseball Reference does have his FB/GB ratios for any year. But in other years when he hit 40+ HRs, the GDP rate was not so low (1969 & 1970). Maybe he was just faster that year.

How many runs did he save by hitting into fewer DPs? Averaging his rate over 1966 and 1968, I get about 9 DPs saved. What was it worth to not hit into a DP? Using Tangotiger's Run Expectancy Matrix, 1950-2010, my guess is that it would be worth between .122 and .198 runs in each case. Using the 1950-68 matrix, with a man on 1st and 2 outs, the run expectancy is .264. With 2 outs and none on, it is .066. So if there is a man on 1st and no outs and Yaz strike's out or beats the throw to first, you save .198 runs. Doing something similar with a man on 1st and 1 out gets us .122 runs saved.

The average of those two is .16 and over 9 DPs avoided, it is just 1.44 runs. That may not be much but when the Red Sox and Twins played the last game of the season tied for first, the lower DP total might have mattered.

If I used run values from the 1999 Big Bad Baseball Annual, a GDP was -.37 runs and other outs were worth -.09. So not hitting into a DP and making another kind of out saves .28 runs for a total of 2.52 runs over 9 DPs avoided.

Now maybe Yaz got hits instead of hitting into DPs. But the two other years when he hit over .320 he had about a 10% GDP rate, still much higher. So we can't simply say he hit better that year and that caused the lower GDP rate.

"Data guys" More Important In Business Due To "Moneyball"

2011-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

See When Data Guys Triumph by CADE MASSEY and BOB TEDESCHI, NY Times business section, 10-2-11.

Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and author Bill James are entrepreneurs who created a whole new way of running baseball teams based on statistics and this creative spirit is starting to have an impact in the business world.

The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said that "science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." By challenging the experts in baseball, Beane and James were true scientists, asking questions and looking at data in new ways. Excerpts:

"JOSHUA MILBERG has plenty of business cred: an M.B.A. from Yale, experience in the mayor’s office in Chicago, a job as a vice president for an energy consulting firm. But all of that, Mr. Milberg says, matters less than his reputation as “the data guy” — someone who can offer insights through statistical analysis. And for that, he and a growing number of young executives can credit none other than “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” by Michael Lewis."

The book "...examines how the Oakland Athletics achieved an amazing winning streak while having the smallest player payroll in Major League Baseball. (Short answer: creative use of data.)

These managers are savvier with data and more welcomed in business circles in part because of the book."

"At its heart, of course, “Moneyball” isn’t about baseball. It’s not even about statistics. Rather, it’s about challenging conventional wisdom with data."

"This evangelism has created opportunities for the analytically minded."

The article calls this work "creative empiricism."

"But “Moneyball” dramatized the principles behind these forces: a reliance on data to exploit inefficiencies, allocate resources and challenge conventional wisdom — and thus broadened their appeal.

“Moneyball” traces Billy Beane’s use of unorthodox analytics to the work of Bill James. Working as a baseball outsider, Mr. James began self-publishing his analysis and commentary in 1977 and built a passionate following."

"Once people see the value of a batter’s O.P.S. — on-base plus slugging percentage, a key measure in the book — it’s a short step to applying similar principles in their own organizations."

"Generation Moneyball isn’t yet in charge. But as the Nobel laureate Max Planck once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”"

OPS vs. 1.8*OBP + SLG

2011-10-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

And people say I shy away from the controversial topics.

This analysis is at the team level. Let's start with runs scored. The following regression equation shows the relationship between team runs per game and team OPS:

R/G = 13.02*OPS - 5.04

I used all teams from 1996-2009. For OBP I used (H + BB)/(AB + BB). The r-squared was .897 and the standard error was .1608. That works out to 26.05 runs per season.

Now when I used 1.8*OBP + SLG (call it adjusted OPS or ADJOPS) instead of OPS, the equation was

R/G = 10.26*ADJOPS - 5.68

The r-squared was .907 and the standard error was .153. That works out to 24.77 runs per season. So using 1.8*OBP + SLG is a bit better. The standard error is 5% lower. It is also 1.28 runs lower. That would be worth about a tenth of a win.

I have also used a team's OPS differential to predict winning percentage. That is, its hitting OPS - the OPS it allows its opponents. Here is the regression equation:

Pct = .5 + 1.26*OPSDIFF

The r-squared was .798 and the standard error was .0311. That works out to 5.04 wins per season. I used all teams from 1989-2002.

Now the same analysis with the differential using 1.8*OBP + SLG (call it the ADJOPS differential):

Pct = .5 + .986*ADJOPSDIFF

The r-squared was .815 and the standard error was .0298. That works out to 4.83 wins per season. So again, as in the analysis of runs scored, 1.8*OBP + SLG does just a bit better.

One reason why 1.8*OBP + SLG only does slightly better is probably that the range of OBP and SLG across teams is not that great. But for individual players, the range varies much more. So it might make more sense to use 1.8*OBP + SLG instead of OPS in those cases.

Do Diamondbacks have stats to match Brewers stars?

2011-10-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Click here to read the AP article by Chris Jenkins. He writes:

"The Diamondbacks might not have the Brewers’ marquee names. But the numbers, and the results, show two teams that are surprisingly similar going into Saturday’s Game 1 of the NL division series."

This sounds like an interesting question yet very few numbers are presented in the article. Actually no numbers that statistically compare the two teams. It turns out, that by luck, the Diamondbacks over achieved with runners on base, a trend that no team can keep up.

It looks like the Brewers are much better. Their hitters had an OPS of .750 while their pitchers allowed a .689. That gives them a differential of .061.

The Diamondbacks hitters had an OPS of .736 while their pitchers allowed a .725 OPS. That gives them a differential of .011. Well below the Brewers.

Based on some regression analysis I have done, we can project winning pct with the following equation:

Pct = .5 + 1.3*OPSDIFF

This gives the Brewers a pct of .579 or 93.85 wins. The Diamondbacks get .514 or about 83.32 wins. This seems like a very big difference.

Yet the Brewers actually only won 2 more games (96 vs. 94). And the Brewers runs differential (721 - 638 = 83) is only slightly higher than the Diamondbacks run differential of 69 (731 - 662).

What allowed the Diamondbacks to match the Brewers, at least on the surface? Some very good luck. They over achieved with runners on base. The Diamondback hitters had an OPS of .770 with runners on base (ROB) while their pitchers allowed .731. That gives them a differential of .039.

The Brewer hitters had an OPS with ROB of .745 while their pitchers allowed .719 for a differential of .026.

This seems to be something in favor of the Diamondbacks, but it really isn't.

Doing better with runners on base will improve your chances of winning. You will score more runs than expected and give up fewer runs than expected. Yet, in the long-run, individual players and pitchers (and teams) end up performing about the same in clutch situations (like ROB) as they do overall. Even the best clutch hitters and pitchers do just a little bit better in any clutch situation than they normally do given a large enough number of games.

For the Diamondbacks to to even look like they are as good as the Brewers, they had to be lucky. We cannot expect them to continue to over achieve so much with runners on base.

September Second Best Month For OPS

2011-09-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

Each league had its second highest monthly OPS. The numbers for each league are in the table below. The NL's scoring was not that great but the AL had its best month.

Did Branch Rickey Subscribe To The Same S**t As Billy Beane And Bill James?

2011-09-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

I am reposting this entry from April 2010 since the Moneyball movie just came out.

Some sportswriters still like to make fun of the statheads or sabermetricians who never played the game and still live in their mom's basement. But to those writers I say "read the 1954 LIFE magazine article where Branch Rickey discusses some very modern looking formulas." This article is online and was called GOODBY TO SOME OLD BASEBALL IDEAS: The 'Brain' of the game unveils formula that statistically disproves cherished myths and demonstrates what really wins. Some of the new stats he proposed were "on-base average" and "isolated power." The article even shows many formulas, some of which are complex.

Rickey is in the Hall of Fame for his work as an executive. But he also played and managed. I think if you ridicule statheads, you would probably ridicule Rickey. Here is the introductory paragraph:

"Baseball people generally are allergic to new ideas. We are slow to change. For 51 years I have judged baseball by personal observation, by considered opinion and by accepted statistical methods. But recently I have come upon a device for measuring baseball which has compelled me to put different values on some of my oldest and most cherished theories. It reveals some new and startling truths about the nature of the game. It is a means of gauging with a high degree of accuracy important factors which contribute to winning and losing baseball games. It is most disconcerting and at the same time the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory."

That is followed by a fairly complex formula. Then Rickey asks "Can this bizarre mathematical device be put to any practical use?" And his answer? "It can indeed! It can be applied to any major league club for any season or part of a season to diagnose points of weakness and strength."

So Rickey, perhaps one of the most influential men ever invovled in baseball, saw the need for new and complex ways of analyzing the game. How can some writers, and some GMs, not see this today?

But what about intangibles? Rickey says:

"But somehow baseball's intangibles balance out. They reflect themselves in other ways. Over an entire season, or many seasons, individuals and teams build an accumulation of mathematical constants. A man can work with them. He can measure results and establish values. He can then construct a formula which expresses something tangible, and that is why this formula was devised."

After compiling many stats and data, what did Rickey do? "We took the figures to mathematicians at a famous research institute. Did they know baseball? No, but that was not essential."

Did RBIs' figure in Rickey's formula? No. "As a statistic, RBIs were not only misleading but dishonest."

There is much more to read in this article that is of interest. Near the end of the article he mentions getting his scouts involved in finding players with power, guys who will improve the ability of his team (the Pirates) to bring runners home. But that is based on the formula. Imagine that. Rickey was going to tell his scouts what to look for based on a formula.

If you have never read the article, I think you are in for a treat since it is so well written and it was written so long ago.

Has Mariano Rivera statistically separated himself from his peers?

2011-09-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

That is the issue raised by an article in yesterday's NY Times Mr. Young, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Rivera Will Be Joining You By DAVE ANDERSON.

He compares Rivera to Cy Young and Nolan Ryan. Young won 511 games and the next highest is Walter Johnson at 417. Ryan struck out 5,714 batters, 839 more than Randy Johnson. Does Rivera dominate his peers in a similar way?

It is hard to argue against his 0.71 ERA in 139 post-season IP. I doubt any other closer can come close to that. Probably no other has had a chance to pitch so much in the playoffs. But the article offered no comparisons. No other pitcher's post-season performance was discussed.

Rivera now has 603 saves and the only other guy with 500+ saves is Trevor Hoffman with 601. So let's see how those two compare in their regular season stats (Hoffman only had 13 post-season IP). The table below summarizes some of their stats.

Their save percentages are almost identical. I thought that maybe Rivera got into tougher situations because he has such low HR% and his ERA is so much better than Hoffman's (2.22 vs. 2.87) that it seemed like maybe he came in when the score was closer. But they each have about the same average leverage index. The 1.92 for Hoffman, for example, indicates that his typical game had nearly twice the pressure as average in terms of inning and score.

So these two guys pitched a similar number of innings under the same pressure and were equally successful in what they were asked to do. Now maybe Rivera was in more pennant races or playoff chases but the Yankees usually made it in fairly easily. Maybe the competition was a little tougher in the AL.

ERA+ is adjusted for league average and park effects. Rivera's means that his ERA so adjusted is a little less than half the league average while Hoffman is about 30% lower. So big edge for Rivera (another closer, Billy Wagner, in about 900 IP had a 187, not too far from Rivera). Wagner had a career save % of 86%.

They are close in WHIP. FIP or fielding independent ERA takes walks, HBP, SO, and HR into account (with IBBs taken out). Hoffman is not too far off. This comes from Fangraphs and I don't think it is park adjusted. A rough estimate is that Hoffman's parks were about 7.2% better than average for pitchers while for Rivera just about average. If I raised Hoffman's FIP ERA by half of that 7.2% I get 3.19.

When I do walk% and SO/BB ratio, IBBs are taken out and HBP are in. IBBs are also taken out when doing HR%. This edge for Rivera seems very large. Maybe it is even bigger being a righty in Yankee Stadium and other teams would have tended to send lefties up to face him.

Rivera is not too far ahead of Hoffman in AVG and OBP allowed. But the edge in SLG seems big, probably due to the low HR%. The edge is even bigger in road games.

One other closer, Dennis Eckersley is worth looking at. I found his best 6 seasons in FIP ERA and the simple average of them was 2.13. For Rivera it was 2.15. If I park adjust Eckersley here, he goes up to 2.19. Still not too far from Rivera. But that has to be adjusted for the league average. Those years for Eck around 1987-93. It looks like the league average has been about .44 higher in those years than it was over Rivera's years. Rivera's FIP ERA is about .474 of the league average while for Eck it is .535. If Eck pitched in those years of Rivera he would get 2.42. Not too far off (also recall that for Rivera, those are his best six years and but I just used his entire career as an approximation). Eckersely came to the closer well after the age of 30 (and maybe before that we did not really have closers). Eckersley had a career save % of 85%.

What is probably the amazing thing is for how long Rivera has been consistently great. He is almost 42 and is having another outstanding season.

Update: David Pinto points out that Rivera had 116 "long saves" (4 outs or more) while Hoffman only had 55. I left a response.

Bill James vs. Richard Feynman

2011-09-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Cage match. Who would win? I think Bill James would have the size advantage, but I really don't know for sure.

Anyway, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” If that is true, then I think Bill James must be a great scientist.

I thought of this watching "Moneyball" today. It was good to see them mention James and show his picture. It is very entertaining, enough so that, in my opinion, people with just a passing knowledge of baseball can enjoy it.

I don't have anything insightful to say about it. Joe Posnanski has written two great articles.

Moneyball The Movie

Moneyball and the Ballad of Bill James

He gives the movie 3 stars out of 5. I think it is at least a 4. So far on IMDB it has an 8.0 rating out of 10. But that is in only 729 votes. It will probably come down, but my guess is that it will end up with at least a 7.0.

Update 9-25: The IMDB rating is now at 8.2 with 1395 votes.

Update 9-26: Art Howe isn’t happy about his portrayal in ‘Moneyball’

Update 9-26: The IMDB rating is now at 8.3 with 2212 votes.

Update 9-27: The IMDB rating is now at 8.3 with 2898 votes.

Update 9-30: The IMDB rating is now at 8.2 with 3599 votes.

Update 10-1: The IMDB rating is now at 8.2 with 3845 votes.

Update 10-2: The IMDB rating is now at 8.2 with 4382 votes.

Update 10-10: The IMDB rating is now at 8.2 with 6113 votes.

Verlander And Kershaw Are Leading All Three Pitching Triple Crown Categories

2011-09-21T14:21:00.001-07:00

ERA
1. J. Verlander DET 2.29
2. J. Weaver LAA 2.41
3. J. Beckett BOS 2.50

Wins
1. J. Verlander DET 24
2. C. Sabathia NYY 19
3. J. Weaver LAA 18

Strikeouts
1. J. Verlander DET 244
2. C. Sabathia NYY 224
3. F. Hernandez SEA 220

ERA
1. C. Kershaw LAD 2.27
2. J. Cueto CIN 2.31
3. C. Lee PHI 2.38

Wins
1. C. Kershaw LAD 20
2. I. Kennedy ARI 20
3. R. Halladay PHI 18

Strikeouts
1. C. Kershaw LAD 242
2. C. Lee PHI 232
3. T. Lincecum SF 217

Click here to see all of the pitchers who won the triple crown at Baseball Almanac.

Only twice has a pitcher in both leagues won the pitching triple crown in the same year. 1918, Walter Johnson & Hippo Vaughn and 1924, Walter Johnson & Dazzy Vance.

Best/Worst Month for a Team's Pitchers (and the 1969 Mets allowed only 3 HRs in September)

2011-09-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Tom Ruane of Retrosheet looked into this after I asked him about it. Here is the link:

Best/Worst Month for a Team's Pitchers

Tom mentions "Since 1935, only the 1954 Orioles had a lower HRA rate than those 1969 Mets." Tom also looks at the best months in hits allowed and strikeouts.

Prior to Sept. that year, the Mets' HR rate was .023842 (using batters faced - IBBs - SH). In Sept. it was .002841. So the Sept. rate was only about 1/8 of what it had been before that year.

Using the cumulative binomial distribution and assuming the following:

Number of occurrences: 3
Trials: 1056
Rate: .023845

The probability of getting 3 or fewer HRs was about 1 in 36 million (I welcome any comments or corrections on this). Just cutting the HR rate in half or less that month (about 13 HRs allowed) has chance of only 1 in 183. 6 HRs or less is 1 in 225,000.

The Mets did allow 3 HRs in the last two days of the season in Oct. But by then they had clinched the division. They allowed no HRs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 18 in a total of 22 games (that is what a quick check of Retrosheet shows).

On Sept. 19, game 2, Stargell of Pit. hit a 2-run shot in an 8-0 Pirate victory. But by then, the Mets already had a 5 game lead with 13 games to play (the Cubs had 11 left).

On Sept. 21, game 1, Pagan of Pit. hit a solo shot in the 4th inning. It made the score 4-3 but the Mets won 5-3

On Sept. 21, game 2, Stargell hit a solo shot in the 4th inning to make it 4-1 but the Mets won 6-1.

It seems like none of these HRs was significant. Only one even had a man on.

The Mets also allowed only about 31% of their HRs for the whole year with runners on while the rest of the league was about 43%. The Mets turned 30 DPs in Sept. Their next highest month was 25 and the next after that was 18. Don Cardwell had an ERA under 1.00 in Sept. It was .039 in 23 IP. It was 3.25 going into Sept.

Report On Hitting So Far In September

2011-09-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

The table below shows some basic stats for each month in both leagues. Hard to sum up September so far. The AL so far has had a big drop in OPS but runs per game is up. The NL is about the same as it was in August.

Can Justin Verlander Win The Pitching Triple Crown?

2011-09-05T09:54:00.001-07:00

He now leads the AL in wins, strikeouts and ERA.

Wins
1. J. Verlander DET 21
2. C. Sabathia NYY 19
3. J. Weaver LAA 16

Strikeouts
1. J. Verlander DET 224
2. C. Sabathia NYY 211
3. F. Hernandez SEA 204

ERA
1. J. Verlander DET 2.34
2. J. Weaver LAA 2.49
3. J. Beckett BOS 2.54

Weaver has seen his ERA rise quite a bit over his last two starts. After Aug. 24, Weaver's ERA was 2.03. He gave up 13 earned runs (ER) in 11 IP over those two starts. In fact, after his Aug. 5 shutout of Seattle, his ERA was 1.78. For all of August, his ERA was 4.28. He also gave up 8 ER in 4.2 IP against the Blue Jays on Aug. 13. Before the All-Star break his ERA was 1.86. Since then it has been 3.82.

Verlander seems to have been a little more steady. His ERA before the All-Star break was 2.15. Since then it is 2.75. Since June 15, his ERA has been no lower than 2.15 and no higher than 2.38. Verlander has only once given up more than 4 ER (a 6 ER game) and has always pitched at least 6 innings in every start. He has only given up 4 ER 3 times and has not given up exactly 5 runs even once. 22 of his 30 starts had both 3 ER or less and 7 IP or more.

Click here to see all of the pitchers who won the triple crown at Baseball Almanac

Hitting And Scoring Picked Up In August

2011-09-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

So far this year, the AL is averaging 4.41 runs per game with an AVG-OBP-SLG of .257-.322-.405 and an OPS of .727. 1992 was the last year the AL had a lower runs per game with 4.32. Same for OPS, .713. Last year the AL R/G and OPS were 4.45 and .734. So not too big of a drop off. Of course, things can change with Sept.

So far this year, the NL is averaging 4.15 runs per game with an AVG-OBP-SLG of .253-.319-.392 and an OPS of .710. The last time the NL had a runs per game lower was in 1992 at 3.88. That was also the last time they had a lower OPS, at .684. Last year the NL R/G and OPS were 4.33 and .723.

The table below shows how each league has done, month-by-month, this year. April includes March data. Both leagues had their best power month measured by SLG and ISO.

Players Who Led The League In Triples And Home Runs At Least Once Each

2011-08-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

With Curtis Granderson currently tied for the AL lead in HRs while leading in triples, I thought I would find all of the players who had led the league in both in the same year as well as the others who did it but not in the same year. Some guys led one league in HRs one year and another league in 3Bs another year, like Dick Allen. They are all below, linked to Baseball Reference. If I missed anybody, let me know. They are in no order except the guys who did it in the same year are listed first. There are alot of Hall of Famers here. There are 33 in all.

Harry Stovey (twice in the same year)
Tip O'Neill (once in the same year and lead in 2Bs, too)
Harry Lumley (once in the same year)
Jim Bottomley (once in the same year)
Tommy Leach (once in the same year)
Willie Mays (once in the same year)
Mickey Mantle (once in the same year)
Jim Rice (once in the same year)
Roger Connor
John Reilly
Bid McPhee
Oyster Burns
Sam Crawford
Harry Davis
Home Run Baker
Johnny Mize
Ty Cobb
Lou Gehrig
Rogers Hornsby
Buck Freeman
Dan Brouthers
Dick Allen
Ed Delahanty
Joe DiMaggio
Sam Thompson
Wally Pipp
Frank Schulte
Buck Ewing
Jim O'Rourke
Jimmy Sheckard
Joe Medwick
Ryne Sandberg
Walt Wilmot

The record for most consecutive games versus over and under .500 teams

2011-08-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

A guest post by Tom Ruane of SABR and Retrosheet

I thought it might be interesting to look at four groups:

1) under .400,
2) under .500,
3) over .500 and
4) over .600.

Here's what I found:

1) Starting on August 11, 1885, the Chicago White Stockings
played a record 23 straight games against opponents with
a winning percentage under .400. During the streak, they
played only Buffalo, Detroit and St. Louis. It ended when
they faced Boston (which entered the game with a
none-too-impressive winning percentage of .406). Chicago
went 20-2-1 during the streak.

The longest such streak since 1900 is nineteen and it was
done four times:

2) The Chicago White Sox played 51 straight games against
losing teams from May 27 to July 10, 1966. The streak ended
when they hosted the third-place Indians in the first game
following the All-Star break. Ironically, the Sox went only
22-28-1 while playing losing teams, and 45-32 afterwards.
No teams are close to their streak, the second longest
being a run of forty straight games by the San Francisco
Giants in 1986. It ran from July 3rd to August 17th and,
like the White Sox, the Giants had a losing mark (19-21)
while it lasted.

3) The top five teams with the most consecutive games
played against winning teams:

At the end of the streak by the 1916 Senators, the only
other team in the AL with a losing record was the 27-94
Philadelphia Athletics. And the three streaks from 1908 are
due to the practice of scheduling long road and home trips
between the eastern and western teams. In 1908, all of the
western teams had winning records.

4) The longest stretch of games against teams with a
winning percentage higher than .600 was 27 by the
Philadelphia Quakers in 1884. From May 20th to June 19th,
they went 6-21 against Boston, Providence and New York.
Entering the games of May 20th, those three teams had a
combined record of 37-5. Philadephia had been in fourth
place at the start but was in seventh place at the end of
the run.

The record since 1900 is 21, by the 1998 Tigers from
April 3rd (which was the first game of the second series
of the year) to 30th. Given how early in the season
it was, a few more wins here and there might have
short-circuited the streak, but Detroit went 5-16 in the
games.

Hitting Has Picked Up A Bit So Far In August

2011-08-18T16:51:00.001-07:00

The table below shows the OPS and runs per game for each league by month for 2011.

Should Thurman Munson Be In The Hall Of Fame?

2011-08-09T15:56:00.001-07:00

I'm looking at this because it was discussed at Baseball Think Factory. That discussion was inspired by a new website that is trying to get Munson in called VoteThurmanIn.com.

Munson is 14th in career WAR among catchers. Here is the top 22 from Baseball Reference (I went to 22 so I could include Campanella). It also shows their best three consecutive seasons (which I just eyeballed to find) and the number of times they finished in the top 5 and 10. These guys played at least 50% of their games at catcher.

Now Munson is only 240th among position players in career WAR. That probably is not enough for the Hall. But catchers don't have the longevity of other players, so being in the top 15 is impressive. If he had not died at age 32 in 1979, he might have made the top 10. He was on a pace to get about 3.6 WAR in 1979. He also had over 3 the previous year.

His best 3 straight years is not near the elite like Bench, Carter, Piazza or Mauer (does he have the record for best 3 straight by a catcher?-although some games at DH may have helped). But Munson's best 3 straight years beat Lombardi, Bresnahan and Hartnett. He also has more top 10 finishes than Lombardi and Hartnett.

Tenace is ahead of him in career WAR but only about 58% of Tenace's innings were at catcher (Munson is about 97%).

Munson also is 144th in MVP shares (at 1.50). That is good considering that catchers don't do that great in the voting. See my post called MVP Awards And Award Shares By Position. So his contemporary observers liked him. He also won three Gold Gloves.

Fangraphs has him at 21st in career WAR among catchers. But some of the guys ahead of him played less than half their games at catcher: King Kelly, Joe Torre, Brian Downing, Buck Ewing. Tenace and Bresnahan are both ahead of him, too. Bresnahan played about 70% of his games at catcher (this all points out something problematic with the position regarding the Hall of Fame-many guys who played there got moved to other positions). And again, don't forget that Munson died young. He could have moved up in the rankings.

Just what I have done so far is probably not enough. But I think we should be looking at him as a serious candidate.

July Hitting Picked Up A Bit In The AL, Still Sluggish In the NL

2011-08-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

He are the monthly OPS figures for the AL starting in April:

April .713
May .720
June .719
July .731

For the whole season, it is .721. But just last year, for the whole season, it was .734. July should be one of the strongest months. From 1994-2009, the AL had an OPS of at least .750 every year with a high of .795 in 1996.

He are the monthly OPS figures for the NL starting in April:

April .709
May .702
June .699
July .709

For the whole season, it is .705. In 2009, for the whole season, it was .739. From 1994-2008, the NL had an OPS of at least .740 every year with a high of .773 in 1999.

Is Ryan Howard A Clutch Homerun Hitter?

2011-07-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

This was inspired by a discussion at Baseball Think Factory about an article at Fangraphs called Ryan Howard and the RBI by Steve Slowinski (there is no shortage of great Polish baseball bloggers).

Some people say that Howard is a good "RBI guy" and that he is paid to drive in runs so maybe his overall stats and/or his OBP don't matter that much. But a good "RBI guy" would tend to hit better with runners on. In my opinion that means a higher AVG with runners in scoring position (RISP) than he normally gets and a higher SLG with runners on base (ROB) than normal

But this year Howard is only 47th in SLG (.463) with runners on base in all of baseball with guys with 150+ PA in that situation. Teixeira leads with .667.

Howard is 20th in AVG (.304) with runners in scoring position this year in all of baseball with guys with 100+ PA in that situation. Votto leads with .424.

So overall, nothing special on Howard's part.

But somehow Howard over his career has managed to hit better with ROB and RISP. His AVG/SLG with none on is .266/.528. With ROB it is .285/.593 and .281/.561 with RISP. The one difference that seems pretty big is the SLG with ROB.

From 1991-2000, ROB SLG was .422 in all of baseball and .411 with none on. Since 2006, it looks like SLG with ROB is about .009 higher than with none on. So Howard is way above that being .063 higher. Some of that might be because he is a lefty. But whether it is luck or some real clutch talent is hard to say.

So I thought I would try a statistical test on his HR% with none on (NONE) vs. his HR% with ROB. Here we calculate something called a "Z-score." To be significant at the 5% level (meaning there is less than a 5% chance of getting the difference between the two HR%s) the Z-score has to be at least 1.96 (plus or minus, since a guy could do worse with ROB, the clutch situation I am looking at). HR% will be highly correlated with SLG (also, it does not look like Howard hits very many more 2Bs or 3Bs with ROB than NONE). Some technical details on this are below.

Howard's HR% with NONE in his career is 6.857% while with ROB it is 8.221%. That may not seem like a big difference, but the ROB HR% is 19.9% higher (8.221/6.857 = 1.199). The question is whether or not it is statistically significant. This is where the Z-score comes in.

The Z-score takes into account the number of ABs and HR% in each situation (ROB, NONE). It also takes into account the normal major league difference (I used +.0009, the approximate difference from 2007-10). This is important because if the normal HR% was .01364, then Howard would not be clutch at all since this is the difference between his two percentages (.08221 - .06857). When I did this calculation for Howard, I got a Z-score of 1.655. That is significant at about the 10% level. I guess I would like to see it at the 5% level before considering that he is clutch in hitting HRs with ROB. But even if he had reached 1.96 or more in his Z-score, it is possible he got there by luck and not skill because 2.5% of the hitters will have a Z-score of +1.96 or more.

Z = (CLUTCH AVG – NONCLUTCH AVG + EXPECTED DIFFERENCE)/SD

NORMAL DIFFERENCE FOR CL = +.0009 (which is added in this case)

SD = STANDARD DEVIATION =

{[CLUTCH AVG*(1-CLUTCH AVG)]/CLUTCH AB + [NONCLUTCHAVG*(1-NONCLUTCH AVG)]/NONCLUTCH AB}

(FROM PETE PALMER, BY THE NUMBERS 3/90. He called it a “pooled” standard deviation)

In a normal distribution, 5% of the players would have a Z-score of at least +1.96 or less than –1.96.

Ubaldo Jimenez Home And Away, 2009-2011

2011-07-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

I guess he is the subject of trade rumors. Here are some of his numbers

Home:

IP-265.67
H-254
HR-20
BB-103
SO-233
ERA-3.79
H/9IP-8.60

Away:

IP-291
H-201
HR-13
BB-119
SO-287
ERA-2.94
H/9IP-6.22

So his ERA has been about .85 better on the road. But, of course, home ERA is usually better. Here are the differentials the last three years for all of baseball: .46-.54-.24.

Not all no-decisions are created equal: Evaluating a little-examined pseudo statistic

2011-07-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

That was the title of Gilbert Martinez's presentation at the recent SABR convention. Gilbert is president of the Rogers Hornsby Chapter of SABR in Austin, TX.

Click here to get the power point slides. It has alot of neat graphs.

Here is the abstract:

"In 2009, two pitchers recorded 16 no-decisions. The Houston Astros’ Roy Oswalt set a franchise record for no-decisions and was 8-6 in 30 starts. The L.A. Dodgers’ Randy Wolf was 11-7 in 34 starts.

Research shows that 2011 Hall of Fame Inductee Bert Blyleven holds the record for most no-decisions in a season with 20 after a 12-5 record in 37 starts with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979.

While Oswalt and Wolf didn’t set a record, they were among the most in a single season and they did receive some attention by the media and fans. Little analysis has been done to understand the nature of these no-decisions. Statistics abound in baseball, and especially with pitchers. Statistics capture games started, wins, losses, saves, earned run average, pitch counts, walks, hit batsmen, ground-ball outs, fly-ball outs, innings pitched, homeruns given up, strikeouts per nine innings, and so on. This project will focus on starting pitchers and no-decisions recorded as a result of starting a game.

The purpose of this project is twofold: 1) to evaluate the most no-decisions by a starting pitcher in a single season and in a career and 2) to determine which pitchers with the most no-decisions were unlucky or lucky.

A pitcher would be considered unlucky if he leaves the game with a lead, only to watch his team’s bullpen lose the game in the late innings. This would be considered a positive no-decision (positive because it suggests an effective pitcher). Likewise, a lucky pitcher would be one who leaves the game with his team trailing, only to be bailed out by a potent offense, thereby taking him off the hook. This would be considered a negative no-decision. If he leaves with the game tied, this would be a neutral no-decision.

These no-decisions are not equal, and some pitchers are more valuable to their teams than others. In other words, some pitchers saddled with numerous no-decisions but who have more positive no-decisions than negative no-decisions are more worthy of our sympathy than those with more negative no-decisions compared to positive no-decisions.

Initial review of the literature shows little on this subject, so it appears this research project would contribute to our understanding of lucky and unlucky pitchers in the context of no-decisions. In fact, this statistic is not readily recorded on Baseball-Reference.com.

The methodology includes running a formula in a pitchers database to determine no-decisions: (Games started) minus (wins + losses) = no-decisions. However, those results would need further review to eliminate no-decisions that come from relief appearances. The remaining results would be analyzed to determine the circumstances in which the pitcher was given the no-decision: Was his team leading or losing when he was removed? Was he lucky in receiving the no-decision or was he unlucky?

The result would be the number of positive, negative and neutral no-decisions, shedding new light on the pitcher’s effectiveness."

Has Jake Peavy Had Bad Luck This Year?

2011-07-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

His ERA is 5.19. The league average is 3.87. Yet here are his AVG-OBP-SLG allowed

.262-.281-.341

The league averages are .252-.319-.392

So he appears to be much better than the league average in OBP and SLG allowed.

He is getting hit pretty hard with runners on base (ROB). Here are his AVG-OBP-SLG allowed in those cases

.344-.342-.439

Now with runners in scoring position (RISP)

.370-.347-.508

It is not the case that he can't pitch in the clutch. For his entire career, his AVG-OBP-SLG are .233-.271-.336. With ROB, they are .235-.275-.313 and with RISP they are .240-.283-.303.

Fangraphs shows his fielding independent ERA at 3.06. That is a stat that tries to predict a pitcher's ERA just based on strikeouts, walks and HRs. His xFIP ERA is 3.49. That makes a further correction by giving all pitchers the same HR rate on flyballs (or something like that). They have an even more sophisticated stat called SIERA which projects him to have 3.57. Anyway you look at it, his actual ERA of 5.19 is very unlucky.

Pitchers Duels That Turned Into Slugfests (and Vice Versa)

2011-07-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post by Tom Ruane, based on a post to the SABR list.

While watching the two teams fail to score for most of the evening
during the recent SABR outing to Dodger Stadium, I got to wondering
about the highest scoring games that began with scoreless inning
streaks. Here is the list since 1918:

And here is the flipside, the most runs scored in a game that ended
with the longest scoreless streak:

Tom Ruane, a computer programmer in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is a member of Retrosheet's board of directors. He has published articles in "The Baseball Research Journal" and "By The Numbers." He won SABR's highest honor, the Bob Davids Award, in 2009.

What Is Konerko Doing Differently? His OPS+ Is Up, His Strikeout Rate Is Down And So Is His GDP Rate

2011-07-16T19:29:00.001-07:00

The table below shows these stats over the course of his career. Data from Baseball Reference.

These last two years his OPS+ has been well above anything he ever did before. He has his lowest strikeout rate in 8 years and his lowest GDP rate in 6 years (for strikeout rate it was K/PA with IBBs taken out-GDP rate is GDPs divided by opportunitites). He his making more contact which should make more GDPs a possibility but he is avoiding them more than in the past (see what I say below as to how his low 2005 GDP rate is another example of how lucky the Sox were that year).

The chart below shows Konerko's OPS+ over time.

A regression with OPS+ as the dependent variable and year as the independent variable yields an r-squared of .4 and the trend line is positive. He did not peak before 30 like most guys and then trend downwards

Now for the strikeout rate and the GDP rate.

Except for that wild fluctuation in the middle of his career, his GDP rate seems to be trending downward. He has always been slow but his GDP rate is not rising as he ages.

I think it is interesting that his GDP rate took such a big dip in 2005. He only grounded into 9 double plays that year. The year before it was 23 and the next year it was 25. Hitting into 10-15 fewer DPs must have really helped the Sox that year. This may be another way they were lucky that year. The Sox had to go down to the last week of the season before they clinched a playoff spot. It was not a sure thing. They beat their main competitor, the Indians something like 14 out of 19 that year and won a bunch of 1-run games that year against them. Konerko not hitting into DPs must have helped quite a bit. Click here to read about a bunch of other ways the Sox were lucky that year that I wrote about. For one, they got great years out of relievers Politte and Cotts who did not do much before or after that season.

All-Star Game Oddity?

2011-07-14T18:48:00.000-07:00

I wonder if this is not that strange. The first 3 NL pitchers used in the game are former ALers (Halladay, Lee, Clippard). The first 4 hits by the AL were by former NLers (Adrian Gonzalez, Bautista, Josh Hamilton, and Adrian Beltre). The first two hits by the NL were by former ALers (Beltran and Berkman).

With free agency, maybe something like this has happened before. Here are the former NLers who played on the AL team:

Adrian Gonzalez
Miguel Cabrera
Jose Bautista
Carlos Quentin
Josh Hamilton
Adrian Beltre
Paul Konerko
Chris Perez

Here are the former ALers who played on the NL team:

Brandon Phillips
Carlos Beltran
Lance Berkman
Matt Holliday
Scott Rolen
Roy Halladay
Cliff Lee
Tyler Clippard
Jair Jurrjens

If It's The Year Of The Pitcher It Is Even More The Year Of The Phillies Pitcher

2011-07-12T15:47:00.001-07:00

You might have heard of these guys. Halladay. Hamels. Lee. Here is where they rank in WAR among NL pitchers this year:

1. Halladay (PHI) 4.9
2. Hamels (PHI) 4.4
3. Jurrjens (ATL) 4.2
4. Lee (PHI) 3.8
5. Kershaw (LAD) 3.2
Chacin (COL) 3.2
7. Cueto (CIN) 2.9
8. Cain (SFG) 2.8
Vogelsong (SFG) 2.8
Kennedy (ARI) 2.8
Hanson (ATL) 2.8

(data from Baseball Reference).

But even more impressive is that these three are in the top 5 of all players in the NL:

1. Kemp (LAD) 5.7
2. McCutchen (PIT) 5.1
3. Halladay (PHI) 4.6
4. Hamels (PHI) 4.5
5. Lee (PHI) 4.3
6. Braun (MIL) 4.2
7. Reyes (NYM) 4.1
8. Jurrjens (ATL) 3.9
9. Votto (CIN) 3.7
10. Kershaw (LAD) 3.6

The last NL team to have 3 pitchers in the top 5 in WAR among all players was the 1925 Reds. (Sean Forman found and sent me the list of all teams that had 3 or more in the top 10 just among pitchers and I went through those teams to see how they did among all players). Going through Baseball Reference year by year, it seems like 3 pitchers from one team in the top 10 in WAR among all players is very rare.

The 1966 Indians and the 1942 Tigers each had 5 in the top 10 among pitchers but none among all players.

The table below shows where these three Phillies pitchers rank in the NL in key stats so far this year.

Lee's 32nd in HR per 9 IP is in the top half of the 65 pitchers with 80+ IP. He gives up .79 HR per 9 IP while the league average is .877. Also note that the Phillies park gives up about 4% more HRs than average over the years 2008-10 (from the Bill James Handbook).

The art of fiction is dead-Again

2011-07-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Derek Jeter got his 3000th hit today, only the 28th player to do so. It was a HR, at home, on what looked like a beautiful afternoon in NY, 84 degrees according to Yahoo Sports. He also went 5-for-5, the first player ever to do so in the game he got his 3000th hit (according to mlb.com). Then he drove in the go-ahead and what proved to be winning run in the 8th inning. And it was against one of the other contenders in the AL East, the Tampa Rays.

Here is what the great sports writer Red Smith said about Bobby Thomson's pennant winning HR in 1951:

"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again"

See Red Smith on Baseball at the excellent Baseball Almanac site.

Angels Call Up Mike Trout

2011-07-08T10:41:00.001-07:00

Alot of people are mentioning this on blogs. David Pinto mentioned that he is right up there with Bryce Harper as the top prospect in baseball.

Click here to see his minor league stats

Click here to see the Texas League batting leaders

You can sort them by different stats. He is 7th in the league in OPS. He is 2nd in SBs with 28 (just 3 behind the leader) and has only been caught 8 times. He is 5th in AVG and 4th in OBP. 8th in SLG. 2nd in triples (he bats right-handed). He will turn 20 on Aug. 7. Pretty impressive showing at AA.

If you look at all of his minor league stats (including 2009 and 2010) you see lots of 3Bs, SBs (with good percentages) and high OBPs. He hits alot better in away games this year. Does anyone know if he plays in a tough hitter's park?

Wikipedia says "...Trout was named 2010 J.G. Taylor Spink Award as the Topps/Minor League Player of the Year. At just 19 years and two months, Trout is the youngest player ever to win this award."

Hitting Picks Up In July, But Only Slightly

2011-07-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

Here are the OPS levels in the NL by month starting in April:

.709
.702
.699
.714

For the whole season, the NL has .704. For all of last year it was .723. In the first half it was .729.

Now the AL:

.713
.720
.719
.732

For the whole season, the AL has .719. For all of last year it was .734. In the first half it was .741.

So quite a drop off for both leagues this year.

Yes, It Is Easy To Explain Why McCutchen Did Not Make The All-Star Team

2011-07-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

It seems like alot of people are wondering how a guy who is 2nd in WAR in the NL at both Baseball Reference and Fangraphs is not on the team. Here is why:

1. His value comes from non-traditional stats. He has a .389 OBP and 1.3 in defensive WAR (2nd in the league). The sabermetric revolution has only had so much influence and alot of people in baseball, including players and managers, don't know about them or don't think they are useful.

2. He has done poorly against the Giants, who are managed by the guy who picks the reserves, Bruce Bochy. The Giants have only played the Pirates 3 times this year, back in late April and McCutchen went 0 for 13. He has only a .180 career AVG with just 1 HR in 61 ABs against the Giants. So maybe that is why Bochy does not recognize how good he is.

3. He is not a standout in the traditional stats. McCutchen is not in the top 10 in HRs, RBIs or AVG or SBs. He has not won a Gold Glove and is only in his 3rd year. He has never batted .300, hit 30 HRs nor had 100 RBIs. So I guess he just does not have a great reputation (even though he should).

4. He also got off to a slow start, batting just .219 in April. Then he hit .275 in May and .347 in June (not witnessed by Bochy). So his name has not been on people's minds the whole season.

I could throw in that he plays on a team in a small market that has not had a winning season since 1992 and they have finished last in their division the last 4 years.

Is AROD In Serious Decline This Year?

2011-07-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

Last week on the ESPN2 show "First Take," one of the commentators said something like "AROD is in serious decline this year." Those may not have been the exact words, but it was words to that effect.

Well, AROD has a 131 OPS+ this year, while last year it was 123. Even in 2009, it was 138, so this year is not too much worse than that. He did have 176 in 2007 and 150 in 2008. So any decline he had was before this year. And he is 35 (and turns 36 on 7-27). So this is not surprising.

He is also 7th in the league in WAR and the last year he was in the top 10 was in 2008. So the commentators of "First Take" could just as easily have said he was having a good comeback season. But they never mentioned WAR or OPS or any stats like that.

This brings me to my point: There is still not much use of sabermetrics in the mainstream media. Some complain about the new statistics ruining baseball. But the mass media, which alot more people are exposed to than stats blogs, keeps saying things that don't make sabermetric sense. So no, the new stats are not taking over and ruining baseball. They have made only a slight dent.

When the show discussed who the Yankees MVP was so far this year, they said Mark Teixeira. But here are Yankee leaders in WAR:

Curtis Granderson 3.8
Alex Rodriguez 3.3
Brett Gardner 2.8
Robinson Cano 2.5
Nick Swisher 2.5
Mark Teixeira 1.8

Teixeira is 2nd on the team in OPS+. But Granderson has 157.

Another example of this is Hawk Harrelson on the game today talking about how the leadoff walk always scores. But no one on national TV or a super station like WGN ever mentions the work of Retrosheet head Dave Smith who showed that leadoff walks only score about as often as leadoff singles. See Leadoff walks.

Great Post By Rich Lederer At Baseball Analysts

2011-07-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

Rich has been cited for showing "you can move around the traditional gatekeepers and centers of power" because of his great campaign to get Bert Blyleven elected to the Hall of Fame. See The Declaration of Independents by Rich Lederer.

Phillies Send Starting Pitcher To Minors-His ERA Was Too High At 2.20

2011-07-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

See Worley, Phils beat Marlins 1-0.

One anonymous source said "The guy clearly was not pulling his weight." Another said "We couldn't allow him to put our season in jeopardy."

If you look at the numbers I posted yesterday, 3 of the top 7 in WAR in the NL were Phillies pitchers (that is among everyone, position players included). This has got to be very rare.

Player Tied For NL Lead In WAR Not On The All-Star Team

2011-07-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

Bill Gilbert pointed this out to me. Here are the leaders from Baseball Reference:

1. McCutchen (PIT) 5.1
Kemp (LAD) 5.1
3. Halladay (PHI) 4.6
4. Braun (MIL) 4.3
5. Reyes (NYM) 4.2
6. Hamels (PHI) 4.0
7. Lee (PHI) 3.8
8. Jurrjens (ATL) 3.7
9. Bourn (HOU) 3.5
10. Kershaw (LAD) 3.4

At Fangraphs, McCutchen is 2nd to Jose Reyes. Anyone know how often this happens, that the leader in WAR does not make the All-star team?

The Pirates have one all-star, Hanrahan, a reliever. Maybe Bochy thought that is what the NL needed. But McCutchen is having a better year than Beltran (not to pick on him) at least according to WAR, 5.1-2.7. And McCutchen has been good the last two years and had more WAR last year than Beltran. The Mets have at least one all-star anyway, Reyes. So McCutchen could have easily been picked within the current rules.

McCutchen gets alot of his value from a high OBP (.393) and his defensive WAR (1.4), which is 2nd in the league. The Giants have only played the Pirates 3 times this year, back in late April and McCutchen went 0 for 13. He has only a .180 career AVG with just 1 HR in 61 ABs against the Giants. So maybe that is why Bochy does not recognize how good he is.

McCutchen is not in the top 10 in HRs, RBIs or AVG. He has not won a Gold Glove and is only in his 3rd year. He has never batted .300, hit 30 HRs nor had 100 RBIs. So I guess he just does not have a great reputation.

His Baseball Reference page shows him with 4.0 WAR last year, which is very good. Yet when I used the Play Index to find the leaders in WAR, it shows him with just 3.7 (good for 26th) among position players.

He also got off to a slow start, batting just .219 in April. Then he hit .275 in May and .347 in June. He is 7th in OPS+ at 150.

White Sox 31-20 Since Starting 11-22

2011-07-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

They had the worst record in baseball on May 6 at 11-22. They were the only team below .400 at that point.

In April, they had a batting OPS of .664 while allowing .739. In May it was .754/.695 and June was .721/.659. So after a bad
-.075 In April, they were a positive .059 and .062 the last two months.

My rough formula for winning pct is

Pct = .5 + 1.25*OPSDIFF

So they should have been .575 over May and June while they were actually 30-24 or .556. A .575 pct would give them 31 wins.

Through May 6, they were outscored 158-123, slightly more than 1 run per game. Since then, including beating the Cubs today 1-0, they have outscored their opponents 219-186. That gives them a Pythagorean winning pct of .581 while 31-20 is .608.

So Far, Phil Humber Has Resembled Greg Maddux

2011-07-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

A pleasant surprise for the White Sox, although it is only for half a season. Humber is not striking out alot of guys, but he is not walking many and he is not giving up many HRs. That is what Maddux did. Humber stats are close to Maddux's career averages.

The table below shows how Humber this year compares to Maddux's career numbers. Of course, Maddux pitched until he was 42. But even if I only went up to age 37, Humber would still be close and Maddux had a 143 ERA+, just a bit better than what Humber has this year.

This Year's Low Scoring In Recent Historical Perspective

2011-07-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

The NL OPS in each of the first 3 months has been: .709-.702-.699. The declines seem as surpising as the low levels. And in June the NL has had some games with the DH. So it might have been lower without the inter-league games. The AL has gone .713-.720-.719.

David Pinto of "Baseball Musings" had a good post a couple of days ago about hitting this year vs. last year. See Halfway Point. He shows how HRs, hits, etc. have fallen.

The graph below shows AL runs per game from 1960-2011

It is pretty clear that this year is pretty low (4.26). The last time the AL was lower than 4.26 was in 1981, when it was 4.07. That was a strike year. Taking that out, we need to go back to 1978, when the average was 4.2.

The graph below shows NL runs per game from 1960-2011

The average this year is 4.1. The last time it was lower was in 1992 when it was 3.88.

Sad Story: Ricky Vaughn Admits He Used Steroids In 1989 To Help Indians Win Division Title

2011-06-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

I guess there is nothing left to believe in. It was a great Cinderella story that year and now it is ruined.

Click here to read the story,

Rich Gossage vs. Mariano Rivera

2011-06-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

...“I wasn’t a closer, I was a relief pitcher,” Gossage said. He made a great point that he was not just the closer, but the seventh and eighth inning man. He pointed out that he came on with inherited runners in the seventh or eighth inning many times. Some of those situations required that he keep the ball out of play.

Gossage went on to say that “Mariano doesn’t come in with inherited runners. He gets to start out the ninth with nobody on… Easy? It is a piece of cake compared to what we use to do.”

From Baseball Think Factory, quoting an article by Mike Silva.

Yes, relievers were used differently in Gossage's time. From 1977-1985, one of the time periods I will look at for Gossage, most of the top 50 seasons in both saves and games finished were by pitchers who pitched over 100 innings (with only a couple of cases of even 1 game started). From 1997-2005, the period I will look at for Rivera, there were no 100+ IP seasons and even 90+ IP was rare (less than 5 for both stats).

So I want to compare both Gossage and Rivera to the average relievers of their times. I picked Gossage's 1977-1985 years since that seems to be his prime years and he was very good throughout the period. It does leave out his great 1975 season as a reliever (he was a starter in 1976). So for Rivera, I look at his first 9 years as a closer, 1997-2005 (which leaves out a very good 1996 seaon). The fact that Rivera has continued to pitch great since then is a plus in his favor. Gossage supporters might say that Rivera's relatively low IP totals have helped his longevity. Gossage was just average after 1985.

The average relief pitcher from 1977-1985 had an ERA of 3.68 while Gossage had 2.10. If we turn that into a winning pct. using the Pythagorean formula created by Bill James to estimate team winning pct. using runs and runs allowed, we get .754. From 1997-2005, Rivera's years, he had an ERA of 2.04 while the league average was 4.31. That gets us a pct of .817. So Rivera edges Gossage .817-.754. (I checked park factors for each pitcher and the simple average of their teams pitching park factors was the same, 97.56, meaning that they each got a little help from their parks, which were about 2.5% lower than average in scoring). All the data I use here is from Baseball Reference or The Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

I also found the top 10 pitchers in saves in each era and then calculated the combined ERA of the other 9 (taking out Gossage and Rivera). The best 9 in Gossage's years had 2.87. That gets a .651 pct. The best 9 in Rivera's years had 3.07, getting us a pct of .694. Again, edge to Rivera.

So far, when being compared to contemporaries with a similar role, Rivera is ahead. But ERA can be misleading, since the fielders play a role here (and ERA may not be the best way to judge relievers who are supposed to come in and put out fires).

To avoid this problem, I am going to look at how each guy comapared to his peers in the fielding independent stats (HRs, BBs, SOs). Then I will convert that into a run value using the values below

HR: 1.40
BB: .33
SO: -.22

Those are the values used in what is called "Fielding Independent ERA" formulas. The table below shows how each guy compared to the average reliever of his time in these stats per 9 IP. For example, Gossage allowed .508 HRs per 9 IP while the average reliever allowed .724. So he was .216 better. Multiplying that by 1.4 we get .3024 (it is negative in the table, meaning how much below average Gossage was). Then this is done for the other stats and for Rivera. The last line shows the combined run value each guy was below average using all three sats.

So Rivera is farther below average than Gossage. If I use the average reliever ERAs from each period, then Gossage gets 2.49 (3.68 - 1.19). Rivera gets 2.76 (4.31 - 1.55). The Pythagorean winning pct for Gossage is then .686 and for Rivera it is .709. The next table does the same thing but only for the other 9 pitchers in the top 10 in saves in each period.

Going right to the bottom line, we can see that they are almost even. Gossage would get a Pythagorean pct of .620 and Rivera would get .611. Very close. Now Gossage may have been better than Rivera, but I think the evidence shows that he should not belittle his greatness. Rivera seems to be at least close to Gossage as measured by how good they were relative to their peers.

One weakness of looking at the others in the top 9 is that park effects and fielders might play a big role since they don't represent the entire league. It is possible that the other 9 guys Rivera gets comapred to pitched in great hitters parks so they look weak in comparison to him. Or maybe Rivera had much better fielders behind him. I have not checked that. And when I did the top 10, it included both leagues whereas when I used the league average, it was just the league they pitched in (for Gossage it was the NL from 1977 and 1984-5 and the AL from 1978-83).

Who Did Yankee Opponents Have To Fear In The Late Innings During The Late 1970s?

2011-06-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago on a White Sox game, Ken Harrelson said something like "back in the late 70s, when you were facing the Yankees, Reggie Jackson wasn't the guy you had to worry about. Other teams worried about Munson and Piniella in the late innings."

So I looked at how each of them hit in innings 7-9 from 1977-79 using Baseball Reference. The table below summarizes the data.

If you were afraid someone would get a hit, Piniella was the problem. But if power was the concern, Jackson was still definitely the guy doing the damage. And his average was not much lower than Munson's.

Here is the AVG/SLG/ISO for each guy combined for the three years:

Jackson 0.275/0.543/0.268
Munson 0.280/0.361/0.081
Piniella 0.328/0.452/0.124

Notice that if you add up the isolated power of both Munson and Piniella it is still less than Jackson's, meaning that he had more extra bases per AB than those two combined.

June Hitting Up Slightly In The AL, Down Slightly In The NL

2011-06-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

With hitting pretty low already this year, not much good news for fans who like offense. The AL OPS by month so far

April .713
May .720
June .723

But for isolated power (ISO) we have

April .145
May .141
June .140

Runs per game in June 4.4

The NL OPS by month so far

April .709
May .702
June .700

But for isolated power (ISO) we have

April .137
May .132
June .131

Runs per game in June 3.83

Seasons With 15 Or Fewer HRs And SLG > .600

2011-06-10T15:49:00.000-07:00

The PA minimum was 400. This is inspired by “Roll Projector!” Jose Reyes *is* on an Historic Pace from the Baseball Reference blog. They mention that Jose Reyes has a chance to set the Mets record for total bases in a season without hitting many HRs.

The table below shows all of the players who fit my criteria.

Those all happened a long time ago. The table below shows all the players who did it since 1946 with less than 30 HRs.

June Hitting Off To A Slow Start

2011-06-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

The NL is averaging 3.89 runs per game with a .689 OPS. Their ISO is just .125. The AL is scoring 4.16 runs per game with a .712 OPS and a .139 ISO. Data from Baseball Reference. These numbers are even lower than they were in April and May. See my earlier post May Hitting About As Bad As April.

Last night there were 7 games with a total runs scored of 5 or less. That is between both teams. In 98 games so far in June, the NL has hit just 73 HRs. That would be about 120 per team for a whole season. The AL was a little better with 82 HRs in 88 games.

The table below shows the hitting stats in each month for both leagues in each of the last two years. The June numbers for 2010 are for the entire month.

The next table shows how each of those stats has changed.

Not sure if there is any kind of pattern other than that everything is down. It looks like the NL's power decline is even bigger than the AL's when you look at ISO.

May Hitting About As Bad As April

2011-06-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

The MLB OPS for each month was .711. The NL fell to .702 from .709 while the AL rose to .720 from .713. But each league saw runs per game drop off. The AL went 4.33-4.29 while the NL went 4.25-4.02. Isolated power fell just a bit in each league. The AL declined from .145 to .142 while the NL slid to .132 after .137 in April.

The run scoring was probably helped over the last two days of the month which had 5.28 per game for all of MLB. I looked at April vs. May hitting a few weeks ago with May Hitting So Far Has Been Even Worse Than April Hitting and May OPS: AL .705, NL .699.

I also noted, as so many others have, that Albert Pujols is off to a slow start. See Albert Pujols' Slow Start from May 23. His OPS+ in each of the first two months so far have been 112 & 113. It is the first time in his career that he has had two straight months under 120. He has only had under 150 in back-to-back months twice before this and never had back-to-back months below 140. In 48 of his first 60 months his OPS+ has been 150 or higher. His ISO in May was .099, well below the league average of .132.

Paul Konerko had the highest May OPS of his career, .902. The next highest is .846. So given that hitting is down in MLB this year compared the rest of his career, this is pretty interesting. In fact, Konerko's May OPS in every year of his career has been less than the full-season OPS. See May Day, May Day! Throw Konerko A Life Preserver. So it looks like he has overcome his May jinx.

The table below shows his OPS in every month starting in 1999. April actually includes March and Sept includes Oct.

In only 3 seasons has his May OPS been greater than his April OPS (1999, 2007 and 2001). In only 3 seasons has his May OPS been greater than his June OPS (1999, 2003, and 2009). In six seasons his May OPS fell by 100 or more points compared to April and then rose 100 or more points in June compared to May.

In six seasons his overall OPS was 100 or more points better than his May OPS. Three others were 50 or more points better. The closest his May OPS has gotten to his full season OPS is 22 points. He has had 8 months with an OPS under .600 and 4 of them have come in May. No other mont has more than one and the one from Sept was .599.

Going into this year his career May OPS was .713. So he beat that by nearly 200 points.

Parity Comes to MLB

2011-05-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post by Tom Ruane of Retrosheet

In looking at the standings the other day, I noticed that there
didn't seem to be many great or terrible teams so far this year,
especially in the AL, where most of the teams are within a
couple of games of .500. This got me to wondering if this was
out of the ordinary or simply something I hadn't noticed before.
To investigate this, I determined the difference between each
team's wins and losses after their first fifty decisions and
calculated the average difference to determine league parity.

Here are the seasons with the smallest average difference
after fifty decisions:

Year Teams Diff
1959 16 4.50
1944 16 4.88
1968 20 4.90
1975 24 5.00
1947 16 5.12
2011 30 5.27
1974 24 5.33

Not all teams reach their 50th decision on the same day, but to
get some idea of the early-season parity in 1959, see:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1959/06061959.htm

And here are the years with the least parity:

Year Teams Diff
1876 8 19.25
1884 28 15.86
1875 7 15.71
1879 8 14.50
1883 16 14.00
1872 2 14.00

And the same list since 1900:

Year Teams Diff
1907 16 13.00
1953 16 12.00
1911 16 11.62
1906 16 11.12
1955 16 11.12
1931 16 11.00

Here is a link to a 1907 standings page:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1907/06171907.htm

I also decided to look at parity by league. Here are the leagues
with the greatest parity after 50 decisions:

Year LG Teams Diff
1944 AL 8 2.50
1959 AL 8 3.00
1974 AL 12 3.00
1947 AL 8 3.50
1915 NL 8 3.75
1932 NL 8 3.75
1968 NL 10 3.80
1926 NL 8 4.25
1943 AL 8 4.25
1983 AL 14 4.29
2011 AL 14 4.29

A link to a 1944 page:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1944/06141944.htm

And the leagues since 1900 with the least parity:

Year LG Teams Diff
1907 NL 8 15.25
1903 NL 8 13.50
1906 NL 8 13.00
1946 AL 8 12.75
1913 AL 8 12.75
1955 AL 8 12.50
1909 NL 8 12.50

So the current year is nothing too earth-shaking, but I was
hoping some might find this interesting anyway.

Albert Pujols' Slow Start

2011-05-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

So far he as an OPS of .750 while the league OPS is .702. So that is a good year but not the kind of great season he has always had. He has never finished out of the top 10 in OPS. This year he is only 45th among NL players with 120+ PAs. He generally is not a slow starter. Here are his OPS numbers for each month, April to September, for all of his career:

1.060
0.991
1.049
1.006
1.099
1.059

Maybe he slips just a bit in May, but it looks he usually starts well. If he had had alot of bad starts, these numbers would look different.

But OPS+ from Baseball Reference is even better since it is adjusted to the league average and for park effentcts. 100 is average. The table below shows his OPS+ in each month for every year of his career:

April includes March and Sept includes Oct. All the months he has had an OPS+ under 120 are in red. He only played 10 games in June 2006 and must have been hurt. He has never had two straight months under 120. It looks like he has only had under 150 in back-to-back months once. He finished pretty strong last year, so it is not like he was starting to tail off then.

He has only been intentionally walked once this season. Here are his IBB totals for each season through 2010:

6
13
12
12
27
28
22
34
44
38

Maybe pitchers are not as afraid of him as they used to be or maybe having Holliday and Berkman behind him having good years keeps Pujols from being intentionally walked. This should mean he is seeing good pitches so he should be performing well (of course, the research on protection shows it does not have much effect).

He has also grounded into 14 double plays already this year. His average is 20 or so per season. But we are not even at the one-third mark. His rate is 26%. That is, he grounds into DPs 26% of the time there is an opportunity. That is twice his career average and the next highest is 16%. Maybe he has just been a little unlucky so far and things will even out. The league average is 10% this year and since Pujols came into the league it has been 10-11%.

The numbers below show how much better Pujols was than the league average for his career from 2001-2010:

AVG: 27%
OBP: 30%
SLG: 50%
ISO: 89%
SO/AB: 44% (less)
BB/PA: 54%

But what about this year?

AVG: 8%
OBP: 6.9%
SLG: 6.8%
ISO: 4.5%
SO/AB: 53% (less)
BB/PA: 10%

No doubt his being only 10% better than the league average in walks is partly due to not being intentionally walked. If I account for IBBs, he falls from being 32% better to only 14% better. Notice that he has improved his relative strikeout rate. The big drop is isolated power. He has been 89% better but now is only 4.5% better.

Players Who Hit Game-Tying HRs In The Ninth Inning And Game Winning HRs In Extra Innings In The Same Game

2011-05-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

Brian McCann just did it a couple of days ago (pinch hitting in the 9th). I asked HR expert David Vincent (of SABR and Retrosheet) "Do you know how many times a player has hit a game tying HR in the 9th inning and then won the game with a HR in extra innings?" Here is the list he sent me, used with his permission. The hot link will take you to the boxscore and/or play-by-play for the game, as it does for McCann.

08/27/1949 Jeff Heath
04/29/1985 Donnie Scott
04/08/1986 Jim Presley
05/08/1990 Andre Dawson
06/10/1998 Robin Ventura
04/05/1999 Raul Mondesi
04/11/2000 Ed Sprague
06/14/2002 Aaron Boone
08/27/2002 Joe Crede
08/20/2004 Adrian Beltre

Jeff Heath also pinched-hit in the 9th inning of his game. His winner was in the 10th inning and both were off of Ewell Blackwell, who was pitching in relief. It is interesting that this was only done once before 1985 and has been done 10 times since (including McCann). Why so many recently while there were so few before?

In the Ventura game, the Sox trailed the Cardinals at home by 4 runs in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs and no one on base. After Albert Belle hit a 3-run HR, Ventura hit his tying HR. Then he hit a 2-run HR in the 11th.

Presley's was opening day and his game winner was a grand slam. Mondesi's was opening day as well. Beltre drove in all the Dodger runs in his game (they won 3-2). Crede's game winner was also a grand slam and it was on the anniversary of Jeff Heath's game. Crede drove in 7 of the 8 runs for the White Sox that day.

Update 5-20: At Baseball Musings, commentor npbcardguy mentions a game when Mike Young of the Orioles hit a game tying HR in the bottom of the 10th and a winner in the 12th. Click here to see the boxscore and play-by-play. Does anyone know of any other games like that?

David Vincent found these other occurrences:

05/17/1971 Ralph Garr

06/14/1963 Willie Kirkland

May OPS: AL .705, NL .699

2011-05-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

For the first week of May (as I reported last week), the AL had an OPS of .681 and the NL had .674. So that means this past week was better. The AL would have been about .729 and the NL about .724. But neither one of those is a very torrid pace.

Here are the AVG-OBP-SLG for each league, so far, for the month of May:

AL: .251-.321-.384
NL: .248-.320-.379

Not exactly the kinds of numbers that conjure up images of slugfests. For the whole season, the AL has an OPS of .711 and the NL has .706. So far this month, both leagues have a lower isolated power than they did in April. The AL fell from .145 to .133 and the NL has fallen from .137 to .131.

Generally, the OPS for all of MLB in April and May combined are pretty good indicators of the OPS we will get for the whole season, as shown in the table below:

The AVG is just the simple average of each of the first two months. It looks like May usually has slightly more PAs, but this is probably a good approximation. The Total column is the MLB OPS for the entire season. In only two seasons was the overall OPS 10 or more points higher than for April/May. The average is for the whole season OPS to be 4-5 points higher. So it looks like we are in for a very low offensive year.

Right now the MLB OPS is .708. The last year it was lower was 1992 when it was .700. The lowest from 1993-2010 was .728 (last year). The next lowest was .736 in 1993. The simple average from 1994-2009 was .760 with no season being lower than .748. In 8 of the 13 seasons from 1979-1991, it was higher than .708. So, by recent historical standards, we are having a very low-offense year.

Since I mentioned Paul Konerko last week and his general patter of doing much worse in May than he does for the whole season, his OPS so far this month is 1.212 after .836 in April.

May Hitting So Far Has Been Even Worse Than April Hitting

2011-05-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

Was it the weather? I sure don't know. Both leagues have an OPS 20 points lower in May than April. Here the stats for April and May so far in both leagues:

One guy going against the trend is Paul Konerko, who usually does terrible in May. See May Day, May Day! Throw Konerko A Life Preserver. But in April he had an .836 OPS while it was 1.123 in May through yesterday. And today he went 5-for-5! His career April OPS is .860 while in May it is .719 (the lowest of any month in his career not counting March when he has only 12 ABs). His overall career OPS is .855.

Happy 80th Birthday To The Greatest All-Around Player In Baseball History

2011-05-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

Yes, hard to believe that Willie Mays is 80. But no one knew he was the "Greatest All-Around Player" until last December when I crunched the numbers. Okay, that's a stretch. But here is that post again. It was A Crude Measure Of The Most "All-Around" Players Since 1957.

I started thinking about this when Cooper Nielson in a Baseball Think Factory discussion said:

"I suppose the "best all-around player" argument could go like this (keep in mind this is not my argument and not one I even agree with, but one that could conceivably and logically put Walker #1 in his era): There are five traditional baseball tools: hitting (for average), hitting for power, running, playing defense, and throwing."

See Cooperstowners in Canada: Larry Walker should be the second Canadian player elected to Cooperstown.

So here is how the crude measure works:

Multiply Gold Glove awards times 30. The idea here was to scale a great player in this stat to a great player in HRs or SBs. Brooks Robinson had the most GGs among position players with 16 and 16*30 = 480, close to 500.

Divide non-HR hits by 5. If a player had 2500 non-HR hits, you get 500.

Multiply SB*HR*non-HR*GG (with the above mentioned adjustments being made for GG and non-HR). If player had no GGs, I stopped multiplying so they did not end up at zero.

For Willie Mays it was 42,129,996,480. That is way too high a number to work with. So I raised it to the .25 power. That gave him 453, a more familiar kind of number to baseball fans. But that was divided by PAs and then multiplied by 10 to get the final number. Mays then had .363 (a nice number, close to the highest all-time batting average of .366 belonging to Ty Cobb). Here is the top 25:

1 Willie Mays 0.363
2 Torii Hunter 0.362
3 Barry Bonds 0.357
4 Larry Walker 0.355
5 Ichiro Suzuki 0.352
6 Ryne Sandberg 0.349
7 Eric Davis 0.345
8 Cesar Cedeno 0.345
9 Roberto Alomar 0.337
10 Devon White 0.333
11 Andruw Jones 0.330
12 Andre Dawson 0.327
13 Garry Maddox 0.325
14 Bobby Bonds 0.316
15 Andy Van Slyke 0.313
16 Mike Schmidt 0.311
17 Ken Griffey Jr. 0.309
18 Carlos Beltran 0.302
19 Paul Blair 0.296
20 Joe Morgan 0.295
21 Marquis Grissom 0.293
22 Ivan Rodriguez 0.292
23 Dwayne Murphy 0.291
24 Bill White 0.285
25 Jimmy Rollins 0.284

If I started with his stats from 1957 on, when they started giving out Gold Gloves, Mays gets .378.

If I gave Ty Cobb 10 Gold Gloves, he would get .306. That is partly due to playing mostly in the deadball era, when HRs were hard to come by. Even if a player tried for HRs, he might not have gotten many. If Cobb had 10 GGs and 273 HRs, then he would have .378, what Mays had from 1957 on. Of course, Cobb is helped by the dead ball era because there was alot of stealing going on.

If DiMaggio had 10 GGs, he would get .363. He's hurt by the low SB total (30). It just was not an era when player tried to steal much. He was fast, reaching double figures in triples 8 times, even doing it at age 35. Yankee stadium helped him there with its big outfield. He had 73 triples at home and 58 on the road. But if you double that 58, it is still more than 100. He finished in the top 5 in triples 8 times.

But then playing at Yankees stadium hurts his HR totals since he was a righty. He had 213 on the road. If he had 426 career HRs, he would get .378. But if I give him more HRs, his non-HR hits might need to be reduced, which would lower his rating. Some of the long balls he hit in Yankee Stadium that were not HRs were outs and some were doubles and triples. I sure don't know what that break down would be.

Also, Willie Mays might have had the greatest season in history in 1962. See Indispensable Seasons Go To WAR! (Or Did Willie Mays Have The Greatest Season Since 1950 in 1962?)

Two .400 Hitters on a Team After 30+ Games

2011-05-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

This was posted to the SABR list by Tom Ruane who does great work for Retrosheet.

After 29 games, both Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman of the Cardinals are batting over .400. This got me to wondering about the last time (or times) a team had two players hitting .400 or more at least thirty games into a season (only counting players with at least 3.1 plate appearances per game played).

Here's what I came up with since 1918:

You can click on the table to see a larger version. For Cochrane and Simmons, it is after the first game of a double-header.

The second number in parenthesis following each player's name is his final batting average that year.

Editor's note: I am not sure if I had heard of Austin McHenry before. Seamheads has a great article about him. See The Promising Life and Tragic Death of Austin McHenry by Mike Lynch.

April Hitting In The AL & NL, 1994-2011

2011-05-01T17:24:00.001-07:00

It seems like alot of people have noticed the low offensive output this past month. So I am basically just posting some numbers without much analysis. It does seem like April hitting helps predict what the reast of the year might be like. See Does The "High" April Slugging Percentage Mean Anything?

The next two tables show the AL & NL hitting for March/April each year from 1994-2011. Data from Baseball Reference. The AL comes first.

Now the OPS in April, AL first.

Bobby Grich And His Case For The Hall Of Fame

2011-04-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

This came up again recently with Ex-Angel Grich is a no-brainer Hall of Famer By SAM MILLER of THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER. Hat tip goes to Baseball Think Factory.

I have written about how good the case for Grich is before.

The best, eligible Non-Hall of Famers (from 2006)

Peak Value And Hall Of Fame Worthiness

Some Players With A Good Sabermetric Case For The Hall Of Fame

Here is some info I just compiled, using Baseball Reference.

The only AL player with more WAR from 1973-6 than Grich (26.2) was Reggie Jackson (26.3). In a 10 year period, Grich had 5 top 5 finishes in the AL in WAR (among position players). From 1972-76 he was 5-2-1-4-6.

He had 7 top 10 finishes from 1972-81. Grich actually beats Jackson 32.0-31.8 in WAR in the AL over the years 1972-76.

Looks like good peak value. My guess is that many Hall of Famers don't have even that much peak value but that would require looking at all of them.

Grich had 67.6 WAR for his career, good enough for 65th among position players.

Here are the top 15 among second basemen (playing at least half their games there). Grich is 8th, while Whitaker is 7th and may have a good case, too.

Rogers Hornsby 127.8
Eddie Collins 126.7
Nap Lajoie 104.2
Joe Morgan 103.5
Charlie Gehringer 80.9
Frankie Frisch 74.8
Lou Whitaker 69.7
Bobby Grich 67.6
Craig Biggio 66.2
Roberto Alomar 63.5
Jackie Robinson 63.2
Ryne Sandberg 62
Willie Randolph 60.5
Jeff Kent 59.4
Bid McPhee 57.9

Here is how Grich compares to six other second basemen who are in the Hall. He had more top 5 finishes in WAR than all of them and only one had as much WAR in his best consecutive 3 seasons.

Top 5 finishes in WAR
Grich-5 (best consecutive 3 seasons-20.7)
Alomar-3 (best consecutive 3 seasons-20.6)
Sandberg-4 (best consecutive 3 seasons-20.7)
Lazzeri-2 (best consecutive 3 seasons-18.3)
Doerr-3 (best consecutive 3 seasons-14.6)
Fox-4 (best consecutive 3 seasons-16.9)
Herman-3 (best consecutive 3 seasons-19.1)

Will Prince Fielder Surpass Albert Pujols?

2011-04-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

On Monday night before the Brewers game, a commentator on ESPN said something like "now that Fielder is entering his prime years, his numbers will surpass those of Albert Pujols." This seems hard to believe. Fielder generally has not hit as well as Pujols at the same age.

The table below shows how each guy hit by age:

So far, at only one age, 25, was Fielder even close to Pujols. From 21-26, Pujols had an OPS+ of 169. Fielder had 139. The table below shows the offensive WAR for each guy:

The next table shows the neutralized stats for each guy (all data hare is from Baseball Reference):

Bonds And His Performance As He Aged

2011-04-17T15:24:00.001-07:00

Since he is in the news, I thought it would be good to revisit.

I have written about this before and there are some links below. This table shows his neutralized SLG as he aged from Baseball Reference. This means that it was adjusted for the league average and park effects. Notice how his 4 best years are clearly from 36-39. This seems to be highly unusual and I think his improvement at those ages over what he did earlier is much better than anyone else's improvement.

Now links to other posts:

The Best 5-Year Hitting Performances By Age

Bonds Aging vs. Aaron Aging

Bonds Greatest Feat Might Be Improvement

Has Anyone Aged as Well As Barry Bonds?

Has Anyone Aged as Well As Barry Bonds? (yes, there are two differenct articles with the same name)

Can "Pitching To Contact" Lead To More Scoring?

2011-04-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

See Are Twins Taking "Pitching To Contact" Too Far? by Rob Neyer.

To look at this, I calculated the batting average and slugging percentage in the AL in 2010 on contact. For contact, I used AB - K + SF. I assumed that sacrifice hits (bunts) and their attempts rarely end up in strikeouts. So in the AL last year when a plate appearance ended in contact, the AVG was .320 and the SLG was .501.

How many runs per game might this lead to? To approximate this, I used the equation

R/G = 16.04*OBP + 11.595*SLG - 5.52

That comes from regression analysis based on the 2007-2009 seasons.

Last year the AL had a leage OBP of .327 and a league SLG of .407. The equation predicts that would lead to a runs per game of 4.44 (it was actually 4.45). But if we used .320 for OBP and used the .501 for SLG, we get 5.44 runs per game. That seems like a big difference.

I am not sure if this approximation works. It would be quite a different game with no walks and the denominator for OBP and SLG is not the same in each case. But even with that said, I am skeptical that pitching to contact (or not trying to cause batters to miss the pitch) is a good idea.

Did Minnie Minoso Have Enough Peak Value To Make The Hall of Fame?

2011-04-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Rob Neyer's Measuring Minnie Minoso's Hall Of Fame Case got me thinking about this. He might have enough peak value using WAR. His career WAR is not bad at 52.8, which is 152nd among position players (from Baseball Reference).

Here is the top 10 in WAR in the AL over the years of 1951-59:

Mickey Mantle 72.1
Minnie Minoso 49.5
Yogi Berra 43.3
Ted Williams 42.7
Nellie Fox 38.3
Gil McDougald 37.3
Larry Doby 34.2
Al Kaline 32
Al Rosen 27.8
Jackie Jensen 26.7

Second place to only Mickey Mantle is pretty good. He was still 6th if we look at both leagues;

Mickey Mantle 72.1
Willie Mays 57.2
Eddie Mathews 54.8
Stan Musial 53.1
Duke Snider 50.2
Minnie Minoso 49.5
Richie Ashburn 43.5
Yogi Berra 43.3
Ernie Banks 43.2
Ted Williams 42.7

Minoso had 7 top 5 finishes in the AL including 1st place in 1954 and 1959.

He was also 10th in OPS+ for players with 3000+ PAs in both leagues.

Ted Williams 186
Mickey Mantle 172
Stan Musial 159
Willie Mays 158
Eddie Mathews 152
Hank Aaron 151
Duke Snider 149
Ralph Kiner 141
Ernie Banks 139
Minnie Minoso 137

Here are his ranks in Win Shares in the AL from 1951-1960:

1951: 6
1952:
1953: 7
1954: 5
1955:
1956: 3
1957: 7
1958: 7
1959: 4
1960: 5

For the whole decade of the 1950s, Minoso was 3rd in Win Shares in the AL:

Mantle 317
Berra 276
Minoso 234

That means Minoso averaged 26 Win Shares per season. I don't know if any of this is enough to get him in, but his case is better than I thought.

AL On Record Power Pace

2011-04-04T17:54:00.001-07:00

Just checked at Baseball Reference and so far the league SLG is .449. That would break the record for a whole league of .448 set by the NL in 1930. The AL has an ISO of .184. That would break the record the AL set in 1996 of .168. The Rangers have a .775 SLG with a .442 ISO. The Blue Jays have an ISO of .283, the Angels .239 and the Yankees .210.

Was Roger Maris More Deserving Of The MVP Award In 1960 or 1961?

2011-04-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

I am not sure he should have gotten it in either year, but if he had to get it, 1960 was actually the better choice. This is inspired by Baseball and the Value of Sabermetrics: An Author's Perspective. It was an interview at Bleacher Report of author Alan Hirsch who wrote the new book The Beauty of Short Hops (Hat tip: Baseball Think Factory).

Here is the exchnge that inspired this post:

"Q: What about the fact that Maris, by some measures, was actually as good or better in 1960 than in 1961?

In 1960 Mantle mostly hit in front of Maris, not behind him. And Maris only had four intentional walks in 1960 hitting mostly in front of the rather mediocre Bill Skowron. Should we question the impact of Skowron on Maris’ performance in 1960, the season in which he was probably more deserving of the MVP award?

AH: First, I’d take issue with the suggestion that Maris was as good in 1960 as in 1961."

Now here is my analysis:

Maris 1960 vs. Maris 1961 is a very close call. But it looks like if he was deserving of the MVP, 1960 was the better choice.

OPS+
1960-161 (2nd to Mantle's 164)
1961-167 (Mantle lead with 206, Cash had 201)

Offensive winning percentage
1960-.751 (2nd to Mantle's.764)
1961-.739 (5th, Mantle lead with .868, Cash had .864)

WAR
1960-7.5
1961-7.2

He was 1st in 1960 and only 5th in 1961. So that makes 1960 more deserving. Here are the WAR leaders for each year in the AL

1960
1. Maris (NYY) 7.5
2. Mantle (NYY) 6.7
3. Bunning (DET) 6.0
4. Herbert (KCA) 5.9
5. Aparicio (CHW) 5.4
6. Skowron (NYY) 4.5
7. Lary (DET) 4.3
Ramos (WSH) 4.3
Fox (CHW) 4.3
10. Robinson (BAL) 4.2
Sievers (CHW) 4.2

1961
1. Mantle (NYY) 11.9
2. Cash (DET) 10.0
3. Kaline (DET) 8.3
4. Colavito (DET) 7.9
5. Gentile (BAL) 7.2
Maris (NYY) 7.2
7. Howard (NYY) 5.9
8. Killebrew (MIN) 5.5
9. Kralick (MIN) 5.2
10. Pascual (MIN) 4.7
Romano (CLE) 4.7
Pizarro (CHW) 4.7

Win Shares
1960-31
1961-36

In 1960, Mantle beat Maris in WS 36-31 (they were 1-2). In 1961, Mantle beat him 48-36. Mantle was 1st, Maris 3rd. Cash had 42. So that tells me he was not deserving in either year, and even less so in 1960.

Here are the leaders in runs created above average in each year. In 1960, Maris was at least close to the leader. But in 1960 he was way back.

1960 AL
1 Mickey Mantle 59
2 Ted Williams 53
3 Roger Maris 51
4 Roy Sievers 37
5 Norm Cash 33
T6 Jim Gentile 31
T6 Harmon Killebrew 31
T6 Bill Skowron 31
9 Tito Francona 26
T10 Jim Lemon 25
T10 Minnie Minoso 25

1961 AL
1 Norm Cash 113
2 Mickey Mantle 111
3 Jim Gentile 74
4 Rocky Colavito 63
5 Roger Maris 60
6 Harmon Killebrew 56
7 Al Kaline 48
8 Elston Howard 42
9 Roy Sievers 35
T10 John Romano 29
T10 Norm Siebern 29

Here are the 1960 AL leaders in BFW, batting plus fielding wins by Pete Palmer
BFW
3.9 Aparicio CHI
3.7 Maris NY
3.6 Mantle NY
3.5 Runnels BOS

Now 1961

7.6 Cash DET
7.5 Mantle NY
5.5 Gentile BAL
4.6 Colavito DET

Maris had 3.1

Breaking News! White Sox Get Obama!

2011-04-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Click on White Sox Sign Obama For Left-handed Bullpen Support

How Good Are “Replacement” Pitchers? Evidence From Case Studies

2011-03-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

When a star pitcher goes down with an injury, a team must get someone else to pitch. That new guy is called a replacement pitcher. To see how good those understudies might be, I looked at cases of when this happened from 1946-2005. I examined the ERAs of the new guys (only in their starts, data from Retrosheet) and then determined what their winning percentage would be based on that ERA. That winning percentage will be an estimate of how good a replacement pitcher is.

The cases come from any pitcher since WWII who was in the top 25 in career IP or in the top 25 in ERA relative to the league average (minimum of 2000 IP). Then I found seasons when they had a drop in IP of 25% or more from the previous season. This had to be followed by an increase back up of at least 25% (of the following year’s total). I did this to avoid cases of someone who had really declined or was near the end of his career. The idea is that their being out was somewhat temporary. If a pitcher had two seasons in a row of low IP, became a reliever, or was traded in the three-year period, I did not include it. I also only wanted to look at starters, so I did not check Hoyt Wilhelm, who ranked high in relative ERA. Also, IP totals were adjusted for strike seasons to be more in line with a normal full season.

The table below shows the results:

Jim Palmer, for example, pitched 140.333 fewer IP in 1979 than in 1978. The ERA of the worst combined 140.333 IP on the Orioles that year was 3.99 (after adjusting for park effects). With the league ERA of 4.23, that would give a Pythagorean winning pct of .529.

Since the Orioles got 140.333 fewer IP from Palmer that year than the previous year, they had to "replace" him. And we know he was not going way because he pitched over 200 IP the next year. Some of his IP literally had to be replaced. And the "worst" 140.333 IP on the Orioles that year were not really that bad. They had good replacements. But, as can be seen in the table, that was not always true. Jack Morris's replacements in 1989 combined to have a 7.94 ERA, good for a .194 pct. The overall winning pct of the replacements was for all 27 cases .348 (a weighted average based on the missing IP in each case).

There are a host of issues associated with this study. I could have used the increase in IP after the year in question for what the replacements would have (or an average of the two). ERA may not be the best way to evaluate the replacements. Sometimes many pitchers were combined to make the replacement and some of them had very low IP totals. Maybe they only pitched on the road or at home, so the park adjustment might not be a good idea. Still another issue is that teams don’t pitch the same number of innings each year. If IP go up, regardless of who is or is not hurt, someone has to pitch them. So maybe in some cases I set the replacement IP too low.

It might also be instructive to see how the worst pitchers on a given team did in the year before the guy in question got hurt. The next table shows the pythagorean pct for the year they were actually hurt and for the year before, covering the same number of IP (with adjustments for strike years being made). I also did not count the pitcher himself in determining the worst ERAs for starters on his team the year before he got hurt, no matter what his ERA was.

For Blyleven in 1981, for example, I looked at the worst 153.666 IP among starters (making an adjustment for the strike year). Once that was adjusted for park effects and the league average was used, their Pythagorean winning pct would have been .346. That is actually worse than in a comparable number of IP in the year when Blyeven was actually hut and had to be replaced. I would expect that the worst batch of starters' IP to have an even higher ERA the next year with Blyleven missing. But it did not work out that way.

Only 9 of the 27 cases actually saw the projected winning pct of the worst starters go down. One example is 1991 for the Angels, when Blyleven missed the whole season and they had to replace the 134 IP they got from him in 1990. The worst 134 starting IP for the Angels in 1991 would get a Pythagorean pct. of .263. The worst 134 IP in 1990 has .366. That is the kind of thing we would expect when a good starter needs to be replaced. Yet this was not the norm.

The overall composite or weighted average of the project percentages was .348 in the year these pitchers were hurt and it was .356 the year before. That seems like a very small difference. This tells us that when a star pitcher goes down, the missing IP are covered by a group of pitchers who perform about as well as the worst pitchers on that team the year before. It makes me wonder if every team is getting a fairly big chunk of its IP from replacement level pitchers each year.

The one other thing to look at would be who actually took over the missing starts and see how they did. In 1967, Nelson Briles came out of the bullpen to make 14 starts in the second half of the season when Cardinal ace Bob Gibson got hurt. Briles went 10-2 with a 1.89 ERA as a starter. He then became a regular in the Cards rotation the next two years and was pretty much a starter (and a good one) for the next 10 years.

Bert Blyleven's peak vs. Sandy Koufax's Peak

2011-02-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

I raise this issue because it came up the other day at "The Hardball Times." See Visual Baseball: Blyleven vs. (dare I say) Koufax? by Kevin Dame. Here is something I wrote in the comments:

In 2007 at “Beyond the Boxscore” I posted an article called

"Bert Blyleven: As Dominating as Sandy Koufax

Over a 5 year stretch, both of them were 22 runs better than the 2nd best pitcher."

That was using a stat called RSAA or Runs saved against average. "It's the amount of runs that a pitcher saved vs. what an average pitcher would have allowed," as explained in the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. It is also adjusted for park effects.

I then went on to show that Blyleven was comparable to Koufax in strikeout-to-walk ratio and HRs allowed when park effects were factored in. Blyleven may have been a dominant pitcher during that time and no one really noticed.

Pitchers' Performance With Runners On And None On, 1974-2010

2011-02-20T15:03:00.000-08:00

I used data from David Pinto's Day-by-Day Database. I found all the pitchers who had 2500+ PAs with runners on base (ROB) and no runners on (NONE). There were 274 pitchers.

The correlation between the batting average (BA) allowed with ROB and BA allowed with NONE was .723. For slugging percentage (Slug%) it was .740. Those are both fairly high.

But I did expect it to be even higher based on some recent posts where I compared BA differential and Slug% differential between the two cases for consecutive years were extremely low. That suggests very little ability to pitch to the situation.

The table below shows the 25 best pitchers in terms of lowering their BA with ROB compared to NONE.

Now for Slug%

The next two tables are the worst pitchers. That is, they gave up a higher BA and Slug% with ROB than with NONE.

Bud Black Says Padres Are More Balanced Now And This Will Make Up For The Loss Of Adrian Gonzalez

2011-02-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

See Black: ‘We’re more balanced’. (Hat Tip: Baseball Think Factory). Click here to go their discussion. Here is what Black said:

"There is definitely going to be a different look. The Padres made a major transition midway through the 2009 season. It has transitioned again. I like this team. The focal point of last season was always Adrian (Gonzalez). We’re more balanced. That balance has to make up for the loss of Adrian."

That will be tough to do since in the last two years Gonzalez finished 4th and then 2nd in WAR with 7.0 and 6.3 (from Baseball Reference). Black said they will be improved elsewhere. That might make up for losing Gonzalez, but it does not have anything to do with balance per se.

I have done some research on balance. See

The Impact of Lineup Balance on Scoring, 1920-89

and

Are "Balanced" Teams More Successful?

I found balance helps very little, if at all. I also have links to research by Keith Woolner and David Gassko at that first site. It looks like their research shows that at most better balance can add 1 per season. So if Adrian Gonzalez's replacement costs the Padres more than 1 win compared to him, the balance will not help, as Black says. That is assuming that they actually are more balanced.

Does Clutch Pitching Persist Year-To-Year? (Part 2)

2011-02-06T14:52:00.000-08:00

Part 1 was a couple of weeks ago, when I only looked at one pair of years. I have now done 5 pairs of years. Low correlations indicate that pitchers tend not to be clutch one year and again clutch the next year.

I looked at all pitchers that had at least 250 plate appearances against opposing hitters in both of five consecutive two-year periods both with and without runners on base. There were around 70 such pitchers in each of the five cases. Data from David Pinto's "Day by Day Database" which is based on Retrosheet.

I found the differential between the batting average they allowed with runners on base (ROB) and the batting average they allowed with no runners on (NONE). I did the same for Slug%. So if a pitcher allowed a .240 BA with ROB and a .260 BA with NONE, his differential was -.020. That means he did better in the clutch than otherwise.

Did pitchers maintain about the same clutch performance in each year? Probably not. The table below shows the correlation between the first year's differential and the second year's differential for both BA and Slug%. They all tend to be pretty low or negative. If a pitchers in general tended to have about the same differential in each year, the correlation would be much higher. That is what I would expect if they really had a constant ability (or inability) with runners on base. But what this means is that many pitchers have a good differential one year and a bad or mediocre one the next year.

In both cases, with runners on and with none on, there is a large number of PAs. So if there really is some clutch ability here, we should see it. Also, pitchers, unlike hitters, can actually bear down and throw a little harder with runners on (or try harder to break off good curve balls). A batter really can't swing harder, for example, depending on the situation. But pitchers could save a little extra for when they needed it with runners on. Batters probably don't save a little extra.

So the one group that could theoretically have some control over the clutch don't seem to have it even when looking at a fairly large number of observations.

The Expanded Postseason and its Impact on True Champions

2011-01-29T08:33:00.000-08:00

SABR member Steve Fall presented his research on this at the Hornsby Chapter annual meeting. Very interesting.

Click here to read more about this and there is a link to the power point presentation Steve did. There are 24 slides. Here is the conclusion:

"While other factors have had some impact on the results, the most successful regular season teams have a much tougher time prevailing as World Series Champions due to the extra round of playoffs they must survive."

An Attempt To Measure Park Effects From 1934

2011-01-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

I heard about this from the South Texas Chapter of SABR (Hornsby Chapter). Jan Larson said that author and chapter member Norman Macht, author of many books on baseball and other topics including Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball, came across a Baseball Magazine article from 1934 that looked at park effects. Here is the link A New Way to Compile Batting Averages (1934). The article is below anyway. The big idea was to calculate the batting average for each park and see if a player did better or worse than that.

The article was by FLETCHER PRATT. Jim Baker pointed out that he was very interesting. He was a science fiction and history writer who created some type of popular naval war game. Go to

Fletcher Pratt Wikipedia article

The World's Most Complicated Game: Fletcher Pratt, a historian and naval expert, invented a complex pastime that used ballroom floors and up to 120 players (from Sports Illustrated)

Here is the article:

The Present System of Computing Batting Averages Has Long Been Criticized and it Has Many Defects. Many Schemes for Improving the Records Have Been Advanced From Time to Time. Here is One That May Have Some Merit.

Does it seem right that Chick Fullis, who didn't hit hard when he was with the Giants, should suddenly develop a batting average thirty points higher than Mel Ott's at Philadelphia? Does it seem fair that Chick Hafey, one of the best hitters in baseball, should be getting the Bronx cheer for weak hitting, when the only trouble is that at Redland Field he was in a park where he had to drive the ball a mile to get a single?

Averages to show how well a player should hit in a park would straighten out these in¬consistencies. They would also give a lot of other information. They might tell us, for example, whether the Braves' pitching staff is really good, or merely look good because they have a lot of room to work in, and they might give us a real line on how well Chuck Klein should hit when he gets into a uniform with "Chicago" written across the chest.

But how will you get the batting average for a ball park? Simply by taking all the at bats in that park during a season, no matter what teams were playing, and dividing by the hits. The result will be the park's batting average, and it will be very accurate, for it will be an average compiled from the work of all the players in the league. This composite percentage will show, with reasonable certainty, how well the average player, if there were any such thing as an average player, ought to hit in a given park.

Trying this process with the National League parks for 1933, what results do we get? Here's the list, with all the games played during the year included:

There's a. lot of information in this table. Note that there is more than 73 points’ differ¬ence between Baker Bowl and the Polo Grounds. When one analyzes these figures they become even more important. They mean, for instance, that any team will hit over .300 in Philadelphia, and that the poor Philly pitchers have to face solid line-ups of .307 hitters from the beginning to the end of the season. But, of course, the visiting pitchers are up against the problem of curbing the clouting teammates of Dick Bartell and Don Hurst.
On the other band, take a look at the batting averages compiled at the Polo Grounds and at Braves' Field. No wonder Terry and McKechnie have good pitching staffs; they couldn’t have anything else in parks where the batters can hit no better than .244 and .232. It will be noted that 47 more runs were made at the Polo Grounds than at Boston during the 1933 season. This may mean that part of the low batting averages at the New York park is due to the ability of the Giants' pitch¬ing staff rather than to the park.

But that brings up another point. What is a good hitting team? Not just a team that makes a big batting average. The Phillies have been up near the top of the batting averages in the National League for years, and for just as many years they have been down near the bottom of the standing of the clubs. The usual reason given for this is that the Philly pitching staff has been weak, which is just another way of saying that the Phillies, although they pounded the ball, didn't hit quite as well as the teams they stacked up against—not well enough to beat them, any¬way. The Yankees in the days of their glory were a really good hitting team; that is, they consistently made more hits than the oppo¬sition in the same parks and under the same conditions. A hitting team, then, is not a team with a good batting average, but a team that can hit better than the opposition; that is, better than the average.

Now if the batting average of all the teams in the league at a certain park is .260 and the team whose home park it is, smacks the ball for a team batting average of .280, that team will be consistently hitting better than the opposition. So that if we compare the team batting averages in the league with the bat-ting averages of the parks they play in, we will be in a fair way to finding out what teams hit better than the opposition they encountered.

First let's take the clouting Phillies, who had three of the National League's six leading hitters and ranked third in team batting, with a figure of .274. The average for their park was .307, as we just saw. That is, all the teams playing in the Phillies' park hit .307 in 1933. But the Phillies themselves hit only .274, so their average was 33 points under what it should have been if they had hit as well as the rest of the teams in the league.

This shows that in spite of that .274 average, the Phillies were a weak-hitting outfit, which may help to explain why they finished in seventh place.

Now compare the figures in the same way for the Giants. In 1933 they hit only .263 and ranked down near the bottom of the league in hitting, while people compared them to the old Hitless Wonders of Fielder Jones. But the park averages we just compiled show that all the teams in the league hit only .232 at the Polo Grounds. This means that the Giants were hitting 31 points better than the opposition they met all season. They look like light hitters because they were play¬ing in a light-hitting park, but when they got into a batter's park, you couldn't get them out, as the Senators discovered. It doesn't matter whether it was because the Giants' pitching staff always kept the enemy in check, or whether it was because Bill Terry and his merry men could always find the opposing pitchers in the pinch. The Giants looked like weak hitters in the averages, but on the ball field they were a better-hitting team than any they faced.

Suppose we go right through the list of the teams in the league then, and make new averages. The team batting average will be one element; that will show how each team actually hit. The park batting average will show how all the teams in the league hit in that team's park; and the difference will be the amount each team hit better or worse than the teams it played against. Here's what we get:

Note how this list brings the teams out almost exactly in the order they finished in the Standing of the Clubs. This shows why the rank of the teams in the team batting averages doesn’t mean much. It’s not how hard a team hits the ball that counts; it’s how much better it hits than the other teams. On this basis, it appears that the Braves, who seemed to be a punchless outfit, actually hit just as well as the Pirates, who were rated the leading hitters of the league. It also shows that the Cards didn’t get so much good out of their wonderful pitching staff because they themselves weren’t hitting. Sportmen’s Field shows up as one of the best batting parks in the league.

But if you can subtract the park averages from a team’s batting average and get a good line on the team’s hitting, why can’t you do the same thing with individual batting averages and get a very accurate judgment on how good they are as hitters? If all the players in the league compile a general average of .280 at Sportsmen’s Field and Pepper Martin hits .316 there, then Pepper Martin is hitting 36 points better than the average and deserves to rank high up among the batters of the league. And if a player hits .305 at the Phillies’ .307 park, he is a -2 hitter in spite of his good-looking average.

So when we apply the same system to the individual batting averages we begin to understand why Chick Fullis fattened his batting average by 50 points when he moved from New York to Philadelphia and why Chick Hafey’s average fell when he changed over from St. Louis to Cincinnati. Sportsmen’s Field is a .280 park, Redland Field a .258 park. This would normally take about 22 points off the Chick’s average. Now Hafey hit .303 in 1933. If you give him back the 22 points he lost by switching a Cardinals uniform for a Redlegs one, his average comes back to .325, which is just about right, allowing for the dead ball in the National League last year.

When we go right down the line and apply the same system to the ranking batters of the league, we get a lot of interesting results. The leaders come out as follows:

Look what this does to the individual batting averages. For one thing, the Phillies no longer have three of the six leading hitters. Klein and Virgil Davis, who would be hot hitters in any company, are still up near the top, but the others have melted away. And Wally Berger, a fine hitter, who breaks up many a ball game and doesn’t get enough credit for the good hitting he does, is placed up there where he belongs.

Incidentally, with Klein in the fold this means that the Cubs are going to have the hardest-hitting outfield in baseball, and it also gives us a line on the vexed question of how Klein and Virgil Davis will hit in their new monkey-suits. The averages show Klein hits about 61 points better than his park. In Chicago, he will be batting in a .257 park. Add 61 points to this, with about 20 more for the livelier ball he will be batting in 1934, and you have .338 for his average if he does as well as last year. Virgil Davis will be batting in a .280 park at St. Louis. Add the 42 points he hit over his park average at Philadelphia, and make the same allowance for the lively ball and you have .342 for his probable average in 1934. So that both Klein and Davis will be found somewhere around .340 when the 1934 World’s Series rolls around, and if they aren’t the writer of this article will eat an arithmetic book with cream and sugar.

Does Clutch Pitching Persist Year-To-Year?

2011-01-24T16:16:00.000-08:00

Low correlations indicate that pitchers tend not to be clutch one year and again clutch the next year.

I looked at all pitchers that had at least 250 plate appearances against opposing hitters in both 2009 & 2010 both with and without runners on base. There were 76 such pitchers. Data from David Pinto's "Day by Day Database" which is based on Retrosheet.

I found the differential between the batting average they allowed with runners on base (ROB) and the batting average they allowed with no runners on (NONE). I did the same for SLG. So if a pitcher allowed a .240 AVG with ROB and a .260 AVG with NONE, his differential was -.020. That means he did better in the clutch than otherwise.

Did pitchers maintaing about the same clutch performance in each year? Probably not. The correlation between their differentials in each year was just -.064. A zero correlation means no relationship and this is very close to that.

It was higher for SLG, though. But it was -.196 . That means if a pitcher was good in the clutch one year, he tended not to be good the next year, although the effect is weak.

This is just one year. More years need to be looked at. I will try to do more when I can.

FC Lane on the Batting Order

2011-01-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

The post below is the few pages from FC Lane's book called "Batting" that dealt with the batting order. Whether or not it matches up with some of the recent analysis on lineups I will leave up to readers. One expert mentioned that it was a good idea to bat Cy Williams 2nd. FC Lane was a great baseball writer and editor of Baseball Magazine in the early part of the 20th century.

How the Batting Order "Colors" Batting

JOHN McGRAW once said, "Every ball team is capable of being arranged in a way to produce the maximum batting punch. You need a fast man who is a good waiter for lead off, another fast man good at the bunt and the hit and run in second place, then a massing of your heavy artillery in the next three or four positions so as to deliver the hardest blow with the least possible slowing down in speed. A slow footed runner, for example, will often cripple an attack. He must hit uncommonly well to be placed high on the list. Naturally your pitchers come last, for even if they are good hitters, they change too frequently for a settled batting order."

Jack Coombs said, "Every manager models his batting order on a scientific basis. He has so many batters at his disposal. He wishes to align those men so that their combined efforts will appear to the best advantage. How can he do this? Few managers agree on the precise details, but all agree on certain essential points. For example, number one should be a good hitter, but above all a good waiter. If he is short of stature so much the better for he will be harder to pitch to. All managers agree that the second man on the list must be a foxy hitter and fast on his feet. They agree also that third, fourth and fifth positions should be filled by good hitters who are preferably sluggers. I believe the three most important positions on the line-up are first, fourth and seventh place. First is obviously important. He is the entering wedge of your attack. Fourth is the logical clean-up man, the fellow who drives home that entering wedge. Seventh is a kind of clean-up man, but I cannot afford to put too good a hitter there. If I do, the opposing pitcher will pass him to take a chance at the tail of the batting order. Rather I must station a hitter at seventh who is not easily excited but is cool and always likely to come through with a hit."

Miller Huggins said, "An attack which is distributed through six or seven men rather than centered in one or two is much more effective. The team with a bunch of good hitters is usually consistent in its stick work. It is the steadiness of the pace which counts. On some clubs the batting punch is supplied by a renowned hitter like Hans Wagner or Nap Lajoie. On other clubs there is no such individual star but a better balanced attack of several men who are all good hitters. I prefer such a batting attack for your one or two stars may have an off day. The average work of six or seven men doesn't vary so widely. Besides, it is difficult for the pitcher to side step such an attack. In a pinch he can pass one or two men, but he can't pass half a dozen in succession. Furthermore, the strain of pitching to a number of men who are always dangerous is cumulative. The pitcher gets no breathing space as he would when he had retired one or two formidable stars and then faced mediocre batters."

Not all experts agree on the relative importance of the various positions on the line-up. Most of them would rate the lead-off man as important, and the clean-up sluggers as even more so. Hugh Jennings, however, thought differently. He said, "The neck moves the head and what the lead-off man accomplishes depends pretty much on the follow-up assistance he gets from the second man in the line-up. I believe it is a bigger job to locate a man who can play second properly than it is to find a good lead-off man. The talents which the lead-off man must possess are well understood and everybody realizes that the clean-up man must be a slugger. But the second place man hasn't been studied so thoroughly. This batter must be a good bunter. Good bunters ought to be common, but they are really less numerous than good hitters. The second place man must have a good batting eye and be a good waiter. Above all, he must use his head. In general he should hit to right field for his main object is to advance the lead-off man who has presumably reached first either through hit, pass or error. By driving the ball to right field he can send the runner to third base. I f he hit to left field, that runner would be held at second. Above all the second place man must have the peculiar knack of knowing whether the second baseman or short stop is going to cover the bag. Then he must be able to hit in a manner to break up their defensive play. This is very important. In fact I consider it the prime qualification for the man playing second position on the line-up. Moreover, the second place hitter should be fast. Then he won't get snarled up ina double play. There are times when he will retire the base runner in spite of himself. Then his thoughts are bent on saving his own scalp. That's largely a matter of speed in getting to first base."

Arthur Fletcher once played Cy Williams, his heaviest slugger, in second place. He said, "Cy isn't much of a bunter, I will admit. But he has some qualifications that you can't overlook. First of all, he's a right field hitter. That's what you want, a man to advance the runner. Then Cy seldom strikes out. You can generally depend upon him to hit the ball and hit it hard. Thus he advances the runner even though he is thrown out himself. And that's as good as a sacrifice. Besides, Cy is always likely to come through with a hit which may be a homer. Placing him high in the batting order you get more of his work. He'll go to bat five times in many a game where he would appear but four times if he batted farther down the list."

Even the despised tail of the batting list may be a source of strength. Wilbur Cooper said, "I am convinced that a pitcher adds much to his effectivness by his own good hitting. I believe that my batting and fielding have won seven or eight games a season for me that would otherwise have been lost."

Bill McKechnie said, "In all my experience I have known just one batter who liked to play the lead-off position." Bill thought this an inexcusable attitude, but it's not difficult to fathom. Batters don't like the lead-off position because it interferes with their hitting. It cuts their batting average many points. For example, John Tobin said, "The man who bats number one on the list and hits for .280 is doing well. He must forget his own hase hits in an effort to get on and of course his average suffers. How much it suffers I couldn't say, but I believe it will drop twenty to thirty points. Of course, some one has to play that position, but I think the records ought to make some provision for lead-off man and not rate his batting on the same basis as that of the slugger who comes fourth or fifth on the list."

Max Carey said, "In fairness to myself, I shall claim special consideration for my batting. I would have done much better had I not been lead-off man for several seasons. It is well known that lead-off man can not expect to have as high an average as he could get lower down the list. There are two reasons for this. In the first place he often has to wait out the pitcher and try to work him for a pass. In the second place, the pitcher, when he faces the lead-off man, usually has no one on bases to bother him. He is able to take lis full wind up and concentrate on the batter."

Batting languishes at the tail of the list. The catcher is out of the game frequently while the pitcher appears only once in three or four days. As Babe Ruth says, "No man can get in the games twice a week and do himself justice at bat as he would do were he getting daily practice."

Some managers shift their batting lists infrequently, even though one or two positions are open to criticism. They prefer to suffer this disadvantage rather than the greater disadvantage of a general disorganization. Not a few managers, however, particularly on losing clubs, shake up their batting lists rather often in the effort to hit upon a better working combination. When they do, the batting of the various players on the list is apt to fluctuate widely, for there is a definite connection between a batting average and the particular position in the batting order which a player is called upon to fill. In general lead-off man is handicapped by orders to wait out the pitcher, second position is handicapped by orders to sacrifice. The tail of the batting order is handicapped by a variety of adverse conditions among which infrequency of batting practice ranks rather high. Only at the clean-up positions does batting flourish at its best, for those players are usually called upon to "hit it out." There is also a noticeable psychology in a batter's position on the list. Let the man, for example, who has hit seventh, be raised to fourth or fifth place and his new responsibilities often act as a tonic on his batting average.

To sum up, a batter's work is colored to a considerable degree by the particular position he is called upon to fill in the batting order.

Trevor Hoffman Retires With Highest Strikeout-to-Walk Ratio

2011-01-11T18:43:00.000-08:00

The table below shows the top 15 pitchers in strikeout-to-walk ratio since 1955 with 1000+ IP. For walks I used BB + HBP - IBB (which is called BB*). Data from Baseball Reference and the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

In 1089 IP, Hoffman only hit 9 batters. The average pitcher would have hit about 4 times as many. And about 19% of his walks were intentional. For the average pitcher it was about 9%. Now for the guys who had 2000+ IP.

Ted Williams, Pedro Ramos, Dizzy Trout And Autographs

2011-01-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

This is a post about trying to get to the bottom of some mythic stories. Stories that sound good but don't seem to stand up to scrutiny. The following site

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=3280

Has a passage from the book "The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship" by David Halberstam. Here it is:

"When [Ted] was generous there was no one more generous, and when he was petulant there was no one more petulant, and sometimes he was both within a few seconds. Once in the mid-1950s, Pedro Ramos, then a young pitcher with Washington, struck Ted out, which was a very big moment for Ramos. He rolled the ball into the dugout to save, and later, after the game, the Cuban right-hander ventured into the Boston dugout with the ball and asked Ted to sign it. Mel Parnell was watching and had expected an immediate explosion, Ted being asked to sign a ball he had struck out on, and he was not disappointed. Soon there was a rising bellow of blasphemy from Williams, and then he had looked over and seen Ramos, a kid of 20 or 21, terribly close to tears now. Suddenly Ted had softened and said, “Oh, all right, give me the goddamn ball,” and had signed it. Then about two weeks later he had come up against Ramos again and hit a tremendous home run, and as he rounded first he had slowed down just a bit and yelled to Ramos, “I’ll sign that son of a bitch too if you can ever find it.”"

Now a writer at Baseball Think Factory wrote a refutation of this. It is at

Tracer: The Ted Williams-Pedro Ramos Story

My problem is that "The Biographical Encyclopedia of Baseball" has almost the same story about Ted Williams and Dizzy Trout. Page 1145, the entry on Trout. It does not say which year. It is the one edited by Pietrusza, Silverman and Gershman. Does anyone know anything about these stories? Any of them true? Are they told about other players? When was the first one reported? I doubt they are all true!

In the Dizzy Trout version (the Biographical Encyclopedia quotes his son, Steve), he strikes out Williams to preserve a 2-1 victory. I could find no game even remotely close to something like this for Trout vs. Boston using the Baseball Reference and Retrosheet game logs.

Update January 9: Rob Neyer discussed both the Ramos story and the Trout story in his book on baseball legends (pages 127-130). The Ramos story, he says, comes from Hy Hurwitz of the Boston Globe. The Trout story, he says, comes from Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo.

There is something plausible about the Trout case. On August 29, 1946, the Tigers beat the Red Sox 9-8 in 14 innings. Trout pitched the last 6.2 innings to win the game (allowing no runs on 3 hits and 3 walks). He struck out 2 batters but neither was Williams since the Baseball Reference boxscore shows no K's for him in that game. It is possible that Trout retired Williams in a key situation with runners on base. But the boxscore does not show that and the only news stories I found did not describe much about the game.

The Red Sox sent 64 men to the plate in the game, meaning that the leadoff man made the last out of the game. So Trout certainly did not get Williams out in the last inning.

But on Sept. 11, 13 days later, Williams did hit a HR off of Trout. So the story is not that far off at least as far as the events on the field are concerned.

Rob Neyer Asks: Does Kevin Brown have Cooperstown case?

2011-01-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

Click here to read what Rob has to say. He lays out a good case for Brown. Here is some info on Brown I posted recently at Baseball Think Factory. I was surprised by how good the case for Brown is.

I have not thought too much about Kevin Brown one way or another but looking at his Baseball Reference page seems to show he deserves it. 34th in career WAR among pitchers despite the lower usage of starters in recent times.

Here are his ranks in WAR in the NL from 1996-2000: 1, 3, 1, 3, 2 (also a 3 in 2003). The only pitcher with more WAR from 1996-2000 was Pedro Martinez, 36.6 vs. 34.6. He was in the top 7 in IP in all those years.

He was in the top 6 in ERA+ every year from 1995-2000 with one 1st place. 53rd in career ERA+.

He was in the top 10 in strikeout-to-walk ratio 7 straight years (94-2000) with 5 top 5 finishes. His ratio relative to the league average is only 69th all-time among pitchers with 2000+ IP (through 2009). But that includes 406 pithers, so he is in the top 17%.

Using that same group of pitchers he is 5th all-time in HRs allowed relative to the league average. I know he pitched 5 years in Dodger stadium (and maybe some other tough HR parks), but look at the top 15. Data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

Jack Taylor 200
Eppa Rixey 200
Tim Keefe 180
Addie Joss 174
Kevin Brown 172
Ed Morris 170
Eddie Plank 166
Dean Chance 165
Ed Walsh 165
Pete Donohue 161
Eddie Cicotte 161
Cy Falkenberg 157
Harry Howell 156
Tim Hudson 154
Roger Clemens 154

The 172 for Brown comes from the fact he gave up 208 HRs while the average pitcher would have given up 358. 208/358 = .581. 1/.581 = 1.72. That gets multiplied by 100. Taylor, Keefe and Joss all pitched in the dead ball era or earlier. If we only look at 1920-2009, Brown is 2nd only to Rixey who pitched alot in Cincinnati and that park in those days was really hard to hit a HR in.

Here is the top 15 from 1920-2009

Eppa Rixey 202
Kevin Brown 172
Dean Chance 165
Pete Donohue 161
Tim Hudson 154
Roger Clemens 154
Mark Gubicza 153
Danny Jackson 152
Derek Lowe 150
Greg Maddux 149
Hoyt Wilhelm 147
Mike Garcia 146
Roy Halladay 145
Dizzy Trout 144
Andy Pettitte 144

Pretty impressive rank for Brown.

Brown's HR rate (HR/PA), home, road

H 1.57%
R 1.50%

So his HR prevention excellence is not due to pitching in pitcher friendly parks. Brown seems to have very high career value and very high peak value. He was also very good at preventing runs and homeruns. He was good at striking batters out and not walking them. All that covers quite a bit of what we expect pitchers to do.

To analyze how good Brown is just using walks, strikeouts and HRs, I ran a regression in which a pitcher's ERA relative to the league average was the dependent variable and walks, strikeouts and HRs (all relative to the league average) were the dependent variables (in this case being over 100 is better than average like with HRs allowed, as discussed above). I looked at all pitchers from 1920-2009 with 2000+ IP. Here is the regression equation:

ERA = 35.23 + .235*HR + .264*SO + .176*BB

Here are Brown's rates for each stat:

HR 172
SO 106
BB 140

Plugging those values into the equation gives him a relative ERA of 128.27. Here is the top 10

Dazzy Vance 140.23
Lefty Grove 134.04
Pedro Martinez 133.46
Roger Clemens 129.85
Eppa Rixey 128.72
Kevin Brown 128.27
Greg Maddux 127.80
Nolan Ryan 127.32
Bret Saberhagen 126.97
Roy Halladay 125.27

Brown is 6th. That is very, very good. Just based on HRs, BBs, and SOs, Brown was 28.27% better than the league average.

But none of this is park adjusted. I also found RSAA per 9 IP (that is Runs Saved Above Average and is park adjusted, from Lee Sinins). Here is the top 20

Pedro Martinez 1.579
Lefty Grove 1.526
Roger Clemens 1.340
Roy Halladay 1.152
Randy Johnson 1.147
Hoyt Wilhelm 1.126
Greg Maddux 0.992
Tim Hudson 0.961
Tommy Bridges 0.958
Curt Schilling 0.955
Hal Newhouser 0.929
Whitey Ford 0.911
Urban Shocker 0.901
Carl Hubbell 0.890
Lefty Gomez 0.866
Gro. Alexander 0.857
Sandy Koufax 0.852
Bret Saberhagen 0.846
Kevin Brown 0.840
Mark Buehrle 0.838

Brown is 19th. Still pretty good.

How Much Of A Yankee Killer Was Frank Lary?

2010-12-30T14:09:00.000-08:00

His career record against them was 28-13. From 1955-61, it was 27-10 with a 3.06 ERA while his ERA against everyone else was 3.42. But did he really pitch better or differently against the Yankees?

Let's start with strikeout-to-walk ratio. In those years, Lary's was 1.62 against non-Yankee teams (I included HBP and took out IBBs-all data from Retrosheet). Against NY, it was 1.71. That may seem consistent with the "Yankee Killer" nick name, but over those years the Yankees themselves had a 1.43 ratio while the rest of the league had 1.32. So the typical pitcher had a strikeout-to-walk ratio that was .11 higher against the Yanks than everyone else. Lary was .09 better. So he was doing just about what other pitchers did.

Now HRs or HR rate (I use HRs divided by PAs with IBBs taken out). Lary allowed the Yanks a 2.6988% while he allowed the rest of the league 1.75%. So the Yanks did about 0.948 percentage points better against Lary than the average team from the rest of the AL. But that is just about normal. Over these years, the Yankees had a rate of 3.0097% while the rest of the league had a rate of 2.162%. The Yankees were about 0.848 percentage points better than the league average. So again, Lary's relative performance vs. NY is about what it was for other pitchers.

What about other hits? Lary's non-HR hit% against NY was .199 while against other teams it was .217. So that is a fairly big improvement. Some how he was better at preventing hits against the Yankees than he was against other teams. The Yankees themselves had a .205 rate while the rest of the league had .204. So the typical pitcher allowed more hits (but not alot more) to the Yankees than they normally did.

So it seems like the one thing that Lary was good at when he faced the Yankees was in preventing them from getting singles, doubles and triples. But the difference was only .018. Over, say, 36 PAs per game, that is just .648 hits. The run value of those hits is about .55 (the weighted average of the linear weights values that Pete Palmer established). So that makes a run value of .36 (interesting that that is just about the difference between his ERA against other teams and the one he had against the Yankees, 3.42 vs. 3.06).

The Tigers did score 4.93 runs per game in his starts against the Yankees from 1955-61. They averaged 4.61 runs per game overall. So the hitters rose to the occassion to support him. And maybe the fielders played a role in lowering the rate of non-HR hits he allowed. So it is possible that Lary became the "Yankee Killer" due to the aid of his teammates.

Bert Blyleven vs. Jack Morris

2010-12-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

It seems like people who favor Morris over Blyleven say Morris was better in the clutch or better in big games. So I try to look at those issues here.

The table below shows their stats in 3 situations: runners on base (ROB), runners in scoring position (RISP), and close and late (CL). Data from Retrosheet.

I did not try to adjust these numbers for the league average. Blyleven might get a slight edge since the early 70s were not a big hitting era. But much of their careers did overlap. The only place where either pitcher has a big edge is Morris's edge in AVG in CL situations. But that .021 does not add up to alot. Blyleven had 2,129 ABs faced in those cases. That amounts to about 44 hits or 2 per season. That seems pretty small.

The next table shows their post season stats. League Championship Series and World Series are combined.

Morris has just about twice the IP. So if you doubled Blyleven's stats, you can see that there is not much difference between the two. Blyleven would have 86 hits, just about what Morris has. Same for HRs. But he would have more strikeouts and fewer walks.

I also looked at how they did in September pennant races. If a team finished 10 or more games ahead or behind, it was not considered to be a pennant race. If a team finished less than 10 games ahead or behind and if they were 5 or fewer games ahead or behind at the end of play of Aug. 31, it was considered a pennant race. 1991 for the Twins was not considered a pennant race (Morris was on that team). They began Sept. 7 games ahead (GA). On Sept. 15 they were 7.5 GA and they finished the season 8 GA. 1981 was not included since it was a strike year with a split season. Many teams were within a few games in Sept. This is highly unusual and winning the 2nd half only gave you a chance to play for the divisional title.

So the years I have for Morris as Sept. pennant races are 83, 87, 88, 92, 93. For Blyleven they were 77-80, 87, 89. Each pitcher had a total of 231.66 IP (Oct. data was included). Some of this data might inlcude games pitched after the divisional title was decided. But I did not feel like spending the time to figure that out. The table below shows how each pitcher did in these cases.

Again, it does not look like there is much difference between the two. So given Blyleven's far superior career stats (and peak value as measured by stats like WAR), he still deserves to make the Hall of Fame ahead of Morris. Whatever edge in the clutch or big games Morris might have, it is definitely not enough to put him ahead of Blyleven.

A Crude Measure Of The Most "All-Around" Players Since 1957

2010-12-15T09:23:00.000-08:00

I started thinking about this when Cooper Nielson in a Baseball Think Factory discussion said:

"I suppose the "best all-around player" argument could go like this (keep in mind this is not my argument and not one I even agree with, but one that could conceivably and logically put Walker #1 in his era): There are five traditional baseball tools: hitting (for average), hitting for power, running, playing defense, and throwing."

What Might Explain Ron Santo's Low Hall Of Fame Voting Percentages?

2010-12-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

It seems like it might be for the reasons I have have seen people give the last week or so: no post-season exposure, somewhat short career (he did not reach 10,000 PAs), lack of milestones like 3000 hits or 500 HRs and lack of MVP awards.

Last year and earlier this year I posted some regression generated equations that tried to explain the percentage of the Hall of Fame vote player got in their first year of eligibility (and also their highest percentage). The model I came up with was based on some trial and error. That seemed unavoidable, since it is hard to have priors on what exactly the voters are thinking. The model looked at all players that became eligible for the first time from 1980-2009.

The model uses the following data to explain vote percentage:

Reaching 10,000 PAs
500 HRs
3000 hits
500 SBs
Gold Gloves
All-Star games
World Series performance
MVP awards

Gold Gloves and All-Star games got capped at certain levels which were then squared. The idea was that those things have an exponential effect which tapers off. There were also interaction terms for World Series performance, Gold Gloves and All-Star games. The idea there was that getting lots of Gold Gloves and playing in lots of All-Star games has more than an additive effect (after I discuss what the model predicted for Santo, technical details like regression results and variable descriptons will be covered).

Santo's first year percentage was 3.9%. Normally, he would no longer be eligible in the writers' voting. But he and some other players were re-instated in 1985. He got 13.4%. The model predicted that he would get 17.65%. The standard error was .08. So even if we give him 8% more, that only jumps him up to 21.4%. Still a pretty low total for a first year (Billy Williams got 23.4% in his first year in 1982 and steadily increased until he got 85.7% in 1987).

Santo's highest percentage was 43%. The model predicted it would be 30%. So he actually did better than that. The standard error was .117. So he was predicted to be about 4 standard errors below what is needed for induction, 75%. And his actual highest percentage was still about 3 standard errors below 75%. Billy Williams highest predicted percentage was 29.6% while it was actually 85.7%. That differential of 56.1% is the highest positive differential. Why Williams is in and Santo isn't is an interesting question.

Here was the equation where the player's first year vote percentage was the dependent variable

PCT = -.010 + .00086(WSAS) + .048(GGAS) + .070(MVP) + .404(3000 HIT) + .280(500 HR) + .002(ASSQ10) - .00089(GGSQ7) + .071(500SB) - .006(WSIMPSQ50) + .100(10000PA)

The adjusted r-squared was .898 The standard error was .08.

Here was the equation where the player's highest vote percentage was the dependent variable

PCT = -.014 + .00037(WSAS/1000) + .025(GGAS/1000) + .067(MVP) + .257(3000 HIT) + .201(500 HR) + .0048(ASSQ10) - .0013(GGSQ7) + .071(500SB) - .00167(WSIMPSQ50/1000) + .137(10000PA)

The adjusted r-squared was .861 The standard error was .117.

MVP is number of MVP awards won, 3000H is a dummy variable (1 if a player reached it, 0 otherwise). The 500HR is also a dummy variable as it is for 500SB and 10000PA (if you made it to 10,000 career plate appearances, you get a 1, 0 otherwise). I used all the voting data from 1990-2009.

What is ASSQ10? It is the square of the number of All-star games played in squared. But AS games played is maxed out at 10. The assumption here is that being an all-star has a positive exponential effect but only up to a point where no more games helps (I have a graph below to help explain this). The GGSQ7 is the same thing for Gold Gloves.

WSIMPSQ50 involves World Series play. First, WSIMP is World Series PAs times OPS. The idea here that the more you play in the World Series the more votes you would get, but by multiplying it by OPS, it also includes how well you played (or just hit). This gets maxed out at 50 and is squared, for the same reason as all-star games (yes, Reggie Jackson is first here and way ahead of everyone else at 141, with Dave Justice and Lonnie Smith tied for 2nd at 101).

The last two variables are interaction variables. GGAS is the gold glove variable multiplied by the all-star variable and WSAS is the world series variable times the all-star game variable. It looks strange that the coefficient values on GGSQ7 and WSIMPSQ50 are negative. But you might notice that they are positive on the interactive variables. I think this is like when a regression uses both X and X-squared in a regression if the phenomena is non-linear (an inverted parabola, for example). The coefficient on X ends up being positive while the x-squared coefficient is negative. The reason I put in these interactive variables was to see if players who were strong in both got an extra boost, as if there was some synergy going on. It seems like they did get an extra boost.

Since the dependent variable can only go from 0 to 100, the coefficient would be very low. So I divided these three variables by 1000 (my stat package was showing coefficient values of .00000 before I did this).

Did Santo Play In An Era Of Poor Third Basemen?

2010-12-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

Here are the offensive winning percentages for NL 3B men for different periods. Data from the Lee Sinins Complete baseball encyclopedia.

1941-50) .507
1951-60) .495
1961-70) .516
1971-80) .512
1981-90) .498

Santo had .618 from 1961-70. He was about 9% of the total, so without him it was probably about .506. Nothing unusual. The guys Santo got compared to were not sub par in hitting.

Santo lead the NL 4 straight years in Total Zone Runs (fielding) for 3rd basemen (from Baseball Reference). But his total over those 4 years, 39, is one of the lowest (BR starts this stat in the early 1950s-I calculated the cumulative total of the leaders over each 4 year period regardless of who it was). It is tied for the 7th lowest in the NL. The lowest is 35 and some of the periods that were lower include the 1981 strike year. The average cumulative 4 year total for the leaders was about 55 in the NL and 72 in the AL. Only two periods in the AL were below 40.

So it is possible that in some years Santo benefits by being compared to poor fielding 3rd basemen. But this is probably not alot of his overall value.

See Yearly League Leaders & Records for Total Zone Runs as 3B at BR. Santo's numbers from 1965-8, the years he lead, seem low compared to the AL in those years and the NL in the years both before and after.

Santo Was Valuable Outside Of Wrigley Field

2010-12-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

Santo did seem to benefit alot from Wrigley. But what if we tried to estimate only his value in road games? Doing a quick calculation to find his road OBP & SLG from 1960-73, I got .346 & .413. Does not sound that great. But in his time, it was pretty valuable. Here is the relationship from regression analysis between runs per game and OBP & SLG:

R/G =16.55*OBP + 10.56*SLG - 5.15

A team with an OBP of .342 and an SLG of .413 would score 4.93 R/G. The league average in those years was about 4.06. That would give us a Pythagorean pct of .596. Pretty darn good.

I also ran a regression with winning pct being the dependent variable and runs per game and opponents runs per game being the independent variables. Here is the equation

Pct = .515 + .111*RG - .114*ORG

If a team scored 4.93 runs per game and allowed 4.06 per game, they would have a .596 pct. That is how good Santo was just in road games.

Lefty Grove's Peak Vs. Sandy Koufax's Peak

2010-11-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

I used a 5-year period for each guy. For Grove, it was 1928-32. For Koufax, it was 1962-66. The table below has some comparisons:

RSAA means "runs saved above average." It comes from Lee Sinins' Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. The numbers are park adjusted. So Grove has a big lead here, both in total and per 9 IP. I will come back to these numbers later when I plug them into the Pythagorean formula.

Grove was 60% better than average at preventing HRs (that is what the 160 means). He gave up 49 HRs while the average pitcher would have allowed 78 (100*(78/49) is about 160). This gives him a pretty big edge over Koufax. But they are not park adjusted. If they were, Grove would have an even bigger edge. Here are the HR park factors for the Philadelphia A's from 1928-32 from the STATS, Inc. All-Time Baseball Sourcebook: 126, 165, 153, 104, 199 (the 126 means that Shibe gave up 26% more HRs than the average park). Now Shibe Park may have had some asymmetries, so that lefties hit alot more HRs. With Grove more likely to face righties (being a lefty himself), it is possible the park did not hurt him as much as these factors suggest. But A's righties Foxx, Miller and Dykes generally had much higher slugging percentages at home than on the road (from Retrosheet). So my guess is that Grove certainly was not aided by his park in preventing HRs.

Koufax allowed 89 HRs while the league average was 124 and had the following HR park factors in his years: 50, 63, 62, 49, 70 (meaning Dodger Stadium allowed fewer HRs than average). So he was helped quite a bit yet Grove still has the big edge here. He allowed 89 HRs while the league average was 124.

Relative SO/BB is each pitcher's strikeout-to-walk ratio divided by the league average. Grove had a 2.67 strikeout-to-walk ratio while the league average was 0.95. The 2.67/0.95 is multiplied by 100 to get 281. That beats the 225 of Koufax or 100*(4.57/2.03).

The ERA+ comes from Baseball Reference. It is ERA relative to the league average but also adjusted for park effects. Grove only has a slight edge here.

WAR comes from Baseball Reference (and they get it from Sean Smith at Baseball Projections). It is "Wins Above Replacement for Pitchers. A single number that presents the number of wins the player added to the team above what a replacement player (think AAA or AAAA) would add. This value includes defensive support and includes additional value for high leverage situations."

It is not clear to me how Koufax beats Grove here. Grove has alot more RAR or "runs above replacement." It might have something to do with the leverage adjustments. None are made for Grove since the play-by-play data has not been posted at Retrosheet. The WAR and RAR numbers imply that for Grove's years, it took 11 extra runs to win a game (441/40.1 = 11) and only 8.26 for Koufax (347/42).

Baseball Projections says that it normally takes about 10 extra runs to get a win. I wonder if they are using the formula which says it takes 10 times the square root of the number of runs scored per inning by both teams. For Grove's years I calculated that to be 10.7 and for Koufax got 9.54. That would give Grove a WAR of 41.21 (441/10.7) and Koufax 36.37 (347/9.54).

Pitching Runs is "Adjusted Pitching Runs." It comes from Baseball Reference. It is "A set of formulas developed by Gary Gillette, Pete Palmer and others that estimates a pitcher’s total contributions to a team’s runs total via linear weights." Lee Sinins told me it might also be based on decisions, but I am not really sure. Anyway, Grove has a big lead here, too.

Now to come back to RSAA and try to calculate the Pythagorean pct for each guy using RSAA per 9 IP. The AL of 1928-32 averaged 5.12 runs per game (yearly averages weighted by Grove's IP) and 5.12 - 1.98 = 3.14. So if Grove allows 3.14 while his team scored 5.12, he would have a winning pct of .727. Koufax would allow 2.78 while his team would score 4.05 runs per game. That gives him a pct of .679.

One thing I have not mentioned yet or tried to take into account is integration. Last January, I compared Grove's career to Randy Johnson's. See How Might Integration Have Affected The Lefty Grove/Randy Johnson Debate? I tried to estimate how much better the hitters would have been during Grove's time if the percentage of players who were non-white was about the same as during Johnson's. I also tried to adjust for the number of non-white pitchers and non-white fielders. I came up with Grove's ERA going up about 10%. What if I did that here?

Then Grove would allow 3.45 runs per game and his pct would fall to .688. That is still higher than Koufax.

But if we use the adjusted pitching runs, Grove allows 3.32 runs per game (5.12 - 1.8). He would have a pct of .704. Koufax would allow 2.63 runs per game (4.05 - 1.42). He would have a pct of .703. That would make the two about even. Grove would get the edge due to more IP.

But if we raise Grove's runs per game by 10%, to 3.65, his pct would be only .663. That would put Koufax ahead.

Finally, if we knock down Grove's ERA+ from Baseball Reference of 172 by 10%, he would be at 155, below Koufax's 167. The 10% adjustment for integration is just an estimate. It is the same one I used when comparing Grove to Johnson. The % of players and pitchers who were non-whites during Koufax's time was probably lower than during Johnson's time. So adding 10% to Grove's ERA is probably too much. I don't think I know the right adjustment to make. But this gives us some idea of what the effect of integration might be.

If I lowered Grove's strikeouts per 9 IP by 10% from 5.91 to 5.32 and raised his walks per 9 IP from 2.21 to 2.43, his new strikeout-to-walk ratio would be 2.19. That divided by 0.95 would be 2.30. So his relative SO/BB would be 230, still higher than Koufax's 225.

If I raised Grove's HRs by 10%, he would have allowed 54 HRs. Then 78/54 = 1.45. That times 100 is 145. That is still higher than Koufax's relative HR rate of 139.

Indispensable Seasons Go To WAR! (Or Did Willie Mays Have The Greatest Season Since 1950 in 1962?)

2010-11-21T16:28:00.000-08:00

If you are still reading, thanks. I will try to explain.

Suppose a team comes in 1st place, finishing 1 game ahead of the 2nd place team. John Smith had a WAR (wins above a replacement player) of 6. Then is "INDWAR" would be 5 or 6 - 1. His team needed 5 of his WAR to get them into at least a tie for first.

My first post on this was The most indispensable seasons. In that case, instead of using WAR, I used what Pete Palmer calls "Total Player Rating" or TPR (more recently it has been called "Batting + Fielding Wins" or BFW). Here I used WAR from Baseball Reference to find the most indispensable seasons since 1900.

The table below shows the top 25.

When you see a "0" in the games ahead column, it means that player's team tied for first place with another team. Then they had a playoff. Their season's WAR included what they did in the playoff game(s). I tried to estimate their WAR from any playoff games. Probably the most anyone got was about .4 by Boudreau in the one game (he went 4-for-4 with 2 HRs). Some cases are teams that were wild cards, like the 2002 Giants. So they would have been so many games ahead of the next best team. Some 1st place teams in the wild card era were either compared to the 2nd place team in their division if that team was not the wild card or the team that finished 2nd in the wild card if their division's 2nd place team was the wild card.

It probably does not surprise anyone that Yaz is first. But Willie Mays 1962 is not far behind. Guidry 1978 is the highest pitcher. But he probably got a very small amount of WAR in the playoff game (he pitched well but not great). The 1980 Phillies needed great years from both Schmidt and Carlton just to eke out a 1 game victory.

Many of the players are Hall of Famers. Ruth also has the 37th best season in 1916, as a pitcher!

I wondered how well some of these guys did in the clutch that year. So I looked at the top 10 since 1950 when Retrosheet has stats like hitting with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP) and in Close and Late Situations (CL). The table below shows how well the top 10 hit in all situations.

Now with Runners on Base (ROB)

Now with RISP

Now Close and Late.

Now Sept/Oct

If you examine those numbers closely, you will see that the only player to have a higher AVG, OBP, and SLG in all the "clutch" cases than he did in Total was Mays. Click here to see all of these stats grouped by player. It might be easier to see that only Mays did better in all the clutch situations.

In fact, Willie Mays was the best of the ten in Tom Tango's clutch rating, which involves WPA or Win Probability Added. All plate appearances are rated for how much they affect the outcome based on score, inning, etc. Here is the definition from the Fangraphs cite:

"Clutch: A measurement of how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment."
Here is how well the top ten did:

Willie Mays 1.4
Jackie Robinson 0.5
Hank Aaron 0.3
Adrian Beltre 0.1
Alex Rodriguez -0.1
Mike Schmidt -0.3
Barry Bonds(98) -0.5
Robin Yount -0.8
Carl Yastrzemski -1.1
Barry Bonds(02) -1.3

This means that Mays' extra good hitting in high leverage situations added 1.4 wins. Seeing as how the Giants finished in a tie with the Dodgers in 1962, that is very important. Mays did well in the 3-game playoff series, too. In game 1, he went 3-for-3 with 2 HRs and a walk. One HR was off of Koufax, in the first inning with one on to get the scoring started. Giants won 8-0. In game 2, he was 1-for-5 and the Dodgers won 8-7. In game 3, he was 1-for-3 with 2 BBs. Giants won 6-4, getting 4 runs in the top of the 9th. Mays singled in a run in that rally and scored another.

When it was all said and done, a great player had to have one of his greatest seasons just to get his team into a playoff. Mays had to hit much better than usual in the clutch and come through in the playoff. What could be a more fantastic year than that?

Rick Reuschel for the Hall of Fame (Revisited)

2010-11-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

See my first post Rick Reuschel for the Hall of Fame .

Here is a brief summary (skipping the more advanced stats I used):

-His strike-out-to-walk ratio was 31% better than the league average

-He gave up 21.6% fewer HRs than average (pitching mainly in Wrigley Field!)

I am doing this again because when I looked at Halladay and the Cy Young award, I noticed that Reuschel is 30th in career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) among pitchers at Baseball Reference. His WAR is 66.3. That seems like a high enough rank in terms of career value. The Hall should have room for 30 pitchers. He had good longevity, pitching over 3500 innings in 19 seasons.

The only pitchers ahead of him in career WAR not in the Hall are: Clemens, Maddux, Randy Johnson, Bert Blyleven, Pedro Martinez, Mussina, Schilling and Glavine. Most, if not all, of them will make it. I counted about 26 Hall of Famers behind him, just in the top 100. He is ahead of Jim Palmer, Juan Marichal, Whitey Ford, Don Drysdale, Jim Bunning, just to name a few.

He had a pretty decent peak value, too. He was in the top 5 among NL pitchers in WAR each year from 1977-80 (1-5-3-4). He also had two other top 5 finishes in his career. He was the 2nd best pitcher in the NL over the 1977-80 period, according to WAR. Here is the top 10:

Phil Niekro 27.6
Rick Reuschel 24.8
Steve Carlton 20.6
Steve Rogers 19.3
J.R. Richard 18.1
Tom Seaver 17.4
Burt Hooton 16
Bruce Sutter 15.6
John Candelaria 15.3
Don Sutton 13.7

He beats Carlton, who had 2 Cy Young awards in those years.

Halladay And The Cy Young Award

2010-11-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

It was unanimous. That seems a little surprising. No doubt among the voters. Here are the NL leaders in WAR for pitchers according to Baseball Reference:

1. Jimenez (COL) 7.1
2. Halladay (PHI) 6.9
3. Johnson (FLA) 6.4

Seems like these other two guys could have gotten some first place votes.

Halladay is the one of only 4 pitchers since 1980 to have 3 or more straight seasons with a strikeout-to-walk ratio greater than 5 while qualifying for the ERA title. The others are Maddux (4), Schilling (4) and Wells (3). Data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

Halladay is one of only 6 pitchers since 1980 to have 3 or more straight seasons with an ERA less than 2.80 while qualifying for the ERA title. The others are Maddux (7), Rijo (4), Johnson (4), Clemens (3) and Brown (3).

Halladay has the most WAR over the last three years, 20.2. The last pitcher to have 20+ WAR over three years was Santana, 2004-6. Here is the top ten from 2008-10:

Roy Halladay 20.2
CC Sabathia 16.8
Tim Lincecum 16.7
Cliff Lee 16.6
Felix Hernandez 16.3
Jon Lester 16.2
John Danks 16.1
Zack Greinke 15.6
Ubaldo Jimenez 15.3
Johan Santana 14.4

Halladay now ranks 10th in Cy Young Award Voting Shares. Besides his two wins, he has four other top 5 finishes. He joins Gaylord Perry, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson as the only pitchers to win the award in both leagues. Here is the top 10 in award shares:

Randy Johnson (5 wins) 6.5
Greg Maddux (4 wins) 4.92
Steve Carlton* (4 wins) 4.29
Pedro Martinez (3 wins) 4.26
Tom Seaver* (3 wins) 3.85
Jim Palmer* (3 wins) 3.57
Tom Glavine (2 wins) 3.15
Sandy Koufax* (3 wins) 3.05
Roy Halladay (2 wins) 2.91

*Hall of Famer

Halladay has finished first in WAR 2 times and has 5 second place finishes. His career WAR is no 54.3. That is 62nd best ever. In a year or two he will be in the top 40. Maybe he will end his career in the top 25.

Players Who Won The Triple Crown Over A Two-Year Period Since 1920

2010-11-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

I got started on this because I wanted to see if Albert Pujols did it for the last two years. He just missed. More on that later. I set the plate appearance (PA) minimum at 800. The tables below show the winners. Data came from the Baseball Reference Play Index.

What is interesting to me is that in some cases, the winners were far ahead of the other players in all three stats, that Al Rosen was the only guy to do it twice in a row, and that Albert Belle is the only guy to do it since 1954. Rosen was probably only able to do it because Ted Williams was in the Korean War. And Williams is the only other guy to do it twice.

Now back to Pujols. The table below shows the leaders over the 2009-2010 seasons with a 1,000 PA minimum. He's just a bit beind Votto and Ramirez in batting average (BA). I hate it when mere mortals get in the way. May the Gods show them no mercy.

Then I thought "what about a 3-year triple crown for Pujols?" No luck there either, since Ryan Howard beats him out in RBIs. This is the next table. 1500 PA minimum.

Not having the RBI lead is certainly not Pujols' fault. The next two tables show how both he and Howard hit with Men On and with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP). Pujols ends up walking alot more in those cases. In all cases, Pujols walks 13.5% of the time while it is 12.4% for Howard. But with Men On, Pujols' walk rate is about 21% while Howard has 12%. With RISP, those numbers are about 29% & 16%. So, even though Pujols hits alot better with Men On and with RISP, as you can see below, he ended up with fewer RBIs.

But Pujols gets the last laugh. He has won the 10-year triple crown, with a 2,000 PA minimum. This is the last table.

The Weather Was Nice For The World Series But How Was It In Some Other Major League Cities?

2010-11-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

I have wondered what things would have been like if the Twins had made it to the World Series. Imagine night games, outside, in Minnesota, in the last week of October and the first week of November. So while I watched the series, I checked the temperatures in various cites using Accu Weather. The data I collected can be seen at World Series Weather 2010.

The first column gives the temperature and the second column says "wind ch" for wind chill. I think that is what Accu Weather means by real feel. I also recored the local time (they were all PM, inspite of my typos). In the last column I mention any description that Accu Weather gave, like showers if it was raining at that time or if showers were on the way. In some cases they said something about wind gusts. On Nov. 1 at 7:11 pm, it was 47 degrees in Minneapolis with wind gusts over 40 MPH. That would have made for a fun game as the night went on (I don't know why Accu Weather showed a "real feel" of 46 degrees with such strong winds-I also don't know why the real feel was sometimes higher than the stated temperature).

There were some low temps out there but probably not anything we have not seen in recent years. October 28 in Cleveland had a temp of 43, wind chil of 30 and showers. That would have been no fun to play in. So it seems that no city realized my worst fear of sub-freezing weather and snow when a game was supposed to be played.