THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Book - Out of Stock

The Book is out of stock at Amazon, B&N, and Buy.com.  I have no idea when it will be back in stock.  It may be in stock at the publisher, but I cannot confirm that.  You can try placing your order there.

Someone at Ebay has five copies in stock, reasonably priced.

An Amazon merchant in Canada has one as well.

You can also give this ISBN to your local bookstore to see if they can locate it somewhere: 9781597971294

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Alert the news - I have something good to say about a manager

In tonight’s LAD/ALA game, Weaver was throwing a no-hitter through 6.  He was due up in the top of the 7th with 2 outs and a runner on second.  Scioscia pinch hit for him, much to Weaver’s chagrin (he left for the clubhouse, pouting - of course he always looks like he is pouting, or at least like he is disinterested). 

He’ll probably get criticized by some people, but it was the right thing to do.  He had thrown 97 pitches and the Angels were losing 1-0.  And the chances of him throwing the no-no were around 1 in 50, and that’s if the Dodgers took the lead! You don’t get credited for a no-no unless you pitch at least 9 innings.

For what it is worth, I think that Scioscia is one of the, if not THE, best manager in baseball.  Every year, I project the Angels to win around 80-something games and they win 90-something. 

Friday, June 27, 2008

Are home teams cheating this year?

So far this year, the home team has won 56.64% of its games.  The last 3 full years (05-07), the home team WP has been 54.2%.  The difference in 1174 games so far in 2008 is 1.65 SD.  The difference may even be less than that because in 2005, while the home team won 53.7% of its games, the home and road team run scoring suggested that the true home team WP was 54.4% (using a basic pythag formula).

This year, the home and road run scoring suggests a true 56.4% home team WP (as opposed to an actual WP of 56.6%), so perhaps we can say that the home team wp is 2% higher than over the previous 3 years.

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

One of many ways that not regressing toward the mean can get you in trouble…

Here is a snippet from a BP article by Geoff Young about Adrian Gonzalez, the Padres slugging first sacker (I sound like a real baseball writer!):

So I decided to check out his age 25 stats (from 5/8/07 to 5/7/08) and see just how much he’d built on his success from the previous year. Using the same format from my earlier article, and with the help of David Pinto’s Day-by-Day Database, here’s what I found:
Adrian Gonzalez, Age 24-25 Age AB BA OBP SLG ISO XB/H AB/HR
24 598 .316 .376 .543 .227 .376 18.69
25 650 .282 .344 .498 .216 .432 22.41

Uh-oh. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I had it all figured out: Gonzalez was going to exhibit a slow but steady increase in skills, and the numbers would support what my eyes had led me to believe.

Unfortunately, reality had other ideas.

So, Young thinks that Gonzalez did not progress as a 24 year old should, given that his numbers (say, OPS) went down from .919 to .842, a significant decline.  But wait…

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The clocked game of baseball

If you look at all the overtime games in the sports, the most thrilling is NHL playoff hockey.  It combines the two things we love the most: no clock, and sudden death.  Football is close, but it’s very one-sided.  A game could reasonably end with one side never having the ball on offense.  In hockey, each side is basically given 20-seconds to do something, and then you have a turnover (that’s the nature of the game).  Football is about ball-possession, and so, it’s not a sudden death, but a long-winding torture.

But, the tensest I was in watching an overtime hockey game was the 1994 Olympics, where they had shootouts to determine the winner.  It was tense, and dramatic.  While they decided to get rid of the clockless aspect and with it the sudden death, it was still an incredibly tense feeling to see Peter Forsberg skating down all by himself on a breakaway, and making that move.  Before the game, I hated the idea of it.  Once you are part of it, you can’t deny the feelings.  You want to hate the idea, but you are simply enthralled. 

Baseball extra innings is great.  It’s got the same long-winding torture of football, and the clockless aspect, but both sides get a chance at it.  Now, we hate what they did with hockey (and soccer) with the shootout… but we still are captivated by it.  In Europe, they’re trying something: put guys on first and second to start the extra inning, with 1 out.  We know that in a normal situation (bases empty 0 outs), the chance of a scoreless half-inning is 71%.  So, the chance of having a scoreless 10th is around 50%, a scoreless 10th+11th is 25%, and so on.  (We also shouldn’t forget the chance of both teams scoring the same number of runs.) With man on 1b, 2b, 1 out, the scoreless half-inning is still 57%.  For such a drastic rule change to have such little impact, I don’t think it’s worth it.  If you are going to bastardize the game, the payoff better be there.  You want that Brandi Chastain moment here.  I don’t think you’ll get it here. 

You’ve either got to do man on 2B, 0 outs, or men on the corners, 1 out.  I’m not saying this is a good rule.  It may be a bad rule.  But, like shootout hockey, it may be riveting, as much as we continue to hate the idea.

New Gameday

Hat tip: Peter.

Real change in talent levels

Dave describes the changes in fastball speed for Verlander.  Yesterday, Josh shows us the standard deviation of a pitcher’s fastball speed:

I thought the average would have been 1.0, but it is actually 1.35.  That’s on a pitch-by-pitch basis.  On a start-by-start basis, the spread will likely be less than 0.5 standard deviations.  If Verlander is really throwing 3 MPH different in two separate months, this is an enormous piece of information to have.  Basically, we’ve got two Verlanders.

The question to ask: how transient is the lower fastball speed?  Is it like a weather pattern, like a tornado, that would basically be random, and therefore, we don’t expect for the tornado to reappear at the same spot.  Or say like lightning hitting the same spot twice.  Or, could this possible recur, and therefore, we need to give say 90% weight to Verlander-we-know and 10% for the Verlander-who-sucks. 

In similar spirit, but not as dramatic, is the drop in fastball speed of Barry Zito between 2005 and 2007: 2.8 mph in two years.  That’s fairly sizeable.  So, when you see his FIP go from 4.34 to 4.82, that is more “real” than someone else who had the same drop in FIP, but who did not have a change in fastball speeds.

Remember, all performance data really is a manifestation of the context and the talent level of the player.  We are inferring the talent level of the player after understanding the environment in which he plays.  We are presuming that the change in talent level of any given player follows the same pattern as any other player, if we don’t know any better.

But, we now know better.  We know that something drastic changed in Verlander and Zito.  We don’t know why it changed.  We don’t know how persistent or transient it is.  We don’t know if it’s a shift like global warming, or a blip like a bolt of lightning.  All of these numbers we have, the tools numbers, like fastball speed, and curveball movements, are themselves just a manifestation of the core to the player: how strong, smart, and coordinated he is.  That is, we infer from the fastball speed and curve movements certain things about the player. 

It all comes down to tools.  If we were god-like, we wouldn’t need to know about any performance results.  That’s what scouting is all about: how god-like can we be in establishing a person’s core true talent, and how much do we need to infer based on the performance results, either at the toolsy-level (fastball speed, bat speed) or at the results-level (BB/PA, BABIP)?

The inference at the results-level gets us most of the way there.  But, in some cases, like Verlander and Zito, it may fail us.  So, we need to get down to the toolsy-level.  And in even smaller cases, we need to get down to the core level (like Ankiel).

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Ranger Wears Prada

NHL’s Sean Avery, interns at Vogue.  I guess the closest thing in baseball is A.J. Pierzinsky (I don’t care enough about AJ to bother spell-checking his name.)

Everyone I’ve told about this dream of mine has been asking me: “Why would a 28-year-old pro hockey player want to be an intern at Vogue?” I guess the answer could be complicated, but to me it’s simple: I like clothes… If you feel like teasing this hockey player about an obsession of his that you might think is a little unusual, go right ahead. Just know that you may get your ass kicked by a very expensive pair of shoes — and that they’ll probably match both my belt and my shirt.

Are scholarships guaranteed, or…?

do they come with loopholes that a reasonable man wouldn’t put up with?

Vote: How predictive are partial season stats?

Retrosheet Announcement

Details:

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Pizza’s fielding system: OPA!

As Pizza and I fight over the best-sounding fielding system (WOWY v OPA!), he offers some background as followup to his introduction last week.

Gotta admit, while wowee is good, it’s really something that kids would say; opa is something that adults say, and with pride around plenty of other adults.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Rosie Bonds and Mike Gimbel

I love the Mike and Mad Dog line…

Rosie Bonds and Mike Gimbel to speak at the Baseball Heritage Museum to call for public protest against the blacklisting of Barry Bonds.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) will be holding its annual national conference in Cleveland from June 26-29th, 2008.  At the last minute, with assistance from SABR, a forum calling for public protest of the blacklisting of Barry Bonds, has been scheduled for Friday, June 27th at 5 PM at the Baseball Heritage Museum, located at 530 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.

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Psychics are consulting for Fortune 500 and other companies and businesses

This is non-baseball related of course.

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Which has more predictvie value for a player: last year’s stats or this year’s stats so far?

The issue being sample size versus recency, of course.  I don’t know off the top of my head, but I would guess it is last year’s stats.  So, here is what I propose (as King of the World):

Take every article you read about who HAS the best offense, the best pitching, who IS the best player on whatever team, who should play, who should be benched, who should be sent down to the minors, who should be traded, who should be signed, who should not have been signed, who should bat where in the lineup, etc., etc.  You will always see their 2008 stats as support for whatever statement or argument the author is making.  Then substitute last year’s stats for this year’s stats since the former is likely at least as predictive as the latter, therefore it should provide better support for the author’s or writer’s arguments.

If you want to have even more fun, take full season stats from 2 years ago and combine them with the first half of last year.  My guess is that these would also be more predictive of future performance than 85 games of 2008 stats.

I understand the fans’ and media’s obsession with current stats as a proxy for a player’s true talent, but an analyst should NEVER, EVER, EVER (did I say NEVER?) support an argument about how good someone IS or a team IS with current season stats.  EVER.

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Mapping IDs

If you are looking to make a contribution to the world of sabermetrics, here is the perfect little project for you:  Create a mapping table of all player IDs out there.

• Captain Crunch put out the CBS, MLB.com, NFBC (whatever that is), and BP ids. 
  
• The BDB has its ID (formerly Lahman), Baseball-Almanac (Holtz), Retrosheet, and B-r.com.
  
• Mike Fast (can’t find it right now) posted the Retrosheet, MLB.com mappings.  (Mike: I found a couple of tiny mistakes.  If you can post it somewhere, I’ll give you the errors.)
  

So, this is what I would like:
1. Post all your mappings somewhere

That’s it.  Someone, maybe me, will then merge all of them to come up with the (current) definitive list.

Ideally, other sites will be as bothered as the rest of us in terms of mapping everything, that they will contribute their mappings of the new players in the future to keep this up-to-date.  All those minor league IDs, college websites, Japanese websites, etc, can finally have everything linked up.  Basically the “universal ID”.  Is it possible?  Let’s see…

Time Zone change and effect on performance

Phil looks at it on the team level.

Phil: do you count the Expos games as “home” or “away” when in P.R.?

MGL and MIT

Here you go.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Psst… wanna work for Bill James?

Bill James

Are you interested in writing for Bill James Online? Here’s the deal.  At this point, we can’t afford to pay you.  We have xxxx subscribers as of now and expenses averaging about $y,yyy a month, so. . .do the math; we’re losing money.

(He posts the numbers, but it’s behind the wall.  I don’t know if I should post it or not.)

***

Fangraphs.com

I am seeking writers to write for the FanGraphs blog. These are paid, part-time positions. Before you apply, ask yourself the following questions:

-Are you knowledgeable about the stats on FanGraphs?
-Are you an independent worker and can you edit your own posts?
-Are you available to post at least 1 post a day, especially on weekdays?

Please send any past work you have written on baseball and any links to your own blog or blogs you have contributed to.

There may be a three week trial period to show that you are “right for the job” before you get paid, depending on your current experience and track record.

It’s a little odd, isn’t it?  Fangraphs has to buy data from BIS, and I presume BJ is getting a freebie there.  Fangraphs only has Google Ads, which, if they are as successful as mine, means he has not even earned 100$ from them yet, while BJ has subscribers.  Fangraphs invests alot more in technology than does BJ’s site.  Or at least, the output of their investment is greater.

It seems to me that Fangraphs, Hardball Times, and Bill James ought to merge.  They are all using the same data source.  They have two sources of revenue (ads for THT and subscribers for BJ).  They have two outlets for paying their writers (Fangraphs on their blog, and THT in their annual).

I might even be assimilated by this collective.  And all together, we’ll be half as successful as Sean Forman.

NBA Win Shares

It seems that Rally and Justin each have come up with their own version of Win Shares for basketball.  I’m not really a fan on basketball, so if someone wants to compare the systems, and whatnot, please do so.