Earlier this week on Twitter, I was part of a discussion comparing Troy Tulowitzki and Evan Longoria, two of the best players in the game. I personally give Longoria a slight edge, but obviously Tulowitzki is great, too. If someone prefers him to Longoria, that is fine, and I could probably be talked in to it. What really spurs this particular post is the discussion we had about comparing their offense. Keeping in mind that this was a casual discussion rather than a deep evaluation of “true talent” involving all of the necessary regression and adjustments, someone noted that over the last three seasons (2009-2011) the two players have had virtually identical offensive value per plate appearance: Tulowitzki has a 137 wRC+, and Longoria has a 136 wRC+. I argued that Longoria’s performance was more impressive given that the American League has superior pitching relative to the National League.

However, Dave Cameron made an interesting point: the Rockies play in the National League West, where hitters seemingly face s larger proportion of stud pitchers — Dave mentioned Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Clayton Kershaw, and Mat Latos in this connection. He also pointed out that Longoria did not have to face the Rays’ own excellent pitching staff. So I decided to look at it more closely. The point is not to settle the Longoria versus Tulowitzki dispute. Rather, I am interested in whether individual hitters face (or do not face) particular pitchers enough that they require a “divisional” adjustment of some sort.

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The contracts that baseball players sign are some of the longest contracts in business — not just sports. When handing out nine- or ten-year deals, projecting salary inflation is critical, and yet getting an accurate forecast is nearly impossible.

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Punxsutawney Phil is due to make his appearance today. He’ll survey the ground around him, take stock of the adoring fans, and prognosticate about the weather. With how bad our weatherpeople are at long-term meteorological predictions, maybe it makes sense for us to turn to a land-beaver for our winter forecast needs.

But what about the state of the ground in baseball today?

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It is officially February when baseball news is reduced to vague rumors about teams from which Roy Oswalt and Edwin Jackson may or may not be considering one-year offers. Well, that and that Mark Teixeira saying he might bunt to beat the shift this season. Hoo boy.

There is something of interest in the Teixeira report, though. Sure, we do not know whether he is actually going to do it or not. Remember, this is the time of year when players say things like “I’m going to steal 20 bags this year” even if they have never stolen more than 10 in any season. Still, it is not a crazy idea. While sabermetric writing on the internet went through a phase of arguing that bunts are counterproductive to scoring and winning, research has progressed to show that bunts are not as bad as all that. In certain situations, they can be a good idea in terms of getting the win in a close game or simply “keeping the fielders honest” (also known as “game theory,” a term I am pretty sure Bruce Bochy uses frequently).

But what about power hitter like Teixeira? Isn’t bunting always a bad idea for them? To answer this properly would require a great deal of complex thinking and programming. For now, let’s take a simple approach by looking at some data from 2011 to see whether Teixeira is simply blowing smoke or making sense.

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Players leave money on the table every year. It’s true! Pitchers, in particular, have been signing away free agency years at below-market prices for a while now.

Consider the most recent big signing, Yu Darvish. He most likely would have made more money had he stayed in Japan for three years and come over as a free agent. Through the arbitration process in Japan, he was due around $27 million over the next three years, and his deal with the Rangers only pays him $25 million over the same time frame. Had he continued his dominance, and come over in three years, it seems likely he would have made more than $30 million over three years. He would have had the leverage of the unrestricted free agent.

But Darvish’ plight resembled that of the arbitration-eligible pitcher here in the states. He could only talk to one team, which should sound familiar. And he probably valued some non-monetary benefits that a long-term contract offered: security and the ability to compete against the best in the world. How prevalent is this sort of give-and-take in the normal process here in the states? How many pitchers have given up free agent years at below the going rate?

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This year’s Hall of Fame ballot had a very weak pool of first-year candidates. Bernie Williams was the leading vote getter with just 9.6% of the vote, and the only member to break the 5% cut off to stay on the ballot. At the same time the 14 returning candidates saw their vote total increase by an average of 7.1%, and five had increases of over 10%. Many have suggested that there is a relationship between these two facts; that is, with few good first-year candidates to vote for there were extra votes for the returning candidates.

Last year David Roher at Deadspin/Harvard Sports Analysis Collective noted that over the 2000s the average number of votes per HoF ballot was fairly constant, between 6.6 and 5.35. This would suggest that in years with strong first-year candidates there would be fewer votes for returning candidates and vice versa. I wanted to more explicitly test this relationship and see whether it extended further back than just the 2000s.

I looked at every Hall of Fame vote from 1967, when the current voting rules were put in place. Along the x-axis is the average number of first-year candidates voted for. Along the y-axis is the average change in vote share for returning candidates compared to the previous year (here an increase from 60% to 65% would be denoted by 0.05).
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Wine and cheese make for a delectable combo. But the two foods don’t age the same. Wine takes much longer to turn to vinegar than it does for your cheese to grow fuzzy green mold. That’s why wine is the one used in sayings by older men verifying their remaining virility.

Power, patience and contact are the components of a delectable (productive) hitter. And yet, like wine and cheese, it turns out that these different skills age differently. Ages 26 through 28 are often used to represent a hitter’s peak, but not all of their different faculties are at their apex in that age range. Let’s check the aging curves, once again courtesy stat guru Jeff Zimmerman.

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When Johnny says his last lines in “The Outsiders” — “Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.” — there’s more than a slight touch of mortality in the moment. There might even be outright pessimism about the directive. After all, the Robert Frost poem he’s referencing finishes: “Nothing gold can stay.”

Turns out Johnny and Frost know a little something about pitchers and strikeout rates. Thanks to the inestimable Jeff Zimmerman, we have strikeout aging curves for both starters and relievers. As dawn turns to day, it seems, pitchers also lose their gold.

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The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will release its list of  soon-to-be inductees on Monday. Some discussion has focused on Bernie Williams and how much his postseason performance should count towards his hall candidacy. I’ll look at a simple way to add postseason plate-appearances into a player’s career WAR.

Of all the candidates eligible for the hall of fame in 2012, Williams had the most postseason plate appearances — and by a large margin. He had 545 of them, which is more than twice as many as any other hall-eligible player. Javy Lopez is second with 225, and Fred McGriff comes in at 218. Impressively, 141 of Williams’ 545 plate appearances came during the World Series. For reference, Williams’ World Series total is nearly three times as many as  Mark McGwire, who had 53.

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Tuesday, I began looking into how the differences between WPA and WAR may influence the seemingly odd (at least through the lens of fWAR) pattern of free agent spending on relief pitching. The discovery that one marginal WAR means nearly one marginal WPA for relievers as opposed to just half of one marginal WPA for hitters and starters partially explains why teams pay roughly three-to-four times more per marginal WAR for relievers. However, in order to accept this as a legitimate reason for MLB teams to do so, one has to give full (or nearly full) credit to relievers for the leverage of the situations they pitch in — this is how pitchers like Tyler Clippard (+5.01 WPA) can finish second in the entire league behind just Justin Verlander despite pitching a fraction of the innings.

Relievers cannot directly decide the situations they pitch in — that is up to management — but is there some sort of innate characteristic of relievers which tends to decide when they enter games?

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Over the last decade, much of team behavior has, sooner or later, matched up with new sabermetric discoveries. The Athletics’ “Moneyball” focus on on-base percentage is no longer a secret; teams have begun to quantify the value of defense and spend accordingly; arbitration-eligible players have become more valuable on the trade market. But there is one area in which sabermetric findings quite clearly do not mesh with team behavior, regardless of general managerial regime: spending on relief pitching. At least using Wins Above Replacement, it just doesn’t make much sense. Whereas every non-pitching position on the diamond — as well as starting pitchers — make roughly the same amount per WAR, relief pitchers are on another level, frequently making three to four times more per WAR than other players.

This only doesn’t make sense, however, if we think of teams as buyers of WAR. They aren’t. The teams with the most WAR, although typically in a very, very good spot, will not necessarily win the most games. Teams buy real wins, and the best way we have to measure real wins is with Win Probability Added.

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Sometimes there seem to be two separate branches of saber-oriented blogging: one that uses sabermetric tools to analyze current events (player transactions, in-game strategic choices, etc.), and another which focuses on more theoretical issues (e.g., specific hitting and pitching metrics). Obviously, the latter is supposed to ground the former, but there still seems to be something of a disconnect between the two levels in popular perception. I say this because I was recently part of a discussion in which some were pointing out the superiority of linear weights run estimators for individual hitters to the approach of Bill James’ Runs Created. Someone then made a comment to the effect that this was simply a nit-picking preference for a “pet metric” that really did not make that much of a practical difference.

Sabermetrics is far from being a “complete” science in any area. Debates about how best to measure pitching and fielding are obvious examples of this. With respect to run estimators, there is a greater level of consensus. However, because of the progress (at least relative to pitching and hitting) that has been made with run estimators for offense, that also means there is less of a difference between the metrics. However, it does make a difference. Rather than arguing for one approach to run estimation over another, I want to simply look at a few different free agents from the current off-season to see what sort of difference using one simple run estimator rather than another would make on a practical level.

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With Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols hitting the free-agent market this offseason, there have been many discussions on how the two of them will age. Lots of work has been done on how an average player ages, but Pujols and Fielder aren’t your average players. Which begs the question: How do stars age, compared to the rest of the league?

One of the hardest aspects when looking at elite players’ aging curves is knowing when to consider them elite. Several hitters who are playing right now appear to be sure-fire hall-of-famers — just as long as their careers don’t do an Andruw Jones nose-dive toward uselessness. To generate a list of players who seem headed toward stardom, I selected players since 1980 who had a total of 20-plus WAR during a three-year span. Also, I took the players who generated WAR of 9.5 or more in a single season.

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Mayhaps this is the season of hiring the un-experienced?

Last October, the White Sox announced a surprise decision to hire Robin Ventura — a once-great third baseman who had been hired four months prior as a special assistant. Ventura, who played some high quality baseball in some three decades, has managed nary a single MLB or MiLB game in his life.

Then, weeks later and a few dozen hours ago, the St. Louis Cardinals hired Mike Matheny — a once-illustrious catcher and he of the ne’er .300 wOBA — to replace likely first ballot Hall o’ Famer Tony La Russa. Like Ventura, Matheny has not yet scribed a professional-league lineup card or even tossed a base in anger. He enters the 2012 MLB season a complete unknown to fans and writers and presumably of good number of his own players.

But then again, what do fans and writers really know about even Tony La Russa? He made some strange decisions, he made some smart decisions, and he made some bad decisions. He gave a good interview, and he presided over a few championship teams.

But what does that really tell us? Where does that leave the ledger? For years we have debated the veracity of certain managers, but what measures and records can we go to?

One thing is for sure: The world of managing needs more statistics.

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Yesterday afternoon, Jayson Stark considered the question, “Is the MLB’s competitive balance a joke?” His answer was a rather blunt no:

MLB’s competitive balance is NOT a joke.

It beats the NFL.

It beats the league formerly known as the NBA.

And … I can prove it.

Stark’s method of proving it — plucking facts from the recent playoff series and comparing them generally to the NFL and other major leagues — was less than rigorous. In general, I agreed with his assertion: Parity in the MLB exists naturally far more than any other sports league.

HOWEVER, if my foot has less gangrene than your foot, does that mean I don’t need a doctor? No. I probably still need a doctor, and I probably need to stop playing barefoot tag on Rusty Nails Pier.

Relative success does not necessitate absolute success. And frankly, I feel the “parity” in the MLB indeed has a gangrene of sorts, a disease that is causing only specific segments of the league to rot while the rest hum along uncaring.

Of course, it is one thing to suspect something and demand more research, but it is another to pull the sabermetrician stocking over your head and answer that suspicion with a Falcon Punch of data.

Let’s do just that.
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Last off season, I looked at the chances of a SP going on the DL. I have finally had time to go back and look at how my predictions fared.

The predictions used logistic regression to find the percentage chance that a pitcher would end up on the DL. I used age, games started in the previous 3 years and how many of the previous 3 years did the pitcher go on the DL. The equation I ended up with was:

1/(1+e^(-z))
where:
z = (.2209)(Years with Trips to DL)+(-0.0040)(GS in last 3 year)+(0.0509)(Age in previous season)-1.7692

Using the equation, I projected the chance that a starter would go on the DL and here is a list of those projections.

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Sometimes announcers state that a player is not able to catch up to a fastball. Common sense states that the faster the pitch the harder it is to hit. I decided to look at the results of every fastball swung at to see how the results changed as the speed increased or decreased.

Fastballs generally have a 20 MPH difference in speeds (80 MPH to 100 MPH) at the major league level, so a baseline of what happens at every swing needed to be created. I took the results of every fastball over the last 4 years. I divided them up by in 1 MPH intervals (except for those >100 MPH which were grouped together). Then, I divided up the results further into those pitches missed, fouled off, hit into an out or hit for a hit. Taking all the data, I got the following results:

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“The Astros sale so far has none of the drama that came with the Rangers last year.” That’s from an Associated Press story written in mid-May.

Five months later, we have drama. According to the prospective buyer, Houston-based businessman Jim Crane, Major League Baseball is pressuring him to move the Astros from the National League Central to the American League West. Richard Justice and others have reported that there might be other issues preventing MLB from approving the deal.

I’d rather not speculate about what is or isn’t true, but both sides seem to be doing all they can to intimidate the other into acquiescing. Just this week, a flurry of stories came out suggesting that Crane could walk away from the deal if he isn’t approved by the Nov. 30 deadline stipulated in his agreement with Drayton McLane. Meanwhile, MLB continues to dig into Crane’s past, perhaps sending Crane the message that his options are the American League or no team.

But whatever the reasons for the hold-up, the bottom line is that if the Astros move from the NL Central to the AL West, the team should receive some compensation. In addition to the concerns that Crane has expressed — more 9 p.m. start times and the addition of a designated hitter to the payroll — the real issue is that the American league is the stronger league. And switching leagues will have a direct effect on the Astros’ win total.

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If heteroscedasticity lasts longer than three hours, consult your physician immediately.

“Honey, I think I’ve got heteroscedasticity,” I said to my wife when she walked in the door. As a writer who works at home, I spend the majority of my time locked away in my windowless home office, concocting ways to frighten my dear wife who works all day.

“And it’s ruining my spreadsheets,” I finally added, after she had stood wide-eyed and wordless for a few moments.

On Tuesday, we examined the fantastic and bizarre case of rookie right-hander Jeremy Hellickson, whose high swinging-strike rate has not translated into an equally high strikeout rate (K%). Today, let’s expand the scope of that investigation.

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The list of umpires scheduled for the LDS has been released. As much as they should not be a factor in the games, several of their decisions will ultimately be scrutinized this postseason. The following is a look at which umpire strike zones are most likely to get notice and affect the game.

I am not going to get into any discussion on if the umpires and their strike zones are good or bad. They are their own individuals. The more I look into the subject, the differences can be some of the 2% that can be exploited to gain an advantage over other teams.

At the beginning of the season, I rated which of the umpires are the most hitter and pitcher friendly. Here is a look at each umpire, their rating and what series and game, for now, they are to umpire. I know there are only five games, but I included the last umpire in case there are any changes. The umpires at the top of the list are more hitter friendly and those at the bottom are more pitcher friendly:

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