Sabremetrics Gone Wild!

Stealing’s Sliding Value

We’re certainly living in strange times when a story predicated on the Runs Expected Matrix attributing “runs” to isolated events (stolen bases) appears in a publication that isn’t published by SABR or Baseball Prospectus. Just a few years ago such a story as this one would have been so mind blowing that it might have been possible not to quibble. But, quibble we must.

I think he should have put in context the number of runs attributed to Patterson this year that didn’t come from steals, and referenced the league and team leaders so that we had some idea what it all meant. Maybe Patterson shouldn’t be running, but it’s really hard to argue against stealing when you’re safe nearly every attempt.

David Appelman: Pujols’ hot spots

SI.com – MLB  Wednesday May 17, 2006 12:26PM

When I was a boy perhaps the most influential thing I read was the issue of Sports Illustrated excerpting Ted Williams’ book about hitting, Science of Hitting. Most notably, a chart that showed his batting average when the ball was thrown in each spot in the strike zone and out.

I’m a little embarrassed now that I have no idea how the data for that chart was compiled and whether it was even real. Collecting such data in the early 60s was a lot harder than it is today. David Appelman is one of a growing number of baseball analysts who are drawing on the ever expanding trove of data Baseball Info Solutions has been collecting, and his Fangraphs.com site has been linked to here before.

These hitter charts are of interest, of course, but it seems to me that they tell the wrong half of the story. Player performance isn’t a constant, and wouldn’t it be really interesting to be able to see the distribution of pitches when Adrian Beltre was going bad and compare it to when he was going good?

The other thing that should be noted is that BIS derives most if not all of it’s data off of television broadcasts. While I trust that a reporter’s mark showing where the ball crossed the plate will be sort of accurate (and I believe the company employs multiple reporters for each game), there are plenty of reasons to suspect that they won’t be pinpoint. And if the analysis is meant to show scintillating differences in performance based on pitch location (remember, that the camera distance and angle is different in every ballpark), the noise of subjective judgement is likely to wipe out the little differences.

This isn’t to derogate Appelman’s work, or to impugn the value of what BIS is doing. But it is important to remember that better and more finely grained data isn’t necessarily objective data. Enjoy these excellent visuals, and imagine what they tell us about these hitters, but don’t imagine this is the end. In some ways it is just the beginning.

Study Reveals Baseball’s Great Clutch Hitters

LiveScience.com

This site cites a study by Elan Fuld that uses some interesting and valuable methods to determine whether clutch hitters exist. While Fuld is able to identify a few hitters who exhibited reliable clutch tendencies throughout their careers, their numbers are so small that his ambitious study really seems to support the idea that clutch hitters don’t exist. To the extent Bill Buckner, Eddie Murray and Leo Gomez were clutch, maybe they were just a little luckier than the vast majority of players during the 30 years he looked at who weren’t clutch.

The role of psychological difference in baseball is an important one, and Fuld’s study apparently demonstrates just how narrow a swath the elite of baseball players are drawn from. That this purported science website could so misread the conclusion of this study should be an embarrassment.

Plus, they don’t even link to Fuld’s study, which you can find here.

You can also find a set of other clutch hitting studies compiled by Cyril Morong here.

Introducing Heater Magazine

Heater Magazine – Home

John Hunt, who should need no introduction, Deric McKamey, the minor league expert at BaseballHQ.com, and Dave Studeman, of HardballTimes.com, have joined Graphical Pitcher author John Burnson to create Heater, an online magazine about baseball. While in the first issue Hunt and Studeman write fine “early season roto” columns, the heart of the Heater are the 30 pages of team statistical profiles and charts, and the umpteen more pages of position breakouts (as well as a page tracking minor leaguers).

Heater will be coming out each week, and for the fantasy player or the hard core baseball fan the wealth of charts, graphs, timelines and other details about this week, last week and next week, as well as a whole lot more stuff (I’m really just scratching the surface) is organized in an exacting and pleasing way. It’s like the back stats pages of Sports Weekly were totally rethought and reorganized to actually present the data in a way that made it easy to find trends and nuggets about players and teams. Radical.
In a word, all of it is useful, all of it is easy to understand, none of it is presented anywhere else in so fine and complete a manner. Don’t take my word for it. There is a sample copy at the link above. You’ll then have to decide if your money is well spent for this sort of thing. I’m hoping it is, because as long as they keep putting this stuff out my job is going to be a lot easier (and I’m going to look a lot smarter).

The BPification of the Baseball World

STLtoday – Sports – Columnists

We used to get pissed off at baseball writers who wrote dopey stuff informed by the game’s common wisdom, much of which wasn’t all that wise. Now we continually find, and this example is one of many, writers whose main talent seems to be to be able to convert the various Baseball Prospectus metrics into somewhat-analytical prose. He analyzes Juan Encarnacion’s prospects using Eqa, criticizes his fielding based on his Davenports, and then questions the sabermetric wisdom of the Age 27 peak, since Encarnacion posted his highest Eqa as a 29 year old.

I’ll let you (and the good citizens of St. Louis) judge if this is worthwhile information. My problem isn’t that it is or isn’t, we’re still trying to sort out which objective information is useful and which isn’t, but that these tools in the hands of the lazy or the dunderheaded end up the basis for all sorts of thoughts that are just as wrong as the old ideas.

Like writing a column about Juan Encarnacion four days into the season that judges him based on some hypothetical ideal ballplayer and how his four-day stats compare, rather than describing what he does well and what he does poorly. Encarnacion may not be all the player he could be, if he did things differently, but he does enough things right to be a legit major leaguer. Getting all high and mighty about his style of play is goofy, probably lazy, certainly dunderheaded.