1) What do you think about drafting “Push Year” players?
2) What do you think about avoiding “short arm pitchers” ie Ken Hill, Pat
Hentgen or Randy Wolf?
3) Do you look at the mix of pitches used by pitchers?
4) How can a person spot from a pitchers statistics if he was “wild over the plate”?
5) What do you think about forecasting based on a player’s personal goal?
Example Clemens wants 300 wins and will get enough this year to make his goal.
Also Eric Young said he wants to break the Brewer record for steals of 54.
6) Is it safer to draft known established players because you can always trade them later and pick up that
missed sleeper that came out of nowhere?
7) Do you look at the range factor of the outfield to effect the pitcher’s ERA?
8) Are player with “Old Player Skills”at the biggest risk for failure?
9)Do you think a players image helps or hinders him with the home plate
umpire?
Let me know please.
You ask a lot of questions:
1) In some cases you might get an edge. Most of the time not.
2) I think it’s a good idea to avoid Ken Hill forever and Pat Hentgen for this year at least, but I’d recommend Wolf, without going overboard on him. Are you asking whether shortarmers develop arm problems? I’ve not seen a systematic survey and I’m not sure it matters. They do what they have to do to do well. We can capitalize on it before they break down, if they do break down more.
3) Does a pitcher throw hard? Or does a pitcher get by on craftiness? I think these issues matter, but mostly I think if a pitcher throws strikes and gets strikeouts, what type of stuff he throws isn’t that important.
4) Wild over the plate is one of those expressions that doesn’t really describe all that much, or rather, doesn’t mean anything specific.
5) Players often have goals, don’t usually talk about them and while they sometimes achieve them they also sometimes fail to achieve them. If the goal makes sense, if it seems plausible, it can’t hurt to add that info to the mix. But an awful lot of things are out of a player’s control, so I wouldn’t make major decisions based on this sort of information.
6) Players come with price tags attached, which in theory should equalize them. The best players to get are the ones who produce more value than they cost to acquire. Some of these will be established players, some will be sleepers. If there were a trend the prices would change and eliminate the discrepancies.
7) When trying to figure out whether a pitcher will get better or worse I look at the defense he’ll be playing in front of and whether it will be better or worse. Range factor is a tool for measuring defense, but extremely team dependant. Zone rating isn’t team dependent but it’s subjective. I’m looking forward to learning about Bill James’ defensive ratings in Win Shares. I suspect that if we find a way to measure defense effectively we’ll discover that a lot of what we attribute to pitchers is really the defense.
8) Old players skills? I’m not sure which those are.
9) I’m sure there is some impact of a player’s personality upon umpires, for better or worse. Because there are so many umpires I doubt that the impact is huge, and it’s probably impossible to measure, but it would seem insanely naive to think that umpires aren’t influenced to some extent.
Now you know.