Blogs

Get Off My Lawn – Minor League Ball

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by John Sickels

John writes one of those tough screeds that sound, about halfway through, like the complaining crap of an old man. But John isn’t nearly as old as he thinks he is, and what he’s writing about is something I hope all of us who care about baseball and stats and the data have already thought about.

The point is that thanks to Pitch FX and the efforts of BIS and MLB and everyone else scoring baseball games,we’re getting a ton more information about every pitch in every major league game. And the automation of this process promises even more in the coming years.

Much of this data, thanks to MLB by the way, is available to everyone, and so it has become a happy sandbox for baseball fans with a fondness for math.

John’s gripe, if you can call it that, is that all these analysts are sorting through the data and ending up with micro conclusions that don’t really mean much to someone watching any particular game.

What I would add is that we know an awful lot about baseball because of the things we’ve learned before this great outpouring of pitch by pitch data. Much of what we learn after all the new data has been processed and tested and used is going to support the observations of those who watched the game closely before all the data was known.

When I’m grumpy I wonder why I’m reading yet another study that confirms what we already knew about this or that baseball situation. But that doesn’t mean those studies aren’t important. We gain the most knowledge by testing everything, each situation and contingency and viewpoint, and then see what shakes out. Confirmation means as much as a fresh idea.

Despite all the noise out there, that’s what’s happening now. John recognizes that, but he’s honest enough to point out that it makes him weary. Me, too.

Convince your league to replace BA with OBP

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Rotographs

In standard 4×4 and 5×5 leagues, OBP is clearly so much superior a rate stat to BA and we all know it, that I’m shocked everyone hasn’t made the change. Once you’re tried it you’ll never go back, because players values actually reflect their values (minus defense) in the major leagues.

But it’s hard to get people to change, which is why only one of my leagues use OBP instead of BA. We’ve talked about making the change in Tout Wars, but since part of the league’s goal is to offer draft guidance, it isn’t going to happen until you all switch over. Get going!

The Forecasters Challenge 2009–revisited again

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The Forecasters Challenge 2009

Tom Tango said today he’ll be running the Forecasters Challenge again in 2010. The primary judging will come from the Pros-Joes format, which is described in the link above. The idea, basically, is to have each pro draft against 21 inferior lists. In last year’s challenge my projections ranked 3rd using this method.

For the record, using the 22 pros against all the other pros, my projections ranked 5th.

In the head to head scoring system, I was second division.

Overall, Rotoworld and John Eric Hanson seemed to score the best.

An Interview with Oakland GM Billy Beane

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John Sickels of Minor League Ball

I was working on Brett Wallace yesterday for the Guide (on sale in January!), and came to the conclusion that Wallace can hit and the A’s can use a third baseman, though he may not be that good a defensive player. Billy Beane agrees!

Nice interview by John, and Billy gives thoughtful answers. He just doesn’t trash anyone. Oh well.

Tough Intervals: An Etherview with Pitchers and Poets

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FanGraphs Baseball

Getting sort of meta, this is an interview with couple of guys who have a couple of excellent baseball sites (pitchersandpoets.com and Rogue’s Baseball Index) that treat baseball as a leaping off point for the imagination. That makes them sound like less fun than they are, which is why I lead with the interview, which is funny. Read ’em all! [Thanks Carter!]

Tumbling Dice > How Much is Enough?

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Lawr Michaels at Creativesports.com

Lawr writes about the number of leagues he plays in, thinking that maybe he’s playing in enough.

I’m reminded of a talk the Blue Jays scout Kimball Crossley gave at First Pitch Arizona a couple of years ago, which he started by saying that people who played in more than one fantasy league were missing the point. A big league general manager makes choices and has to live with them. Those of us playing in two or five or ten leagues, aren’t really making choices, he said, we’re throwing crap at the wall and are glad that some of it sticks.

Over the last few years I’ve dropped out of a few leagues, in part because I agree with Kimball (who some years ago drafted the Patton-Kreutzer team in the XFL, when neither Alex nor I could make it to Arizona for the draft), and now only play in three (AL only keeper American Dream League, NL only Tout Wars, oddball mixed keeper XFL).

I miss the guys, especially in the Rotoman’s Regulars League with it’s 20 team mixed format, but sometimes less is more.

The Forecasters Challenge 2009–final results

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TangoTiger.net

I’ve written about Tom Tango’s Forecasters Challenge here before. Tom asked many of us to contribute our preseason rankings of baseball players based on a metric he devised to calculate a player’s contributions on the field. His plan was to run thousands of drafts from these lists. The team that performed best would be judged to be the best, most useful projection system.

There was lots to like in this approach, though as Tom details in the report linked to here, there were also some surprises. He writes about some of the key structural ones, which have led him to run other iterations of the drafts, trying to find a format that gives a more nuanced judgment of the relative lists.

There are three other points that I think should be made.

First, there is a good chance that the weighting between hitting and pitching is off. This is certainly true of my team (which finished fifth of 22 in the original contest). Whether this is because I weighted hitting and pitching the same, which I did, or because I didn’t discount pitchers for their unreliablity, which I didn’t, or because I just undervalued hitters, something was off. Looking at the two components individually, which Tom has said he will do, should help us better understand how the original contest worked.

Secondly, not everyone used straight projections. Some systems weighted for position scarcity. This wasn’t prohibited, so I’m not complaining, but when it comes time to analyze the results it should be understood that in at least a few cases sardines are being compared to mackerels. A simple correlation of all the projections systems to the final actual ranking would be of interest.

Thirdly, as Tom notes about how Marcel handles players with no ML playing time, all systems use a sort of generic noise projection for the marginal players. This means in a correlation study that the noise can overwhelm the estimates of what players expected to have regular playing time will do. For this reason, I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Tom to run the drafts using a 12 or 15 team league format, so that not every projection system is in every league. This would mitigate the problem of small ranking differences being exagerated by the draft procedure, and may give us a better result. His head-to-head matchups are interesting, too, especially since so many ranks changed dramatically, but another angle of analysis on the data would certainly help us figure out what is better.

These notes are not meant to be critical in any way. Tom’s enterprise has thrown off a whole bunch of interesting data, which I hope he will keep returning to all winter long. Once the magazine is done I expect to dig in, too. He deserves a mountain of credit for conceiving this project and seeing it through. Ideally, we’ll be able to do it again next year with a better idea of what we’re going for. Thanks Tom!

I Love New Metrics!

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Except when I don’t.

This story is about O-Swing %, which measures the number of times a batter swings at pitches out of the strike zone. The writer says that O-Swing % is really interesting, and then goes on to prove (unless his numbers are wrong) that it is pretty much meaningless.

What is actually interesting is that the writer does a decent job of demonstrating why the apparently broad swing in O-Swing % numbers is meaningless. It boils down to the fact that some batters swing more, and so they hit the ball more. While some batters swing less, and hit the ball less. Consider 0-Swing % exhausted, at least for now.

When there is reliable pitch location information there will doubtless be information derived from these numbers that will be of interest, but it certainly won’t be simple or absolute. The game isn’t simply a matter of cause and effect, but a complex system of adjustments and readjustments that change how everything happens. It seems to me the miracle is that the game is played on the same sized field now as it was 100+ years ago. In that context, the variation in results should lead us to explore what changes have been made.

But that has nothing to do with O-Swing %.