BREAKING: Pitchers Do Have Control Over Hits (and other stuff) Allowed!

Well, this actually broke a month ago, by Mike Fast at Baseballprospectus.com, but I just saw it. In a nutshell, Mike uses pitch data to show that pitchers and hitters influence the Horizontal Speed of the Ball off the bat. This metric is derived, if I’m understanding correctly, by dividing the distance the ball traveled by the time it takes to go that far. Hard hit balls get places faster, more softly hit balls get places slower. Pop ups, almost always outs, don’t go far at all and take a long time to get there. By virtue of some commonsensical tests, Mike shows that pitchers have some effect on how hard the ball is hit against them. This appears to be groundbreaking work that confirms and quantifies what all of sensed intuitively: That BABIP isn’t completely random for pitchers. Good stuff.

Do you know Bill Veeck?

In this piece at Baseball Prospectus, not written by a BP writer and thus available for all of us, Tim Marchman talks about one of baseball’s greatest, Bill Veeck.

The trigger for Marchman’s highly enjoyable story is a website called mediaburn.org, a repository for a Chicago guy’s video archive which includes lots of Veeck’s vlogging efforts back in the 50s. Yes, vlogging.

Lots of baseball history is nostalgia, the tinted memories of a better or less challenging time, but Bill Veeck isn’t a nostalgic figure, he’s an exemplar. A working guy who worked his way into the baseball game and never seemed to forget that the game was meant to be remunerative and meaningful for the players and fun for the fans. Plus, he was vlogging back int he 50s. Amazing!

Thank you, Carter, for the heads up on this one!

Brawny: Wise Guy Baseball

Gene McCaffrey is one of the sharpest fantasy guys around, because he’s smart and inquisitive and makes use of the latest data while watching the game closely. That’s the secret, of course, numbers and scouting combined.

Gene is a wizard of the Diamond Challenge, a game I’ve never played, though many say it is the best of the fantasy games. But he is also a roto guy, a former Tout Wars champion and a member of the world’s most original experts league, the XFL.

I’m writing this not to polish Gene’s knob, but because I was reading his annual book, Wise Guy Baseball 2011, and came across this nugget:
Ryan Braun comment from Wise Guy Baseball 2011

I don’t recall ever seeing fantasy players ranked as if they were fantasy teams before, and there’s something cool about it. The game is all about making better choices than the next guy, and doesn’t this show that clearly? The 2010 Mock Draft in the Guide went: Pujols, H Ramirez, A Rodriguez, Crawford, Utley, Braun, Kemp, Mauer, Mig Cabrera, Teixeira, Ellsbury, Fielder, D Wright, Upton, Howard. The top 15 in the chart are close enough to show who did best, but I’m thinking there is more when can learn from this simple technique.

You can order Wise Guy Baseball at wiseguybaseball.com or shoot Gene an email at genethem@aol.com

The Players Who Weren’t Traded

I don’t know about you, but I spent the last few days leading up to the interleague trade deadline clicking on the excellent mlbtraderumors.com. And even now that the deadline has past and the smoke (Smoak) has cleared, they’re still relevant and worth checking out.

This post about the players who weren’t traded is full of useful information, but none more so than the list of players who cleared waivers in August last year and changed teams. If you weren’t in the best position to cash in on the semi blue chippers who just changed leagues, have hope. If the past is prelude, there is more yet to come.

Metsgrrl’s Guide to Citi Field

Yes, the new home of the New York Mets is more than a year old, and I haven’t been. To see the Mets, that is. I’ve been to the very beautiful ballpark for the Tout Wars drafts this past March, hosted by the NFBC, and I entered the year looking forward to visiting the new ballpark for fun. In otherwords a game. But once baseball season starts we begin work on the football magazine. Spare time goes to the family. Time flies, there is editing to be done. Etc etc you know what I mean.

But now the magazine is on its way to the printer, and longtime Guide and Patton$ contributor Mike Fenger is in town with his baseball loving daughters, and we’re going to the yard.

Metsgrrl (on the right)

So, I started casting around for information and came upon this excellent piece of work. Metsgrrl has guides to other parks and tips for traveling to them. The wider travel site is newish, but you can see the seeds of a similar love for the ballpark experience her work abroad as the metsgrrl blog shows for all things Mets. All highly recommended.

Ps. In my list of favorite ballparks it’s hard to fend off the glories of Fenway and Wrigley (Chicago), and alas I was a dues paying member of the Save Tiger Stadium committee for a while but never got there to see a game (I did once stand outside while the Tigers were out of town, and soaked in its surface glories), but I’d like to make a quick case for Comiskey Park. Beautiful ironwork, old style enclosed ballpark, excellent sausages even in the 80s, and a general feeling of the dusky dark appeal of the morbid baseball fan. I can see why they moved on, but that place was baseball’s Notre Dame.

One other story: I did see a game at the Polo Grounds when I was wee lad of seven. It was a night game, Mets versus Colt 45s, and I remember it similarly had a darkness similarly to Comiskey, except that the game I saw in Chicago was a day game. Those two were baseball parks Edward Gorey might love (though I dare say his game was more badminton than rounders). Lost and mourned, at least by those who got to get there.

The Cardrunners Discussion

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a new league I’m playing in called Cardrunners, after a poker instructional site that is sponsoring it. The league has a blog and home page, which has turned into a lively discussion about two divergent approaches to the game.

Bill Phipps is a poker player and a financial guy, and he thinks the general level of fantasy play is poor. He believes building a model of projections and valuation can help someone beat others consistently. Bill’s posts at the Cardrunners blog are provocative and confident. League organizer Eric Kesselman is a frequent contributor, too, with a sensibility similar to Bill’s, but without the bluster.

Rotowire’s Chris Liss argues that all the information of projections and valuation are shared by all the players in any competent fantasy league, and that the edge goes to the player who has the imagination to see what next year’s cheat sheet is going to look like this year, and draft accordingly. Chris has a post at Rotosynthesis called Lost in Translation: Why your projections and dollar values won’t save you.

One gets the sense that the Bill and the poker players don’t realize how tramped over this ground already is. Maybe I should send them to the Masochists Notes from Alex Patton’s books of the 80s and early 90s. The Masochists chapter that Alex blames for ending his run as a book author is here. It is about a retrospective draft experiment we set up, among other things.

John Burnson’s The Graphical Player

I am a big fan of John Burnson’s Heater Magazine, a weekly pdf of baseball stats and analysis that makes the Sports Weakly baseball stats pages look like the Weekly Reader.

John sent me a copy of his annual book, The Graphical Player, in January, when it came out. I glanced at it then, but I was busy and it ended up on a shelf and I didn’t write about it then, which is too bad. Like Heater Magazine, the Graphical Player is crammed full of information. John is evolving a set of graphical rules for presenting data that makes it increasingly useful and understandable, and helps put a player’s skills in the context of his team and of the game as a whole.

This is not a book to use to look up a fact, though there are plenty of those in here. This is a book to browse through, to hunt for patterns in, to savor as a baseball fan the way a gourmand might taste a sauce. The good news, even at this somewhat frantic moment, is that much of the information in the Graphical Player will still pertain after the season starts. If you want to see if a player has historically been a slow starter, this book has graphs that show that he has been or hasn’t. Once you get used to the way the information is presented, this sort of research is a pleasure. The data and its context are presented as a picture.

Other features of note: John asked three writers who follow prospects to name their 60 top rookies for this year. He has compiled their rankings and notes for these 111 ROY-eligible players, with their stats (presented in a very useful format) for the last three years. This is a very helpful survey of this year’s top prospects, though it does omit my decidedly dark horse candidate Thomas Neale (who didn’t make The Guide, which shows just how dark a horse Neale is).

I also think, as documentary, that the team profile pages in the back of the book are full of useful information. They won’t surprise readers of Heater, but as with much of the book, once you get past the sheer data density you’ll be surprised how satisfying it is to see a chart of who played what position the most each month for each team. And the charts that compare each team’s production in different categories to the league average spark only ideas thus far, but clearly they help us understand what was going on. This is a new way to experience this data, and an invigorating one.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the types of information included in the Graphical Player. Some is of help analyzing baseball, while other stuff is geared totally to fantasy players. I don’t want to be grandiose, but it is an amazing accomplishment.

UPDATE: So I posted the above glowing review only to find out that the only copy of the book you can buy at Amazon currently costs $91. It’s worth every penny, of course, but that’s a little steep. It seems the Graphical Player is also sold out at Acta Publishing, the company that published it. Barnes and Noble doesn’t have it. I’ll tell you what, I’ll sell my copy to the first bidder for $75. And in the meantime, I hope this means that John Burnson sold out his print run and made a small fortune.

The Sandinista Project, free!

from Jimmy Guterman

The Sandanista Project coverThe Clash album Sandinista! is a big sprawling three-record set that sounds like it could have been made by six or ten bands, which it was in some way. What happened was that the band wanted out of their contract with Columbia records. They saw that they were obligated to deliver three more records before they would be free, and someone had the smart idea to deliver all three at the same time. The sessions include all sorts of guest artists and performances by people in the Clash circle, with songs in a great many styles (some of which don’t really qualify at songs at all) and genres. The record never fails to charm, I don’t think, but some of it sounds like attention was flagging. That may be the dub influence. In the end, the only problem was that the record company counted the three-record set as one release, and so the band moved on to Combat Rock and Cut the Crap in pursuit of freedom, records that have their moments but which lack the epic generous delight of Sandinista!

Jimmy Guterman had the idea of remaking Sandinista! with different bands and artists each tackling a song, something of a tribute album, but to a record rather (despite the line on the cover) to the band. He called it the Sandinista! Project, and somehow managed to record covers of all of the umpteen songs by artists you might have heard of and other you have not. The result is delightful. I had been playing Sandinista! on my iPod last summer when I learned of TSP. Guterman released the mp3s of the tunes for free on Joe Strummer’s birthday. Soon I had both sets of songs intermingling amiably in the mix. The newer recordings often have strikingly different but completely agreeable arrangements, sometimes shifting genres or emphasis, nearly always hitting the mark the Clash set in the first place.

I bring this up now because Guterman is offering the Sandinista! Project for free download for the next few days at the link above. Highly recommended.

You can read more about the project at its blog.

Ode to Chris Liss

Many years ago, a lifetime perhaps, I got into a pissing match with Chris Liss about the serial comma (or, as Vampire Weekend calls it, the Oxford comma). But who really cares about that?

Back then, Chris Liss also wrote a story for the Fantasy Football Guide about how our brains are way more adaptable than formulas and other pedantic bs we create for fantasy sports. We think better than we compute, was Chris’s point, and we would be smart to rely more on our brains than any formulas. I said then and I say now, I think he’s right.

Tonight I read something else from Chris: http://www.rotowire.com/baseball/features/2010_LissStrategy.htm

The story linked here, about how Chris won Tout Wars Mixed and the Yahoo Friends and Family League that Rotowire (Chris’s domain) runs, is excellent.

Chris also wrote a story for the Fantasy Baseball Guide 2010 (on newstands now!), the magazine I edit, about the same stuff.

My point is that Chris is pretty much right. Our brains are quicker and more fluid than any formula we could create. You still need to know your league, and know the players (all the players) and how rostering them will change your team—which is what my earning and cost values and other objective measures provide—but once you’ve internalized that data, you can do better on your own than poring over some cheat sheet.

Good stuff.