This is my third blog post and already I'm going to talk about two separate things with the same theme. Overreacting. Brewers fans and fantasy baseball players are both doing the same thing. Small sample sizes are small. The beauty of the 162 game season is that it provides a very large sample size with which to draw conclusions (both of your team and the individual players.
Brewers Fans:
I understand the frustration. lost 2 of 3 to the Cardinals (who are hitting out of this world right now. .346 BABIP which is unsustainably high and a .206 ISO which is also unsustainable), won 3 of 4 against the lowly Cubs (lost the last game 8-0 though) and then got swept by the Braves at Turner Field.
Now we get the red hot Dodgers at home. 9-1 through 10 games vs 4-6 through 10 games.
Let me emphasize this point: It's 10 games into the season.
That's less than 1/16th a full seasons sample size. Player projections are based off of what people believe he is going to do over the course of the year. Lets look at some of the scapegoats so far this year:
Aramis Ramirez: People like to talk about how he's not a replacement for Fielder. Yes, he's not. He's not going to get the walks, he's not going to get the homeruns, he's not going to get people pitching around him.
You know what else he's not going to do? Bat .114 with a .149 OBP and a .171 SLG. If he batted those kinds of numbers two things would happen: First he'd make history as having the worst every day players batting line in league history. Second he'd be benched before too long for someone else.
Aramis has a .143 BABIP, in other words when he hits the ball in play, he is only getting a hit 14.3% of the time. League average? .300 or so. Can you imagine his line if he came up to league average in BABIP which is largely luck based?
If you want to be angry at Aramis for something, make it his K% of 20%. As a matter of fact make that a common theme for the next 2 guys as well.
Rickie Weeks: Batting Leadoff, but he shouldn't be. .184 AVG, .295 OBP, .342 SLG. Partially due to his lower BABIP than league average (.238) but mostly due to his gigantic K rate (34%). Why he is batting leadoff is beyond me. Managers like Roenoke like to talk about how good he is at making things happen and scoring runs. Well he's not getting on base to score and he's not even really seeming to try. You don't need 2 HR 10 games into the season from your leadoff hitter in the National League. You are leaving a lot of runs hanging out there with him at leadoff
Nyjer Morgan: Even smaller sample size than the last 2 guys since he platoons. I like Nyjer, i really do. But he's more likable because of his antics than his play to me. He's too prone to streakiness. .143 batting, .143 OBP, .143 SLG with a .190 BABIP. He will improve, but i don't ever believe he should hit out of the 2 hole.
Dispite all of those stats one thing needs to be noted. Even a single hit in a game will drive those numbers up by a pretty decent amount. Why? Very small sample sizes.
Last years lines for these 3 players: (AVG/OBP/SLG/BABIP/K%)
Ramirez: .306/.361/.510/.308/11%
Weeks: .269/.350/.468/.310/20.8%
Morgan: .304/.357/.421/.368/16.3%
Note: BABIP tends to be higher the faster you are and the more infield hits you can leg out.
These guys will be fine. As the inevitable correction (or benching) happens the Brewers will win more games.
Fantasy and reasons not to worry/reasons to not believe:
Tim Lincecum:
Bad: 10.54 ERA in 13.2 IP over 3 starts
Good: 3.32 FIP, 2.64 xFIP, 10.54 K/9, 2.63 BB/9
Reason for bad outings: BABIP of .426 is historically bad and won't continue. peripherals look great for an Ace on a roto staff dispite 2 losses.
Miguel Cabrera:
Bad: .222 AVG (you went the number 1 or 2 pick expecting somewhere around .310-.320)
Good: 3 HR, 7 Runs, 9 RBI and almost a 16% walk rate.
Reason for bad(?) start: BABIP of .179. when he puts the ball in play it seems like its a home run or an out. This will rebound and so will every other number of his.
Austin Jackson:
Good: .405 avg, .511 OBP 11 runs.
Bad: 24.4% K rate
Reason for start: BABIP is close to double league average. everything is falling his way right now, it will not last and the almost 25% K rate will catch up to him. He's going to bat .250 by the end of the year mark my words
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
Concepts from Moneyball
I love baseball statistics, always have and always probably will. There's just something to them that rings true to me.
At their core, baseball statistics are a measurable way of calculating the worthiness of individual players and a way that baseball games of the past can be recreated in some fashion. Due to the nature of the statistics, they are inherently less obscure in telling individual outcomes than say, football statistics are. In football the stat line you will see about say, a running back, will look like 23 carries, 104 yards, 1 TD, 1 Rec. 5 yards. On average that means 4.52 runs per carry which doesn't tell you that he had one carry for 87 yards and the rest averaged .77 yards per carry. It's harder to recreate games in football through the box score so usually, without watching the game, its harder to tell what exactly happened without further analysis.
Baseball box scores read simpler and easier to understand what happened in an individual game basis. Traditional stats (RBI/H/Runs/AVG/SB for hitting Wins/ERA/WHIP/Ks/Svs for pitching, also known as the 5x5 rotisserie statistics for fantasy baseball) are easy to comprehend (except WHIP which is a fantasy made up stat but we will get into specifics later). You see that say, Ryan Braun went 2 for 3 with 2 RBI's 1 run and 1 HR and you already have a good idea what happened.
Traditional stats are however, misleading and in many ways bad indicators of true performance both past and future, and this is the over-reaching concept of the book Moneyball. I liked the movie, as far as movies go, but to get a true understanding of the concept one would have to read the book. The movie spent a lot of time showing the emotional side of book and did it in a great manner. Unfortunately it had the opportunity to get others to think more critically about baseball and it's base statistics and why they are bad indicators of true performance.
This article will attempt to show the general themes of the book, broken down by stat used or concept used by Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta during their 2002 season. Whether or not they are trying to use these concepts anymore is a different story (the downside to the book I believe is that their concepts made their way into other teams so the players they wanted were not longer cheap which is what they need to compete)
Walks
Walks in baseball are highly underrated, even today, but less so than they used to be. Walks have a lot of advantages to them and basically zero disadvantages. Many people wrongly associate walks are solely on the pitcher giving them up, which is wrong depending on the player. Plate patience plays a larger role in the number of walks a batter has over the course of the year than anything else. There was an interesting chapter of the book entirely dedicated to Scott Hatteberg based almost entirely on walks and plate discipline. Walks do the following for the batter and their respective team:
a) It's not an out. This is the most important concept to note on why a walk is a great outcome. It's not an out and has zero possibility of becoming an out on it's own. An average baseball player will have an out something like 67% of the time they head to the plate (league average OBP is somewhere around .330 i believe but it fluctuates yearly). Walks are not subject to luck like hitting a ball in play does.
b) It makes the pitcher throw more pitches. Generally speaking, Starting pitchers are the best pitchers on their team. Followed by closers (an overrated position), then set up (8th inning guys), then long relief. Long relievers are who you want to get to. In modern baseball, starters are generally out of the game around 100 pitches. (Earlier in the year it's lower, later in the year it sometimes means more innings). The sooner you get the starter to that mark, the sooner you get to the worst pitchers on the team and the higher chance you have of scoring more runs (and thus winning)
c) Taking pitches forces the pitcher to give you better pitches to hit. The better the count is in the hitters favor, the better the likely outcome of not producing an out. Everyone knows this already, but it still bears pointing out. 3-1 is a better place to be in while batting than 1-2. Guys who walk more get to 3-1, 2-0, 2-1 more than other hitters because they consistantly force the pitcher to make good pitches over the plate.
d) The more you walk, the more often you are going to hit mistakes rather than swing at the pitches the pitcher wants you to swing at. This is all about selectivity and getting pitches you can drive rather than just making contact and hoping for the best. Line drives give more hits on average than grounders which on average give more hits than flyouts. Selectivity why Pujols or Prince Fielder seem to crush the ball when they hit it (and thus produce Homeruns by the truckload)
Pitching
Moneyball spent an entire chapter discussing Chad Bradford. While most people think this is about as exciting as watching paint dry, it had a very key concept written into it that most people either fail to understand, or don't ever even consider:
On average, a pitcher cannot control where the ball ends up if he allows a ball to be hit into play.
In other words, hits other than homeruns are at least partially luck based. This is the only conclusion that makes sense when you look at the careers of some of the most widely known pitchers who have had some of the widest variance in ERAs. Greg Maddox went from 2.22 to 3.57 from '98 to '99. From 2.62 to 3.96 from '02-'03. Why did this happen? Luck.
1998: 251 innings, 201 hits, 13 HR given up 45 walks, 204 Ks
1999: 219 innings, 258 hits, 16 HR, 37 walks, 136 Ks
Same pitcher, different outcomes, nothing noticeably different about mechanics. This is the kind of thing that led to two stats being created that I will discuss about in later posts. BABIP and FIP(xFIP).
To put them simply for now, BABIP is Batting Average on Balls In Play. Basically over a long enough sample size batters will hit approximately .300 against every pitcher on balls that are put into play (all plays in fair territory that are not homeruns). Both hitters and pitchers can be counted the same way using the same numbers without correcting for any park factors. If a pitcher is getting lucky (Like Maddox in 1998) his BABIP will be significantly lower than .300 until he has his eventual correction (1999) which brings his career average closer to the .300 mark.
BABIP doesn't tell the whole story because it takes the defense behind the pitcher into account. This is where FIP was created (they didn't call it FIP in the book if i remember correctly but it was basically FIP). FIP is Fielding Independent Pitching. It takes everything about fielding out of the equation and gives you the stats that the pitcher can control. Meaning Walks (non intentional including HBP), Ks, and Homeruns and puts it on an ERA scale.
In that season Billy Beane used FIP to secure Chad Bradford, basically a quad-A player who the White Sox didn't trust to be in their bullpen because he didn't throw a fastball in the 90's and had a weird delivery (submariner). Even though Bradford allowed very few homeruns because of his delivery (in the Pacific Coast League in the worst pitching park in AAA) and walked few batters, the White Sox did not trust the results he was getting.
Player Evaluation
Billy Beane has never had a lot of money to throw around at players like other teams (Yankees, Red Sox, now the Angels and Rangers for instance) so he had to construct his teams utilizing concepts that other teams valued very little. Namely in hitters, walks and in pitchers FIP. Think of who the big name high dollar players are and what they bring to teams. ARod speed and power. Giambi (at the time) pure power player. What teams undervalued was not getting outs for hitters and teams overrated ERA stats and throwing velocity in pitchers (particularly high school pitchers).
A lot of Billy Beane's draft picks over the years have been not so good, and people will look at that as a damnation of his method of drafting, but fail to recognize how cheaply he does it and how seemingly random drafts are anyways. When you pick a player out of high school or college you have very little to actually go on besides what his statistics tell you for how good of a player he is going to be, that is the Billy Beane, baseball player story. "natural talent" is random, statistics are definite.
Well that's all I can think of for now on what to write about my takeaways from Moneyball for now. If I think of anything else I'll write either an addendum or a separate blog entirely about a different concept.
At their core, baseball statistics are a measurable way of calculating the worthiness of individual players and a way that baseball games of the past can be recreated in some fashion. Due to the nature of the statistics, they are inherently less obscure in telling individual outcomes than say, football statistics are. In football the stat line you will see about say, a running back, will look like 23 carries, 104 yards, 1 TD, 1 Rec. 5 yards. On average that means 4.52 runs per carry which doesn't tell you that he had one carry for 87 yards and the rest averaged .77 yards per carry. It's harder to recreate games in football through the box score so usually, without watching the game, its harder to tell what exactly happened without further analysis.
Baseball box scores read simpler and easier to understand what happened in an individual game basis. Traditional stats (RBI/H/Runs/AVG/SB for hitting Wins/ERA/WHIP/Ks/Svs for pitching, also known as the 5x5 rotisserie statistics for fantasy baseball) are easy to comprehend (except WHIP which is a fantasy made up stat but we will get into specifics later). You see that say, Ryan Braun went 2 for 3 with 2 RBI's 1 run and 1 HR and you already have a good idea what happened.
Traditional stats are however, misleading and in many ways bad indicators of true performance both past and future, and this is the over-reaching concept of the book Moneyball. I liked the movie, as far as movies go, but to get a true understanding of the concept one would have to read the book. The movie spent a lot of time showing the emotional side of book and did it in a great manner. Unfortunately it had the opportunity to get others to think more critically about baseball and it's base statistics and why they are bad indicators of true performance.
This article will attempt to show the general themes of the book, broken down by stat used or concept used by Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta during their 2002 season. Whether or not they are trying to use these concepts anymore is a different story (the downside to the book I believe is that their concepts made their way into other teams so the players they wanted were not longer cheap which is what they need to compete)
Walks
Walks in baseball are highly underrated, even today, but less so than they used to be. Walks have a lot of advantages to them and basically zero disadvantages. Many people wrongly associate walks are solely on the pitcher giving them up, which is wrong depending on the player. Plate patience plays a larger role in the number of walks a batter has over the course of the year than anything else. There was an interesting chapter of the book entirely dedicated to Scott Hatteberg based almost entirely on walks and plate discipline. Walks do the following for the batter and their respective team:
a) It's not an out. This is the most important concept to note on why a walk is a great outcome. It's not an out and has zero possibility of becoming an out on it's own. An average baseball player will have an out something like 67% of the time they head to the plate (league average OBP is somewhere around .330 i believe but it fluctuates yearly). Walks are not subject to luck like hitting a ball in play does.
b) It makes the pitcher throw more pitches. Generally speaking, Starting pitchers are the best pitchers on their team. Followed by closers (an overrated position), then set up (8th inning guys), then long relief. Long relievers are who you want to get to. In modern baseball, starters are generally out of the game around 100 pitches. (Earlier in the year it's lower, later in the year it sometimes means more innings). The sooner you get the starter to that mark, the sooner you get to the worst pitchers on the team and the higher chance you have of scoring more runs (and thus winning)
c) Taking pitches forces the pitcher to give you better pitches to hit. The better the count is in the hitters favor, the better the likely outcome of not producing an out. Everyone knows this already, but it still bears pointing out. 3-1 is a better place to be in while batting than 1-2. Guys who walk more get to 3-1, 2-0, 2-1 more than other hitters because they consistantly force the pitcher to make good pitches over the plate.
d) The more you walk, the more often you are going to hit mistakes rather than swing at the pitches the pitcher wants you to swing at. This is all about selectivity and getting pitches you can drive rather than just making contact and hoping for the best. Line drives give more hits on average than grounders which on average give more hits than flyouts. Selectivity why Pujols or Prince Fielder seem to crush the ball when they hit it (and thus produce Homeruns by the truckload)
Pitching
Moneyball spent an entire chapter discussing Chad Bradford. While most people think this is about as exciting as watching paint dry, it had a very key concept written into it that most people either fail to understand, or don't ever even consider:
On average, a pitcher cannot control where the ball ends up if he allows a ball to be hit into play.
In other words, hits other than homeruns are at least partially luck based. This is the only conclusion that makes sense when you look at the careers of some of the most widely known pitchers who have had some of the widest variance in ERAs. Greg Maddox went from 2.22 to 3.57 from '98 to '99. From 2.62 to 3.96 from '02-'03. Why did this happen? Luck.
1998: 251 innings, 201 hits, 13 HR given up 45 walks, 204 Ks
1999: 219 innings, 258 hits, 16 HR, 37 walks, 136 Ks
Same pitcher, different outcomes, nothing noticeably different about mechanics. This is the kind of thing that led to two stats being created that I will discuss about in later posts. BABIP and FIP(xFIP).
To put them simply for now, BABIP is Batting Average on Balls In Play. Basically over a long enough sample size batters will hit approximately .300 against every pitcher on balls that are put into play (all plays in fair territory that are not homeruns). Both hitters and pitchers can be counted the same way using the same numbers without correcting for any park factors. If a pitcher is getting lucky (Like Maddox in 1998) his BABIP will be significantly lower than .300 until he has his eventual correction (1999) which brings his career average closer to the .300 mark.
BABIP doesn't tell the whole story because it takes the defense behind the pitcher into account. This is where FIP was created (they didn't call it FIP in the book if i remember correctly but it was basically FIP). FIP is Fielding Independent Pitching. It takes everything about fielding out of the equation and gives you the stats that the pitcher can control. Meaning Walks (non intentional including HBP), Ks, and Homeruns and puts it on an ERA scale.
In that season Billy Beane used FIP to secure Chad Bradford, basically a quad-A player who the White Sox didn't trust to be in their bullpen because he didn't throw a fastball in the 90's and had a weird delivery (submariner). Even though Bradford allowed very few homeruns because of his delivery (in the Pacific Coast League in the worst pitching park in AAA) and walked few batters, the White Sox did not trust the results he was getting.
Player Evaluation
Billy Beane has never had a lot of money to throw around at players like other teams (Yankees, Red Sox, now the Angels and Rangers for instance) so he had to construct his teams utilizing concepts that other teams valued very little. Namely in hitters, walks and in pitchers FIP. Think of who the big name high dollar players are and what they bring to teams. ARod speed and power. Giambi (at the time) pure power player. What teams undervalued was not getting outs for hitters and teams overrated ERA stats and throwing velocity in pitchers (particularly high school pitchers).
A lot of Billy Beane's draft picks over the years have been not so good, and people will look at that as a damnation of his method of drafting, but fail to recognize how cheaply he does it and how seemingly random drafts are anyways. When you pick a player out of high school or college you have very little to actually go on besides what his statistics tell you for how good of a player he is going to be, that is the Billy Beane, baseball player story. "natural talent" is random, statistics are definite.
Well that's all I can think of for now on what to write about my takeaways from Moneyball for now. If I think of anything else I'll write either an addendum or a separate blog entirely about a different concept.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
How i came to be the baseball fan I am
Baseball. It really is the greatest sport there is. No other sport has the stories behind the players that baseball seems to have. Maybe that's wishful thinking. Maybe that's just me not thinking about it critically. I don't know, but I stick by my statement. In a day and age where players from other sports are behaving badly at a seemingly record pace, baseball seems to skirt by those very same problems (outside steroids I guess, but that's a different story for a different day) while at the same time maintaining the same characters everyone knows and loves.
This is my first ever blogpost. Most of these are going to consist of two things. Baseball happenings overall (some days it will be Brewers stuff, sorry about that I'll always be a Brewers lover at heart.....much to the chagrin of my wife!). I try to be as objective as I can and I always try to look at things from a statistical standpoint. The other is Fantasy baseball. This is my first year ever doing fantasy baseball and I can tell you that i am thoroughly addicted to it already. Fantasy football doesn't even come remotely close to comparing.
I became a Brewers fan March 10, 1981. I didn't know it at the time but the Brewers were actually a good team back then. My parents, for whatever reason, loved baseball. They went to games, listened to games on the radio, and watched them on TV when they could. This is where it all started for me. From birth I was a baseball fan because my parents were baseball fans.
The earliest game I can remember attending was probably 1987. It was the year the Brewers went on their 13 game winning streak to start the year, Paul Molitor had a 39 game hitting streak and it was the only time a Brewer threw a no-no (Juan Nieves, ahh that stupid diving catch by Robin Yount that should have been a routine flyball). My first memory of going to a game was in the bleacher seats at the old County Stadium. Seats were super cheap at the time, maybe $5 for a marquee game. I don't remember who they played, but I remember Teddy Higuera was the pitcher. At that early age of 6 I was already keeping track of the games stats and keeping a normal score of the game. My mom loves mentioning this game because an old, drunk man asked me halfway through the game how many strikeouts Higuera had and I was able to tell him in a very matter-of-fact manner.
The next few years we went to a lot of Brewers games. My mom was the president of the Tom Trebelhorn fanclub so we would get free tickets all of the time, and we would get to meet the players a lot as well. She would get players to come out to West Bend (where we lived at the time) to do signings for little kids at the outlet mall and stuff like that. Looking back at it, it's rare to have that kind of opportunity to be around major league baseball players like that anymore. It used to be common, now not so much. Players at County Stadium used to have to park outside in their own lot. This meant that they had to walk to their cars after the game to get home or to their hotel. This was the opportunity to get their signature on stuff, really anything you had on you at the time. After every game kids would line up on the path that the players took to get as many autographs as their parents would let them stay for. This kind of thing does not happen anymore, at least not that I've seen or heard about.
The other benefit to having my mother be the president of the Managers fanclub is baseballs. You know those ones that 40 year old men will punch a little kid in the face for? we used to get those by the garbage bag full. And we used them.......all of them, to play just random baseball games with our friends in the "baseball field" (a loose term for what it was, it basically was an unfarmed piece of land in front of a cornfield that we made into our own baseball field). That was my childhood, going to baseball games with my parents (mostly my mom) and playing baseball (in the fall we would switch it up to football sometimes)
I played little league when I was a kid as well. West Bend has a really weird system set up for their Little League. There were two separate leagues, Little League, and the "Minor Leagues" with tryouts so the "best of the best" would get into Little League. I found out later that the tryouts were kind of a hoax, mostly meant to get all of the sons of the rich kids into a place of "higher status" even though they stunk at actually playing baseball. I made it into Little League only because they believed I was the son of a Pastor in town (which I was not).
After I moved to a different town I still played, but not for that much longer. It's actually one of the biggest regrets of my life, giving up playing baseball before high school. I'm not even sure why I did anymore.
Anyways, that's how the seed was planted in me to be what I am today (at least baseball wise). I promise later posts will be less sentimental (some might be, but I try not to be) and more factual and/or statistical analysis.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)