May 15, 2008
Rich Barbieri John Barten Sal Baxamusa John Beamer Brian Borawski John Brattain Craig Brown Matthew Carruth Derek Carty Alex Eisenberg Mike Fast David Gassko
Lisa Gray
Brandon Isleib Chris Jaffe Josh Kalk Chris Neault Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! John Walsh Geoff Young And here's the full roster.
Or you can search by:
StubHub is where fans buy and sell Yankees Tickets, Red Sox Tickets, White Sox Tickets, Mets Tickets and all other baseball tickets. If you are looking for World Series Tickets, ALCS Tickets or NLCS Tickets, you can find them at StubHub! More hot selling tickets include: Cubs Tickets, Astros Tickets, Dodgers Tickets, Angels Tickets and Detroit Tigers Tickets. Onlineseats is the best stop for Red Sox Tickets, Chicago White Sox Tickets, World Series Tickets, Dodgers Tickets, Minnesota Twins Tickets, St Louis Cardinals tickets, Chicago Cubs Tickets and Detroit Tigers Tickets Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Let the TicketSpecialists help you locate Boston Red Sox Tickets, Cubs Tickets, New York Yankees and Mets Tickets, Texas Rangers Tickets, Angels Tickets, Orioles Tickets and many Other Baseball Tickets 
All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a
Creative Commons
License.
|
Ten Things I Didn’t Know Last Weekby Dave StudemanApril 21, 2005 It seems that learning is catching on. Even the Scorebard has a poetic list of what he's learned from the first two weeks of baseball. It's hard to follow the Scorebard, but here's a list of the ten things that struggled their way into my foggy cranium this past week: The Athletics have developed the most talent now playing in the major leagues.Alan Schwarz wrote a nice column reviewing the originating teams of every player on an opening day roster. Some of his key findings were:
I may be biased, but I personally like the work conducted by Mike Carminati. Mike looked at all baseball drafts in history up to 1993, leaving enough time for most drafted players to have established themselves. He found that:
One of the best fielding shortstops to ever play the game thinks that Juan Uribe is the greatest fielding shortstop to ever play the game.Chicago has not just one but two astonishingly quotable managers in Dusty Baker and Ozzie Guillen. I say quotable because you never know what they're going to say. Recently, Ozzie opined that Juan Uribe is the best fielding shortstop to ever play the game. When asked to explain his remarks, Ozzie said:He catches the ball sideways. It's weird. To do that, you have to be real good with your hands. I've seen (Omar) Vizquel and Alex Gonzalez and a lot of good shortstops, but nobody catches the ball the way he does. You can't teach that and you can't take that away from him. Ozzie was probably one of the all-time greatest fielding shortstops in major league history before he tore up his knee. Here's how Michael Humphreys evaluated Guillen in his superb fielding analysis, Defense Regression Analysis: The Historical Baseball Abstract has a wonderful essay about Ozzie’s exciting brand of play, both as a fielder and a baserunner. When you look at the year-by-year chart, you’ll see in dramatic fashion how Ozzie’s outfield collision with Tim Raines in 1992, which, according to the Abstract, cost Ozzie his speed, also caused his DRA ratings to drop. But for that injury, Ozzie Guillen might have had as distinguished a career as a fielder as Ozzie Smith. So when Ozzie says that someone is a great fielding shortstop, well... I first say "that's Ozzie." But I then remember that he was a great fielder himself. And I pay a little more attention. Last Friday was Jackie Robinson Day.April 15th was Jackie Robinson Day. The day was cause for a number of Internet tributes..
But Jackie Robinson is my exception. I was once asked if I had any heroes and, after thinking about it a bit, I said yes. Jackie Robinson. His personal and athletic excellence under tremendous adversity transcend everything else that's ever happened on a baseball field. Infield foul outs go right; outfield foul outs go left.Dan Agonistes published some data on his blog that I found interesting. Here are the total number of foul outs by "zone" in each stadium. 3 if the first base zone, 5 is the third base zone, 2 is behind the catcher, 9 is right field and 7 is left field -- all in foul territory.FO3 FO5 FO2 FO9 FO7 Total OAK 126 118 55 18 28 345 TBA 120 111 47 24 35 337 FLO 135 80 73 24 22 334 CHA 123 92 74 20 17 326 LAN 98 118 61 17 16 310 TEX 120 90 78 8 11 307 MIN 99 88 58 32 29 306 MIL 125 82 70 9 12 298 ANA 81 92 71 21 25 290 SEA 95 92 69 16 18 290 ARI 107 85 48 18 18 276 DET 83 95 53 17 23 271 BAL 103 73 52 14 26 268 CIN 88 89 64 10 17 268 TOR 115 74 43 13 22 267 PHI 116 80 45 13 11 265 KCA 97 84 58 13 11 263 SDN 87 84 36 23 21 251 SFN 84 65 66 13 17 245 COL 94 64 43 22 20 243 SLN 97 70 54 14 6 241 NYN 90 60 64 16 11 241 CLE 79 72 63 9 17 240 MON 79 69 55 20 15 238 ATL 84 75 30 33 15 237 BOS 81 70 74 3 5 233 CHN 73 60 66 10 9 218 HOU 106 58 38 9 4 215 PIT 79 53 44 18 11 205 NYA 62 55 77 3 6 203I don't think this data has not been "normalized." In other words, the fact that Tampa Bay has a flyball staff may be part of the reason for their high ranking. But it is interesting to see that foulouts occur about 75% more often in Oakland than in Yankee Stadium. Generally, I knew that. But when you total up the numbers there are 22% more foul outs to the first base side vs. the third base side (2,926 vs. 2,398), yet 4% more to left field than to right field (498 vs. 480). The weaker the foul out, the less likely it is to be pulled, I guess. Pitchers seem to have about 7% to 10% impact on whether batted balls become hits.I consider the pitching/fielding dichotomy to be the most interesting sabermetric subject today. Sure, some people like to refine their Runs Created formulas, or go off on a tangent like Win Probability Added or something nutty like that. But properly splitting credit for runs prevented is where sabermetrics has recently seen and will likely continue to see meaningful breakthroughs.One of the most important recent breakthroughs was Voros McCracken's finding that major league pitchers don't have a lot of impact on whether a batted ball is caught or not (as long as it stays within the park). The measure we use to track this is usually called DER, or Defense Efficiency Ratio. Some other folks might call it BABIP. Over at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required), there have been two new contributions to the research.
What I will talk about a little bit more is my experience with PECOTA. PECOTA needs to predict BABIP, just as it predicts everything else, and it uses all the tools at its disposal in order to do so. This includes previous BABIP rates, strikeout and walk rates, groundball and home-run rates (groundballers allow a higher BABIP), and even hit-by-pitch rates--it turns out that guys who hit a lot of batters are just a little bit better at preventing hits. Throw all that stuff into a regression equation, including multi-year averages for the various predictors, and sophisticated adjustments for park, league and defense effects, and it turns out that you're able to explain around seven percent of variance in BABIP based on a pitcher's prior statistical track record. A Look at Postseason WPAI love it when readers email me with something I didn't know before. It's like the column writes itself! Here's one such email from Colin Gerowitz:I really enjoy the Game In Review feature, and I also like the Win Expectancy calculator spreadsheet you made available. I was playing around with it, plugging in some classic Postseason plays, and I found that Kirk Gibson's home run in the '88 World Series swung the Dodger's Win Expectancy from .142 to 1.000, giving that one dinger a WPA of .858 and making it possibly the "clutchest" clutch hit in postseason history (though I only looked at the last 30 years or so). Edgardo Alfonzo plays better when he's not fat.Brian Roberts isn't the only batter off to a surprisingly sizzling start. As of yesterday, Edgardo Alfonzo was batting .438/.517/.667 with a .399 GPA. He is the primary reason the Giants haven't set into San Francisco Bay along with the sun while waiting for Barry Bonds to return.Alfonzo is one of my all-time favorite players. I was very upset when the Mets let him walk, and I've been surprised at his subsequent decline. However, he has a bad back, and he's always looked "chubby," sort of a mini Cecil. In short, I'm pretty certain he doesn't take steroids. The theory over at Only Baseball Matters is that Fonzie is hitting because he has finally gotten his weight under control. I'm hoping so. By the way, if you read that article you probably saw something about Neifi Perez's hot bat at the end of last year. And yesterday, Aaron discussed Neifi's hot start so far this year. So what's going on with Neifi Perez? Thanks to David Pinto's day-by-day database, we can piece together some of this info. Since last September 10th, Neifi has batted .355/.381/.516 with an .898 OPS in 93 at bats. Think Nomar (batting .163 with zero runs created) is concerned? The history of uniform numbers.Do you subscribe to John Shiffert's regular email service, 19 to 21? If not, you are missing the work of someone who is the very best at effectively connecting baseball's present to its past.His most recent email was a gem, covering the history of baseball uniform numbers. Here's a little excerpt: Prior to the current free-thinking era, the best known case of an off-the-wall number was that of Bill Voiselle. A native of Ninety-Six, S.C. Voiselle played for the Giants from 1942 to 1947 under three different numbers, 19, 5 (a highly unusual number for a pitcher, even then) and 17. However, when he went to the Braves in 1947, he donned his home town as his number, becoming both number 96 and the answer to a famous trivia question… who wore his hometown on his back? As best as can be determined, Voiselle set a record for the highest uniform number, a record that lasted until 1963, when the University of West Virginia, celebrating the state’s 100th anniversary, gave their punter number 100 to wear (no, I don’t recall the punter’s name), thus making him, to the best of my knowledge, the only player in any sport to take the field in a regular game with a three-digit number. And that's just an excerpt. There's a new Pope in Vatican City.I'm not Roman Catholic, so I don't have much to say about Benedict XVI. But Batgirl does.Baseball is from England. Really.I need to finish with something I unlearned this past week. In my last column, I quoted a New York Times Book Review of David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game by saying that "Baseball is from France." Turns out that was a misreading of the book. Block emailed me to clear it up: "In reality, our National Pastime is undoubtedly of English origin, which the book clearly demonstrates."As I've said, you never stop learning. Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website. and a regular contributor to Heater, a PDF fantasy magazine for the digital age. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail. Do you have a general question or comment for one of THT's writers? Send it in to our weekly mailbag We also welcome unsolicited op-ed pieces of approximately 500 words for consideration. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and consistency of style. Please include your whole name and location to be considered. If you have a comment about this specific article, please email the writer. Next Article: Around the Majors: Garciaparra has a torn groin>> <<Previous Article: Around the Majors: Garciaparra's hurt |
