November 22, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. Most Recent Comments
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HR/FB Park Factors (3) Is peak at age 29? (7) On whiffing (4) Sportswriters don’t vote for Cy Young based on popular opinion; baseball universe explodes (14) 
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Friday, August 14, 2009Observations of questionable import: the Cape Cod League Championship SeriesRecently, in these electronic pages, Mr. Adam Guttridge wrote an interesting article about a Florida State League game he’d attended with Kiley McDaniel of Baseball Prospectus. In said piece — itself a picture of journalistic elegance — Guttridge provides sabermetric- and scouting-type analysis of some prospects of interest to the THT reader — in this case, Minnesota farmhands Ben Revere, Chris Parmelee, and Joe Benson. In his evaluation, terms like “gait” and “loft” and “plate coverage” are used ably. Where Guttridge offers readers technical know-how, the present author possesses only a vaguely 19th century prose style. That said, I have one thing going for me: I happened to be in attendance at the second and final game of the Cape Cod Baseball League Championship Series between the Braves of Bourne and Kettleers of Cotuit this past Wednesday night. Bourne won the game 5-1 and many of the salient details are ably reported by Ms. Nicole Auerbach of the Cape Cod Times. Furthermore, the box score provides another important perspective. Of course, those are merely the superficial “facts." Ms. Auerbach undoubtedly omits certain details of great import to the true Baseballing Enthusiast. So as a special service to the THT reader, I offer my attempt at some scout-type analysis. Click for more... Red Sox acquire A-GonThe Red Sox have acquired shortstop Alex Gonzalez and roughly $1.1 million from the Reds for minor leaguer Kris Negron. Shortstop has been a trouble spot for the BoSox all year. On the year, the club has a -21.9 UZR, good (the better term would be bad) enough for 26th in the bigs. They're 29th with a .679 defensive efficiency rating, and most of this can be traced to the shortstop spot as well as third base. Gonzalez posted the best defensive season of his career with the Red Sox before becoming merely "good" with Cincinnati -- but good is all it will take for the Red Sox's defense to improve leaps and bounds. With the bat, Gonzalez is hitting a poor .210/.258/.296 in 270 plate appearances. Since the All-Star Break, he's checking in at .197/.261/.270. Boston certainly didn't acquire him for his bat. With a .283 xBABIP, he's been decidedly unlucky on the year. Couple that with his .725 OPS at Fenway Park in 2006 (.671 on the road) and I figure the Sox are betting that his numbers increase to Nick Green territory, which will be good enough. The Sox's shortstop position is dire enough that Gonzalez could see his $6 million option picked up for next year. Jed Lowrie has essentially had a lost season while the free agent market for shortstops in the offseason is tepid at best. Marco Scutaro heads up the dignitaries at that position, and the Sox certainly would love to bring him in but can they run the risk of being out-bid? All it will take is an irrational three-year deal from Cincinnati. Negron is a 23-year old stuck in A-ball and figures to project as nothing but an average backup infielder. Gonzalez figures to boot Chris Woodward from the roster and pair up with Green to at least provide steady defense for the remainder of the year. Gonzalez certainly won't be worth a win -- a half-win at best, assuming he doesn't go all Albert Pujols on us -- but any upgrade is worth it. Latos looking for fifth winPadres rookie Mat Latos will make his sixth major league start tonight in St. Louis. Latos is currently 4-1 with a WHIP of 0.94, giving everyone a glimpse of what his future his in the big leagues might be like. He was an 11th round draft pick out of Broward College in 2006, and has dominated professional hitters since then. Latos has a classic pitcher's frame. He's tall, lean, and uses his height to throw the ball downhill, creating a difficult hitting angle. Latos doesn’t use his legs to drive towards home plate, preferring to just fall towards the batter and let gravity do the work. This makes his delivery looks a little uncomfortable, since he isn’t using enough of his body to support his tattooed pitching arm. Latos tries to work the corners with a fastball that flies in the low-mid 90s. He has shown the ability to pitch consistently at 92-94 MPH, yet save two or three more MPH for the David Wrights of the world. When thrown glove side, the fastball often gets some natural cutting action, which can make the pitch sail off the plate. Mat's strikeout pitch is his 12-6 curveball. The curve acts like a true drop ball, falling straight down as it approaches home plate, getting very little horizontal movement. Latos rounds out his three-pitch repertoire with a straight change-up. He's not afraid to use the change-up, but he hasn't shown me great command of it yet. He has a tendency to pull it towards his glove side, which can give it some natural cut, like the fastball. Latos doesn’t look like the most athletic guy out there, but I have noticed him covering first base properly, and has fielded a throw from the second baseman, making me think he’s capable of fielding his position. There is no way that Latos can keep up this current run of success forever, but if he can find a quality third pitch to go with his plus fastball and curveball, he will be a consistent force. Tonight Latos goes against the St. Louis Cardinals, in arguably his toughest start yet. I’m predicting that he finally gets hit around a bit, and will struggle to get through five innings. Sven Jenkins is the creator of 60ft6in.com and does freelance work for STATS, LLC. WAR and WSABLong-time readers of the Hardball Times may know that I've done a lot of work with Win Shares, creating Win Shares Above Bench and ranking the all-time greats. Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is newest win-based stat of choice (I'm still a fan of WPA, too). I wrote about the difference WAR can make for particular players earlier this week, and I got to wondering how it did overall. Me being me, I graphed it. Here's a graph of WAR (on the x axis) and WSAB (on the y) for all position players from 1900 to 2008:  As you can see, the two stats not only track very closely, but they almost intersect at zero (I divided WSAB by three to make them equivalent to the WAR scale). If you're a math nut, the R squared between the two is .96. That's the good news. However, as I showed the other day, the difference between WAR and WSAB can matter a lot for individual players. Also, the variance between the two is greater for individual seasons, as you would expect. That's the more discerning news. I've got no other point. Just thought you'd like to know. Illustrator WAR graphs, take twoThis is a follow-up to yesterday's post about making WAR graphs. There were several requests for plot lines and the legend to be larger, and I've done that. Also, at Tango's blog, there was some discussion about including the total WAR in the legend, and how to make that line up properly. It occured to me that the best way to do that would be as a table. (Longtime readers will note that I don't need a lot of prompting to make a table.) And for the convenience of our color-blind readers, I ran the color scheme through VizCheck to make sure there was at least some contrast between the colors for those with color-blindness. Here are the results:  You can click on the image to see a larger version (about three times the size, actually). I'll take any other suggestions you have, dear reader. I'll also take suggestions on another graph to try out. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||