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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Saturday, August 15, 2009Yet another another batted ball reportThey come out every week, Heater Magazine and THT's Batted Ball Report. Today, it's the BBR, available to those who have prepurchased the 2010 Hardball Times Annual. Seriously. If you are going to buy the Annual, why not help us out by buying it a little early and getting the weekly reports and stats, too? Stats you can't get anywhere else, such as weekly batted ball stats for all major leaguers as well as occasional Win Shares and Base Runs spreadsheets. In this week's BBR, we ponder the aftermath of all the trades, including an in-depth look at the enigmatic Alex Rios. Why you can’t subtract FIP from ERAOkay, so the title is misleading. They're both numbers and can be subtracted from one another with wild abandon. Just don't expect it to mean anything. What do I mean? The basic formula for FIP is: (13*HR+3*BB-2*K) / IP + 3.2 You can fancy it up a bit (or a whole lot, if you want something like tRA), but what you're getting is still a linear model of run scoring. Which is fine, so long as you understand what that means. Let's take the home run term of that equation for a minute. It's supposed to correspond with the number of runs allowed per home run. Here's the thing, though. The number of runs allowed per home run goes down if you have a low walk rate or a high strikeout rate or both, because that means there will typically be fewer runners on base when a home run is hit. A linear model of run scoring doesn't account for that. What this means is that you have a much narrower band of results when you use FIP than when you look at ERA. To illustrate:  The red line represents ERA graphed against itself. As one can imagine, ERA has a one-to-one relationship with itself. The blue line represents FIP relative to ERA. It's a bit disjointed, because it's based upon sample data. But what you can see is that FIP doesn't stretch as far as ERA - while ERA on the graph goes from 1.00 to 9.50, FIP runs from about 2.71 to 6.92. (The slope of the line is also rather different.) So, let's take an example, from Cyril Morong's recent blog post about the Dodgers: ESPN shows that the Dodgers DIPS% is 107, meaning that their pitchers would have an ERA that is 7% higher than it actually is if they allowed a league average of hits on balls in play (they are , of course, better than average). With their actual ERA being 3.61, then their DIPS ERA is 3.86. So here their fielders save .25 runs per game (that is, if the pitchers have nothing to do with batting average on balls in play). The Dodgers have played 115 games, so this is an additional 28.75 runs scored. Adding the 10 in from fewer unearned runs gives us 38.75 runs. Since it usually takes about 10 runs to win one game, a rough estimate is that the Dodgers have won close to 4 games this year with their fielding. Except. For an ERA of 3.5, we would expect a FIP of about 3.92, based upon the graph above. If we smooth out that line a bit with a linear regression, we can estimate that a 3.61 ERA should result in a 3.96 FIP. (FIP and DIPS ERA aren't precisely the same thing, but they are both defense-independent component ERAs based upon linear models of run scoring, so I don't fee too bad in conflating the two.) So the effect Morong is seeing here is almost entirely a function of the linearity of FIP, not the Dodgers defense at all. This doesn't mean that FIP is useless, of course - it should do a good job of putting pitchers in the right ordinal ranking - the best pitchers will generally have the lowest FIPs and the worst will have the highest, at least within the limits of sample size. But what it will do is distort the distance between the best and worst pitchers. And that's why you can't just subtract FIP from ERA. (Or, again - you can, but you shouldn't.) UPDATE: Someone asked about tRA. Well, I have that data, along with xFIP. Excuse me if I'm getting a bit too wild with the Photoshop effects; I promise in a few days I'll stop feeling like a kid in a candy store and learn some restraint.  xFIP has an even smaller spread, which should surprise nobody - it normalizes differences between pitchers' home run rates. This has the benefit of being more predictive of future ERA, one should note. tRA and FIP are nearly identical in this regard, which again shouldn't surprise anyone. Matusz makes third appearance tonightBrian Matusz will be making his third career start this evening for Baltimore. Coming off an outing in which he allowed three home runs and couldn’t pitch out of the third inning, he’ll be facing one of the hottest hitting teams in baseball, the Angels. Matusz, a left hander, was the fourth overall selection in the 2008 amateur draft. Coming out of the University of San Diego, he was considered a “safe” pick, with less upside than some other early draftees. Matusz signed late, and didn't make his first professional appearance until 2009. He then reached the major leagues after just 19 minor league starts. He's young, and he looks younger, staring at home plate from underneath his flat-brimmed O's hat. Matusz shot through the Orioles system with a low to mid 90s fastball that gets some classic lefthander's tailing action. In his two major league starts, his fastball has consistently flown between 91-93 MPH, touching 94 a few times, and 89-90 MPH a couple times while pitching out of the stretch. He attempts to work the corners with this pitch, including inside to right handed hitters. Matusz seems to use his change-up as his second pitch. It travels with the same movement of his fastball, just 10 MPH slower. He has decent control of the change-up, meaning he can throw it for strikes. However, he hasn't shown the command needed to hit the corners consistently, leaving the pitch over the heart of the plate too often. Matusz' third and fourth pitches are his slider and curveball. The slider looks like a plus strikeout pitch. He throws it in the low-80s consistently, but can bust it inside on right handers at 84 MPH when going for the swing and miss. It gets good, sharp break and has missed a bat or two already. Brian has used his curveball as a change of pace pitch. [ fastball (89-94), change-up (80-84), slider (79-84), curve (76-77) ] Matusz uses his fastball and change-up early in his outings. After feeling comfortable with this combination, he begins to break out his slider and curve. In his first appearance, when he pitched well, he used his change-up early in the count, and seemed to have a better plan on the mound. In his second outing, he was all about his fastball, which was fine until he pitched himself into some very predictable counts. Matusz has shown a very poor pickoff move, and hasn't been tested at fielding his position. I haven’t seen enough of Matusz to have a feel for what will happen tonight. If he has command of his stuff, he could be effective. However, with the way the Angels are swinging the bats this season, it could get ugly early no matter how he’s pitching. Sven Jenkins is the creator of 60ft6in.com and does freelance work for STATS, LLC. Friday, August 14, 2009Will the Red Sox win the AL East?I'm playing around with a playoff odds calculator that I've created in excel — all will be divulged in an upcoming article. Anyway, to test drive my calculator I thought I'd take a quick look at the AL East. As of yesterday the standings were: American League East Pwins Diff NYA 72 43 .626 0.0 67 5 BOS 65 49 .570 6.5 65 0 TB 61 53 .535 10.5 64 -3 TOR 54 59 .478 17.0 61 -7 BAL 47 67 .412 24.5 49 -2 Despite the Bombers being a cool 6.5 games ahead, in terms of Pythagorean wins they are only a couple of games better. Interestingly in THT's Season Preview we have the Yankees winning 100 games and the divsion (the Sox were second on 98 wins). At the time we calculated the Yankees' odds of making the playoffs were 56%. Props to David Gassko — if the Yankees play to their current win record they'll notch their 101st victory on the last day of the season. Based on current standings and our expectation of true talent at the start of the season, what are the odds of Red Sox trumping the Yankees? Have a look: NYA 82.3% BOS 14.4% Hmmm — as expected the fat lady is warming up her voice. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||