November 23, 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
Introducing Visual Baseball (1)
HR/FB Park Factors (9) Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift (5) Building a Retrosheet database, the short form (4) Is peak at age 29? (7) 
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Monday, August 17, 2009UZR and TeixeiraThis is a post worth reading: David Appelman of Fangraphs responds to Tyler Kepner's criticism of UZR and other advanced fielding stats. I don't think fielding stats are perfect, by any means, but I go nuts when mainstream writers just dismiss them out of hand. I took Buster Olney to task for this a few years ago. Some things never change. Today’s random factUntil 2003, Brian Kingman had a niche for himself: the last man to lose 20 games in a season. He became a bit of a celebrity, and would get a series of interviews each year (most notably with Jayson Stark) about two-thirds the way through the season as some pitcher somewhere lost his 12th or 13th game. Mike Maroth lost 20 in 2003, ending Kingman of his notoriety, but in one way Kingman can claim a distinction: he is the last man to lose 20 games for a team with a winning record. Yup, the 1980 A's, for whom Kingman went 8-20, were 83-79 overall. (They just completely forgot to hit on days he pitched). Question: Before Kingman, when was the last time a pitcher lost 20 for a team with a winning record? Answer: Dolf Luque in 1922. He went 13-23 for an 86-68 Reds team. Luque actually had one of the team's better ERAs, too. If you go back before WWI, you can find a slew of times a pitcher lost 20 for a team that won most of its games, but those are the only pair to do it in the last 90 years. There have been exactly 100 20-game losers since WWI. Honorable mention: Robin Roberts went 10-22 in 1957 for the 77-77 Phillies. Suffice it to say, I like Kingman's odds to hold this claim to fame for quite a while longer. Draft signing deadline loomsTonight at 11:59 PM is the deadline for major league teams to sign their selections from the 2009 MLB Draft. Baseball America has an updated status on all remaining unsigned picks from the top 10 rounds. Among these players are number one selection Stephen Strasburg (Washington), number two Dustin Ackley (Seattle), number three Donovan Tate (San Diego), number six Zack Wheeler (San Francisco) , and the ninth pick Jacob Turner (Detroit). Overall there are still 17 unsigned picks from the first round (including supplemental picks). Strasburg is expected to command a record signing bonus (well above Mark Prior's $10.5 million bonus in 2001) and the rumored asking price has been around $50 million. Agent Scott Boras has a history of holding his clients out and waiting for them to become draft eligible the following season, but the desperate Nationals are in a position where they really need to sign him. Negotiations are expected to last right up until the final minutes. Also still unsigned is pitcher Aaron Crow. Crow was a 9th overall pick by Washington in 2008 but could not reach an agreement. After re-entering the draft and being taken 12th by Kansas City, he is still trying to sign his first professional contract. THT Daily: Four for fourDavid Wright may be done for the year, the fourth Met batting star out of action. Click for more... Measuring the umpire’s effect on the gameWe all know umpires make mistakes, especially when calling balls and strikes. While some people will argue that those mistakes are part of the game, there are few who are able to make a convincing argument to support that. On the other hand, the blogosphere is littered with arguments against umpires and for a computerized zone. I'm not here to take sides (I'm actually firmly in the camp for human umpires), instead, I wanted to take a look at how much of an impact umpires actually have. First, I wanted to see how accurate umpires are. To do that, I went into my Pitch f/x data and grabbed all pitches that were called strikes and all pitches that were called balls. Then, I mapped them out onto an approximation of a major league strike zone. I used the average top and bottom hitter zones provided by Gameday, 1.6 and 3.4 feet above ground respectively, as the vertical ends of the strike zone. Than I used the official major league horizontal zone (17 inches) and added two inches of leeway to each side. I also normalized the vertical position of each pitch ball to batter height. Here is what I got:  Remember that this is from the catchers point of view. As you can see, there is significant overlap. While umpires are pretty good at judging the high end of the strike zone, they are absolutely dreadful at judging the bottom and the sides, especially the third base side. Overall, 9.1% of pitches that were called balls were inside of the strike zone, and 21.7% of pitches that were called strikes were outside of the strike zone. I find that second figure outstanding, especially given that I am already giving the umps a pretty lenient strike zone. If I change the perimeters of the zone to 2 feet both ways, than those percentages become 16.5% and 11.6% respectively. So, assuming that the umpires have no bias towards hitters or pitchers, the "real" zone is likely somewhere in between that. John Walsh already did some great work a couple of years ago on figuring out the "real" strike zone, and I may try to update that later having the benefit of more accurate Pitch f/x data. However, for now, I wanted to take a look at this from another angle. Those percentages I quoted above are huge numbers. Any way you swing it, it appears that the umpires are only about 85% accurate, at least this year. That leaves a lot of room for random variation among players. How much? Well, let's find out. I queried all pitchers this year who have thrown at least 500 pitch in baseball this year, 329 in total, and sorted each pitcher by the number of pitches called strikes that were outside of the strike zone minus the number of pitches called balls that were inside of the strike zone. Then I divided by total pitches to get it on a rate stat. Then I multiplied that by 100 pitches, or roughly one game, and named that "Gift Rate". Here are the results shown graphically:  In case it isn't clear, the x axis is all pitchers who've thrown at least 500 pitches this year. You can read that as the number of "gifts" minus the number of "squeezes" each pitcher receives per game. You can see that despite the old adage, it does not all even out. Some of that may be due to measurement error, as I don't profess my strike zone to be very thorough and there still may be problems with the Pitch f/x data (namely park effects), and there may be some sampling error as well; however, it's clear that umpires effect some pitchers more than others. The standard deviation of Gift Rate among pitchers this year is about 1.6, which means that 68% of pitchers will have up to 1.5% difference in their strike rate based on umpires alone. That may not sound like a lot, but consider that, based off of this years data alone, there is an R^2 of about .62 on strike% vs. BB/9. The average difference in walk rate among guys with a 1.6% difference in their strike% is about .4 which is pretty significant. Going by the FIP formula, if you added .4 and subtracted walks per 9 to a league average pitcher, their FIP would rise by about .20 points. Obviously this doens't consider how strike% effects K Rate, and other factors. So in order to get more actionable numbers, a more rigorous study needs to be applied. However, it serves a reasonable illustration of the impact that umpires can have. Now, here are the pitchers who have been getting the biggest help this year: 1) Derek Lowe: 5.6 2) David Weathers: 5.5 3) Javier Vazquez: 5.1 4) Mariano Rivera: 5.0 5) Livan Hernandez: 4.9 And here are the guys who have been hurt the most: 1) Dontrelle Willis: -3.6 2) Brandon League: -3.4 3) Charlie Morton: -3.2 4) Ryan Rowland-Smith: -3.1 5) Dana Eveland: -3.0 It's hard to see any sort of bias in those lists. Among the leaders, you have two of the best pitcher in baseball (Mariano and Vazquez) and two of the worst (Hernandez and Weathers). The trailers are filled with guys with abysmal control, like Willis, and guys with good control, like League. For those who want it, here is the complete list (pitchers are labeled by their Elias ID and my SQL is acting wonky right now, so you'll have to do some translating). The next step, along with creating a more accurate strike zone, is finding how much of an impact those missed calls have. We all know that there a certain missed calls more significant than others; however, as I showed earlier, the potential impact of a lost or gained strike may be pretty significant in itself. We use FIP, tRA and other such metrics to eliminate defense and other kinds of luck from pitcher ability. However, it's possible that umpires themselves may have as big, if not more, of an effect. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||