February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
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Wednesday, March 03, 2010Baseball analysis 101This was posted on Tango's blog earlier today but I thought it was worth re-posting over here as well. This baseball analysis course consists of several brief chapters; the basics, sabermetric principles, offense, pitching, defense, and other stats. Each chapter contains articles relating to the subject. Most of these articles are fairly recent and I'm sure many of the readers of this blog have already read most of them. This is definitely something worth looking over if you are hoping to learn more about baseball statistics or simply looking for an aggregate source of baseball information. It is completely free and all that is required is a quick registration. Escape from the press boxBy age 26 Chico Harlan had made the major leagues of sportswriting: a beat reporter covering the Nationals for the Washington Post. He was an inventive, sometimes original writer who obviously worked hard to rescue the daily game story from its irrelevance in a wired world. Then he opened his mouth and chomped his foot. Last March, just before opening day for his second season on the beat, Harlan told Harry Jaffe of Washingtonian magazine, "I don’t like sports—I am embarrassed that I cover them. I can’t wait to stop. It is a means to an end and a paycheck." He said he would rather be writing about food. Click for more... “That home run is an out at Citi Field”I wanted to just straight up steal the title of this post, but I couldn't do it. Thanks to Katron.org, we can now easily look at batted balls from one park and see what they look like in another park. Pretty cool, eh? This was done with home runs a while back using hit tracker data and photoshop, but that method had too many issues with it to make it useful. This new method is especially useful for players that have switched teams, and are now playing half of their games in a different ballpark. So let's take a quick look at Curtis Granderson, the new center fielder for the Yankees:  The site does ignore atmospheric conditions and wall height, so it's not perfect. But it's pretty damn close. By my rough count, it looks like there are about 21 home runs on that image. That number could go up or down by a couple depending on whether or not you want to give Granderson credit for dots that are on the fence (pun intended). If we credit him for 21 home runs at home and add in the 20 he hit on the road in 2009, that would be a whopping 41 home runs, tops in the American League. Not too shabby. This is just a fun exercise and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it's somewhat informative nonetheless. I'll probably play around with this some more as time permits and post anything else that jumps out. Jenrry Mejia looks like Jenrry MejiaOver the summer, in a discussion about starters and relievers over at The Book Blog, I said this: I think a lot has to do with preconceived notations of what people think starters and relievers “look like.” Joba Chamberlain "looks like" a reliever. Jamie Moyer “looks like” a starter. I’m sure, on both a conscious and subconscious level, things like height, physical appearance, “makeup,” and even race are taken into account when managers are assigning roles to amateur pitchers. My main thesis was that as coaches at the high school, college, and pro levels begin to assign pitchers roles, much of the time they are not thinking of how to use their players optimally, but instead just plugging guys into roles based on vague ideas of what a closer "looks like" or a starting pitcher "looks like." So in discussing the upcoming Mets season with our own Jeremy Greenhouse at The Baseball Analysts, I said this: I’m really worried the Mets are going to put [Jenrry Mejia] in the bullpen to start the season. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope they put him back in Binghamton next year. His peripherals in Binghamton were really solid last year. I hope he continues to prosper there and move up the ranks. I don’t want to see him get thrown in. He has that look of a set-up guy or closer that people can think "Oh, this is one of those late-inning guys, a K-Rod because of that electric arm." And they can forget that he can actually be a very good starter if they leave him in the minors for long enough. And it still does worry me. Mejia has struggled with his control (4.67 BB/9 in Double-A last season), but strikes out guys in bunches, which is a combination that usually leads to the idea of putting a guy in the pen. But Mejia was just nineteen years old last year, and still put up a tremendous 3.49 FIP in Double-A despite his superficial 4.47 ERA. Given another minor league season or two to grow as a starting pitcher, Mejia could become something special. At the time, I thought I was just speculating with my K-Rod comment. However, then came this yesterday: You can feel the Jenrry Mejia campaign beginning to build in earnest. So far Jerry Manuel has only lightheartedly hinted at the possibility of express-laning the 20-year-old prospect to the majors to get big outs in the bullpen this season, but now Darryl Strawberry is trying to convince anyone who will listen. So I got the comp wrong: it's apparently Mo he looks like, not K-Rod. To think of how silly it would be to try and gain a marginal advantage by using Mejia in the bullpen this season and risk his potential blossoming as a starter. But here it is. The Mets have something really exciting on their hands. Let's hope they do the right thing and think long-term. Supermen aren’t dead yet!Last year, Baseball Prospectus shocked the world with their projected batting line of 311/.395/.546 for Oriole catcher Matt Wieters. Colin Wyers examined in depth how this indicated a severe problem with the Davenport Translations used to adjust the minor league data fed into the Baseball Prospectus PECOTA projection system. I'm no Colin, and I won't pretend to be. However, as I was browsing through the Yankee hitter PECOTA cards that are freely available, one particular projection caught my eye. Baseball Prospectus projects Jesus Montero to hit .291/.334/.481 in the major leagues in 2010. Superman Jr., anyone? The current leader among projection systems, Sean Smith's CHONE, projects Montero to hit a much more subdued .255/.296/.425, and Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projects a .273/.315/.416 batting line for Montero. What could be causing PECOTA's optimism about Montero? It looks to me like it's the same thing that caused PECOTA's interesting optimism about Wieters last year. According to Montero's PECOTA card, his .317/.370/.539 batting line at Double-A Trenton was equivalent to a .312/.354/.529 batting line in the major leagues. That doesn't seem right, does it? Aren't the majors harder than Double-A? A lot harder? Unfortunately, this author is merely a replacement-level Colin, so our brief investigation comes to a close here. How many millions do you think they pay on the free agent market for Complex Learning Above Replacement Colin - Keeping Everything Neatly Together? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||