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, Rob Neyer, 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.  Derek Ambrosino
John Burnson Derek Carty Marco Fujimoto Eriq Gardner Matt Hagen Jonathan Halket Rob McQuown Troy Patterson Mike Silver Paul Singman Michael Street And here's the full roster. Got a question for our fantasy baseball experts? Email us:
Heater MagazineAdd 10 MPH to your fantasy team — see for yourself
HEATER MAGAZINE Winner, 2008 CBS Sportsline Fantasy League of Experts  Plus our Statistical Definitions Most Recent Comments
Top 10 prospects for 2010: Toronto Blue Jays and Kansas City Royals (8)
Top 10 prospects for 2010: Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers (4) Waiver Wire Offseason: NL (2) Acey-deucey (1) Waiver Wire Offseason: NL (12) Monthly Archives
November, 2009
October, 2009 September, 2009 August, 2009 July, 2009 June, 2009 May, 2009 April, 2009 March, 2009 February, 2009 January, 2009 December, 2008 November, 2008 October, 2008 September, 2008 August, 2008 July, 2008 June, 2008 May, 2008 April, 2008 March, 2008 February, 2008 January, 2008 December, 2007 November, 2007 October, 2007 September, 2007 August, 2007 July, 2007 June, 2007 May, 2007 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. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Most Recent Posts
Friday, July 24, 2009End of daysPosted by John Burnson at 2:20amBetting on the emergence of prospects can be frustrating—apart from such matters as the caliber of the guy above the prospect on the organizational chart, and the will of the parent club to avoid contractual triggers, there’s the question of whether the prospect’s approach in the minors will even translate to the majors. However, once a player reaches the majors and gets an extended audition, predicting when he’ll leave should be more straightforward. We decided to explore this question. We wanted to find the level of performance at which fielders post their final season of consequence. We gathered all seasons from 1990-2008 that may have been fantasy-relevant. We chose 300 AB as the minimum load for a potentially valuable season; that’s probably low, but we wanted to err on the side of too many seasons. In each season, we assigned players to the position where they played the most games. (If a player played two positions equally often, we qualified him at both.) We then asked: What is the OPS for these players in the year before they disappear—i.e., in their final 300-AB season? We could have used a more sophisticated metric than OPS, such as wOBA or Predicted OPS, but we went with OPS for its simplicity and familiarity. (In truth, the question is not by what measure players should be deemed done but by what measure players are deemed done by major-league GM’s. For all we know, GM’s steer by BA....) We expect that the onset of obscurity varies by the offensive demands put upon the player, so we grouped the results by position. Note that the only position that mattered was the batter’s position in his final 300-AB season; we did not track whether players were shifted from more defensively stringent positions. Because 2009 is not in the books, we did not treat 2008 as anyone’s final season (there may be a few players who last played in 2007 but whose careers are not over, but they should not soil the analysis). We did include players who had just one 300-AB season (by definition, their last one). Here are the results:
Note that these are aggregate levels; some batters had better numbers when they checked out and some had worse. And obviously, there are team-level considerations that we are missing, notably who (if anyone) is ready to take over. Still, the trends are as we would expect: The bar for further paychecks is high for first base and the corner outfield positions and lower for 2B, SS, CF, and C. This is a sound starting point—when a player slips to this level, he (and you) should be scouting other opportunities. However, even better would be to say “For an OPS of X, a player’s chance of losing his job is Y.” So let’s try that. For players who qualified at first base, we arranged all the player-seasons from highest to lowest OPS. We would expect to find many more “final destinations” at the bottom of the list than at the top, and indeed there are: Only one of the 25 top-rated seasons (4%) was a cul-de-sac, whereas 9 of the 25 bottom-rated seasons (36%) were. Here is the graph for first base. The blue line is OPS, for non-overlapping buckets of 25 batters. The purple columns are the observed fade rate for each group; the thick black line is a trend line. (We say “fade rate,” not “extinction rate,” because the players might still putter around baseball; however, never again do they log 300 AB in a season.)  The trend line lolls around 5% for a while (even the best players are vulnerable to a career-ending injury). And then, starting around .850 OPS, fade rate rockets up, eventually surpassing 30% for the dregs of MLB first basemen. (The miracle might be that that rate is not higher; it may speak to the slow pipeline of talent within an organization.) Armed with this chart, and knowing the OPS of a first baseman, we can now guess his chance of not attaining 300 AB next season. Here are the projected fade rates for the first basemen who are on pace for 300 AB this season:
There’s roughly a 50% chance that at least two of the bottom five players won’t be entertaining fans in 2010. There is a lot of room to extend this study. The natural next variable would be age—it is possible that MLB owners are pokier with the pink slip for younger players than for older ones. We could also focus on base skills, such as contact rate and walk rate, rather than on surface stats. Still, this approach is fresh ground for figuring long-term worth, for fantasy and major-league GM’s alike. Compiled by THT Staff.
Nutlaw said...
Ooh. I like this study a lot. It may be a better metric than you give credit for, as prospects obviously aren’t the only ones who can drive an underperforming player out of a job. Clearly, free agent signings and trades target positions of weakness as well. I find it interesting that first basemen had a higher OPS on their way out than did DHs. I also find it interesting that LF had higher departing OPS than RF, though these differences weren’t overly large. Posted 07/24 at 11:38 AM
Adam said...
@Nutlaw: I think that speaks to the mindset of AL managers more than anything else - the DH is just an extra bat. However, it’s pretty rare that your best hitter is also your worst fielder (Adam Dunn is the only guy like that I can think of offhand), so I guess it makes sense. Posted 07/26 at 06:03 PM
Page 1 of 1
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Next Post: Trade deadline: A few bullpen situations to watch>> <<Previous Post: Waiver Wire: NL | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If there were a way to control for age, you’d probably see Davis (23), Murphy (24), and Ishikawa (25) go down, as there’s still some hope for improvement. On the other hand, Huff (32) and Giambi (38) would go way up, since there’s much less chance that they’ll get any better in the future. Intuitively, Giambi’s “fade rate” would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 99 percent, because a 38-year-old with a .697 OPS is clearly done. Moving up the list a bit, LaRoche, because of his age, is more likely to be out of the league next season than Loney or Kotchman.