The Hardball Times -- Dan Lependorf

The Hardball Times -- Dan Lependorf http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-05-17T08:57:15+00:00 Which agencies negotiate the best contracts for their clients? http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/which-agencies-negotiate-the-best-contracts-for-their-clients/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/which-agencies-negotiate-the-best-contracts-for-their-clients/#When:07:14:15
If a solid player signs a below-market value contract, it’s regarded as a “win”. End of sentence. Not a “win for the team,” but a “win,” as if contract negotiations involved just the one party. Similarly, you’ll never hear Vernon Wells’ contract referred to as anything except “awful,” “burdensome,” or at best, “hefty.”

It makes sense, to be fair. We’re all fans, and most follow a team-first, players-second mentality. But why not look at it from the player’s point of view for once? More specifically, I’d like to take the opportunity to look at an oft-ignored, yet crucially important facet of baseball economics—sports agents.

While some players use independent agents, a large majority gravitate toward the vast resources that a large corporate agency can offer. Shown below are the 10 agencies with the largest amount of 2013 roster spots:

(There’s an important note regarding the accuracy of the roster data below.)

Avid readers of MLB Trade Rumors may recognize many of the agencies on this list. In particular, Boras Corporation (led by agent Scott Boras) has carved out a rather infamous reputation for squeaking out every ounce of negotiating leverage he can use, which continually seems to manifest itself in the form of shockingly large contracts for his clients. Boras Corporation is far and away the agency best known to the general fan, but there are a large handful of lesser-known agencies who can boast a comparably prestigious client list.

CAA Sports is a division of Creative Artists Agency, which is mostly known for representing an enormous amount of clients in the film, television, and music industries. ACES recently came up in the news for being the subject of an MLB Player’s Association investigation regarding its involvement in Melky Cabrera’s bizarre fake website steroid scandal. (The MLBPA sided with ACES and its position that the agency was not at fault.)

While we’re here, here are the ten agencies with the largest amount of 2013 WAR, using the ZiPS preseason projections.

It’s quite clear—while Boras Corporation and CAA Sports may not be the largest agencies in terms of total clients, they’re far and away the winners when it comes to the quality of the baseball talent they have.

The next natural step is total 2013 salary, again sorted by agency.

This chart is exceedingly similar to the last one, which makes intuitive sense. Better players get bigger checks. Boras Corporation and CAA Sports are, again, on a completely separate tier than all of the rest of the other agencies.

My last step brought me to the amount of surplus salary negotiated by each agency, but before I get there, I have to explain my process for finding each player’s salary baseline. Analysts far brighter than I am have figured out that baseball salaries are linear, in that a six-WAR superstar will, on average, make three times as much as a two-WAR role player. This relationship is straight, with a slope somewhere in the vicinity of 4.5 million dollars per WAR. This is the estimate I used for contracts paid to players who would otherwise be eligible for free agency. For example, Vernon Wells was projected by ZiPS to be worth 1.0 WAR this season. His expected baseline salary would then by 4.5 multiplied by 1.0, or 4.5 million dollars. His actual contract pays him 21 million dollars. I awarded the difference, 16.5 million dollars, to his agency, The Legacy Agency.

For young players who haven’t accrued enough service time to be eligible for free agency, I used the “40/60/80” rule for estimating arbitration salaries, which says that players eligible for salary arbitration tend to get 40, 60, and 80 percent of their open market value for their first, second, and third eligible arbitration years, respectively. It’s not a fantastic rule, and it’s certainly not ironclad, but it’s usually reasonably close enough that it’ll get us in the ballpark we need to be in. For new players not yet eligible for salary arbitration, I used the league minimum salary of $490,000.

There’s a reason Boras Corporation is known (and feared) among baseball fans. With a client list that includes Alex Rodriguez, Barry Zito, Jayson Werth, and Prince Fielder, Boras earns more money for his clients than any other agency. This may be one of the few times where a feared reputation is almost entirely deserved.

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It seems obvious that among off days, rainouts and injuries, any possible advantage won’t last very long before the schedule is a jumbled mess. But is it actually true? Is the advantage significant in any form? Why not crunch some numbers and find out?

I’m going to start with a simplistic model using easily digestible numbers, and then I’ll fold real world data into what we’ve got.

In theory

To keep it simple, let’s make the very, very generous assumption that every team has five identical perpetually healthy starters who rotate in a perfect cycle. If the schedule consists of 162 consecutive days, every team’s ace will pitch on day one, day six, day 11, and so on, all the way through to game 161. Expressed graphically, this looks a little something like this. Each row is assigned to a single team, while the columns correspond to days on the calendar. The days where each team’s day one starter is scheduled to throw are marked in red.

Again, using simple numbers (and a little help from Chris Jaffe), let’s spitball the quality of each rotation spot so that first, second, third, fourth and fifth starters for every team have ERA+s of 125, 110, 100, 90 and 80, respectively. Naturally, a conventionally ordered pitching rotation would result in win probabilities of 50.0 percent for every game, since your 125 ERA+ pitcher is facing their 125 ERA+ pitcher, etc.

A staggered rotation, in this case, would mean punting Opening Day by throwing an 80 ERA+ pitcher against a 125 ERA+ ace. Now, it’s not a complete forfeit—there’s some non-zero chance that your fifth starter will manage a minor miracle and beat the opponent's number one. It’s actually a fairly simple calculation by using the Pythagorean expectation formula, and it turns out that an 80 ERA+ pitcher has a 29.0 percent chance of beating a 125 ERA+ ace, given perfectly equal offenses. Not great odds, but it’s clearly not zero.

It’s also true that pitting your number one against the other team's number two results in a win probability that's higher than usual. Again, using the Pythagorean expectation formula in this purely theoretical vacuum, it turns out that you get somewhere around a five to six percent win probability boost above the usual 50 percent over the next four days each.

The total increase in win probability over a full five-game turn of the rotation? 0.3 percent. Seriously. A team’s win probability, when facing a perfectly symmetrical opponent, goes from 50.0 percent to 50.3 percent when deploying this strategy. On average, a team would pick up one free win every other year when using a staggered rotation. In this theoretical vacuum. Not exactly a game changer.

In practice

Let’s break away from a perfect even 162-game schedule.

I plugged the full 2011 major league schedule into the model, keeping everything else the same. As before, I’ve marked every theoretical ace start in red. This one’s far more interesting, due to the off-days.

I simulated the 2011 season 30 times, one for each team’s attempt at a staggered rotation, while holding the rest of the league constant. The average win probability boost? 0.14 percent. The Brewers happened to have a schedule that gave them a half of a percent. Most were far less fortunate, and some actually took a tiny (tiny) probability hit. The strategy really, really doesn’t work.

But hey, we’re deep into this now, why not throw one more wrench into the model? How about actual pitchers?

I carried out the same exercise as before, this time replacing the theoretical pitchers with the pitchers who actually started every game in 2011. As a replacement for the ballpark ERA+ figures, I used their season FIP. As you might expect, probabilities varied quite a bit more here than in our theoretical vacuum. Even still, the average win probability change was a negative two percent.

It doesn’t work. Not in a five-game playoff series, not in a perfect theoretical season, and not using real game data.

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When it was all said and done, the new contracts combined for nearly 1.4 billion dollars, and after including the small handful of financially undisclosed contracts and the hundreds of minor league deals that go unreported, that number is actually higher still. What better way to graphically sum up the chaotic activity of the offseason than a map? Click to enlarge.

Every line corresponds to a player moving from one team to the other. The width of the line is directly linked to the number of players—the giant blue line linking Toronto and Miami was drawn because of the enormous 12-player deal that sent Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, and Mark Buehrle up north. Red lines are free agent signings, while blue lines are trades, so naturally, the blue lines tend to be thicker than their red counterparts. Click here for a free agents only version, and here for a trades only version.

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But I really do love the World Baseball Classic.

Sure, sure, I know the arguments against it. It consists of hastily composed teams full of unprepared players who are fresh off four months of the offseason. A huge chunk of the big stars don’t participate, which sometimes turns it into the equivalent of the 14th inning of the All-Star Game. And the stringent pitch count rules (both written and unwritten, the latter communicated via stern glares and grumbles from a pitcher’s real manager) clearly make the WBC less of an actual competitive tournament and more of a giant exhibition.

There’s nothing wrong with that. None of it matters.

A baseball tournament doesn’t need to have competitive meaning to be meaningful. The WBC isn’t designed to crown the best baseball country in the world. The WBC’s value lies in its ability to foster the growth of international baseball like no other event can.

Two months ago, Jon Paul Morosi wrote an article decrying athletes who turned down an invite to the WBC. Morosi wrote, “...it seems several American stars see the WBC as a matter of convenience rather than an obligation to country and sport,” continuing, “the lame excuse is there in case we need it: Oh, no one cares about the tournament because we don’t send all of our best players.” Morosi doubled down on his argument two months later, leading off a story with “No more excuses. No more rationalizations. If the United States still wants to consider itself the preeminent baseball country on the globe, then Team USA will win the World Baseball Classic.”

Obviously, Morosi is off the mark here. The United States is the home to the strongest baseball leagues in existence, and no three-week quadrennial tournament will change that. But it’s not just that he’s wrong, it’s that his entire premise is built upon a foundation that’s angled in the wrong direction. Morosi’s criticizers, who often point at the WBC’s lack of value as a competitive event as an excuse to dismiss the tournament outright, are hardly more correct.

Both sides are anchored to the idea that the WBC's competitiveness is tied to its relevance. It's not. The biggest draw that the World Baseball Classic has to offer is its capacity to expand baseball’s role as an international game. In a press release that was sent out on Tuesday, MLB announced that the game between Japan and Chinese Taipei last Friday was the highest rated television program in Taiwanese cable history. Japan’s game against the Netherlands was the most watched Japanese sports event in 12 months. That rating even beat the TV viewership of the Japan Series, the Japanese equivalent of the World Series.

People are watching overseas. This extends to countries not typically known as baseball powerhouses, such as Italy and the Netherlands. There are professional baseball leagues in Europe (such as the Italian Baseball League and the delightfully named Honkbal Hoofdklasse, to stay with the aforementioned duo), but they could use greater exposure and a larger local audience. With the demise of Olympic baseball after 2008, baseball needs an international event to give small international leagues a spark. This is that event.

The WBC’s main focus isn’t those of us who reside in the United States or Canada. We get 162 games of quality baseball every year, multiplied by 30 teams, in addition to three rounds of quality playoffs. Frankly, we’re spoiled. The WBC is meant for countries around the globe, who don’t always get the chance to see hometown representatives play on the same field as the best of the best. Pointing at the lack of press the WBC gets on its home turf completely misses the point.

The World Baseball Classic is a show on a grand scale for the international audience that baseball has. It’s a fun tournament that brings back the luster in baseball exhibitions, something the All-Star Game has lacked in recent years. And most of all, it performs a vitally important role that the sport wouldn’t otherwise have—spreading the game to the world. The WBC isn't an international version of the All-Star Game. It's baseball's World Cup.

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Whoops.

Oakland won’t be able to count on being underestimated this time around, which led to a fairly significant, if understated, retooling over the offseason. The catcher and shortstop positions were revamped, and a new utility infielder and fourth outfielder were brought in. Here are five-ish questions about the 2013 Oakland Athletics.

How in the world is Bob Melvin going to give everyone the plate appearances they deserve?

The A’s are set to start the season with four legitimate center fielders, all vying for playing time. Six of the ten infielders on the forty-man roster have logged significant major league time at two, even three positions around the diamond. The A’s seem to be perennially injured, but this year, they’ve layered insurance policies on top of insurance policies, to the point where most positions have a backup or three who could start for the Astros.

(I know, I know, I couldn’t resist. Gotta get that division rival thing going on.)

Of course, the problem with starting-caliber backups is that you’re going to end up with too many hungry bats to feed, and only so many plate appearances to go around. How can Melvin sort this whole thing out? The short answer? He can’t. The outfield, for example, is stuffed to the brim with Coco Crisp, Josh Reddick, Yoenis Cespedes, and Chris Young, who are all deservedly accustomed to a full season’s worth of 600 plate appearances. Throw in Seth Smith, who should bat against the lion’s share of right-handed pitchers, and it’s mathematically obvious that these five outfielders simply cannot all hold full-time jobs.

The long answer? No, Melvin can’t give 600 plate appearances to all five outfielders, but through a judicious use of platooning, the designated hitter, and some form of a rotating rest day, he can stitch together a fantastic outfield mosaic that should perform quite admirably. Chris Young has batted 60 points of wOBA better against lefties than righties, over nearly 1,000 plate appearances. Seth Smith’s observed platoon split is double that (in the other direction), albeit with a third of Young’s sample size. The two of them together create one hell of a utility frankenfielder, which can slot in either corner outfield spot and in center field against lefties.

Long story short? Barring injuries, the A’s will have three well-rested, above average outfielders on both sides of the ball, 162 days out of the year.

That young rotation was great last year. What can we expect for an encore?

Depending on your definition of the term, the A’s trotted out a rookie starting pitcher in somewhere around 80 to 100 games last year. The top-end of that range is nearly historic, ranking fourth among all teams since the deadball era, using a 50 career innings cutoff as the qualifier. All things considered, the starting rotation had the third-lowest ERA mark in the American League, which is great for any team, chock full of rookies or not.

So what’s next for the talented quartet of Jarrod Parker, Tommy Milone, A.J. Griffin, and Dan Straily?

Let’s get this out of the way right from the top—Tom Verducci’s Year-After Effect really doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. Every year, Verducci hypothesizes that young pitchers under 25 who threw 30 more innings than their previous season high have an increased risk of injury the following year. And every year, analysts find that the evidence doesn’t support his claim. This year, he picked Parker and Straily. Don’t buy into it.

That said, there certainly is cause for concern among the rotation. That third-lowest AL ERA mark of 3.80 included 111 innings of 3.24 ERA work from the arm of staff ace Brandon McCarthy, who left for the sunny skies of Arizona over the offseason. Another 152.1 innings came from Bartolo Colon, who put up a 3.43 ERA before getting suspended for testing positive for synthetic testosterone. McCarthy’s sterling production will be difficult to replace, and Colon’s PED issues necessitate treating him as a semi-known wild card.

As far as the actual rookies, Parker and Milone have to be considered the top-flight options. Last year, Parker easily out-pitched his rotation mates with a 3.7 WAR mark on the strength of a 3.43 FIP. His peripheral statistics were right around his production level, and he had the strongest minor league track record of the four. Milone also put up convincing numbers last year, although his junkball finesse repertoire of pitches likely indicates that he doesn’t have the high-output ceiling of Parker. Still, Milone was quite good in 2012, and a comparable 2013 is not out of the question.

Griffin and Straily, the other two rookies, come into 2013 with a larger handful of concerns. Griffin was excellent, though only in 82.1 innings. His production also highly outstripped his peripheral statistics, which is a red flag to take note of. Straily had an even smaller sample size, with an ERA under four, yet an FIP above six. He likely felt a bit rushed, as last year was not only his first year in the majors, but also his first year in any level above High-A. With the presence of Brett Anderson, Colon, Parker, Milone, Griffin and longman Travis Blackley, it’s likely that Straily will get a little more time in the oven before starting a game in Oakland.

And speaking of Anderson, the owner of one of the prettiest left-handed sliders in the league has arguably been the most talented member of Oakland’s pitching staff for three years running now. It’s become an annual refrain, but I’ll say it again—if Anderson’s healthy, he can replace everything the A’s rotation lost after 2012, and then some.

Rookie starters need a strong bullpen to back them up. How is the bullpen looking?

The A’s bullpen finished with the second lowest ERA in the American League last year, and all of the major pieces have stayed in green and gold for 2013. The seventh-eighth-ninth combination of Ryan Cook, Sean Doolittle, and Grant Balfour that worked so well in the later months of 2012 will still be around to slam the door in emphatic fashion.

It’s worth noting that the second lowest AL ERA came with an FIP that’s decidedly middle-of-the-road, ranking seventh in the AL. That said, much of the differential comes from innings thrown from secondary and tertiary options. The Cook/Doolittle/Balfour trio remains strong in both surface and peripheral stats.

If given the choice between two 3.50 ERA bullpens, one with a stout front and a weak back end, and the other with a perfectly balanced bullpen across the board, I’ll take the former without reservation, considering the manager can use his strong arms when it counts. Oakland’s bullpen is very strong up front, which bodes well for a strong 2013.

Yoenis Cespedes exceeded all expectations in 2012. How will new import Hiroyuki Nakajima fare?

I have no idea.

No, seriously, not even a guess?

Nope.

Upgrading a 3 WAR lineup slot to a 4 WAR star is difficult, but upgrading a replacement level position to a league average one is far easier. In that vein, A’s shortstops combined for an abysmal 68 wRC+, one of the worst marks in all of baseball. Oakland’s answer is one of the best hitters in Japan, Hiroyuki Nakajima.

Here’s the thing, though—it’s incredibly difficult to translate NPB stats to major league baseball, and any projection should have error bars as large as the moon. Translating minor league stats to the majors is far easier, at least relatively, because of the extremely large sample size of players who have, for example, moved from the Pacific Coast League to the majors. By comparison, the Japanese transition happens extremely infrequently, by a difference of a few orders of magnitude. The breadth of our knowledge of the jump is sized accordingly.

What I can say is that Nakajima has had an OPS 21 percent better than the league average, at least for the past six years Baseball-Reference tracks. His numbers on the surface appear to have dropped in the last two years, but that’s only because NPB changed the construction of the baseball before the 2011 season in an effort to bring the Japanese ball closer in line to the MLB ball and the ball used in the World Baseball Classic. After the change, NPB run scoring dropped a fair amount, so while Nakajima looks like he hasn’t been quite as good as he used to be, he’s been actually been internally consistent as compared to the league.

I will say this, though. Nakajima’s numbers in Japan are very similar to Norichika Aoki’s, who racked up 2.9 WAR as a rookie right fielder for the Brewers last year. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections see Nakajima with a 2.2 WAR .298 wOBA season, which seems as good a guess as any.

Is Jemile Weeks looking at the end of the line?

Not so long ago, 2008 first round draft pick Weeks was a speedy second base rookie who had smashed his way into a regular major league job. A 110 wRC+, 22 stolen bases, and 1.9 WAR in 437 plate appearances pointed to a promising young talent dripping with potential.

That was 2011. His sophomore 2012 season was, by any measure, awful. The A’s gave him the starting job for five months, but he responded with a 73 wRC+, fewer stolen bases in more playing time, 0.0 WAR, and a two hour drive to Triple-A Sacramento in August. He managed to claw his way back to Oakland when rosters expanded in September, but the message was clear—he hadn’t justified a starting major league job in 511 second year plate appearances, and unless he started producing soon, the A’s couldn’t afford to give him many more chances.

He may not even get one.

The A’s are in contention for the division crown, and as such, they can’t run the risk of having a regular in the starting lineup with a wOBA in the .270s. Two years ago, the A’s converted second baseman Scott Sizemore to third base, where he performed very well. After Sizemore tore his ACL in spring training last year, the A’s scrambled and converted catcher Josh Donaldson to third base, where he also performed very well. Sizemore is healthy again, which makes him the heavy favorite at his original position.

To sum up this ridiculous game of infield musical chairs, Sizemore and Donaldson should have second and third base covered. New trade acquisition Jed Lowrie can serve as an insurance policy for the two of them and shortstop Nakajima, and on the off chance that three of these guys fail at the same time and second base is left open, Jemile also has to worry about Grant Green, Oakland’s 2009 first round draft pick (as a shortstop-turned-second baseman, of course).

How awesome is that Coco Crisp bobble-torso?

So awesome.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan Lependorf 2013-03-08T07:04:15+00:00 How many ballots to get elected to the Hall? http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-many-ballots-to-get-elected-to-the-hall/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-many-ballots-to-get-elected-to-the-hall/#When:09:03:15 Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.
— Official Baseball Hall of Fame BBWAA Election Rules

I don’t think it’s entirely shocking to say that the official Hall of Fame election rules contain no language about the quantity of a candidate’s ballot appearances as part of a voter’s rubric. And yet, almost without fail, Hall of Fame ballot nominees must work their way up from below, slowly gaining ground and traction over the years to crack the 75 percent threshold at a later date. I’m not here to debate the wisdom of that rule wrinkle. I’m more interested in seeing if it’s possible to shed a little more light on how the voters separate those worthy of third-ballot entry with those who manage to sneak in on their 15th.

Of course, the basic underlying idea is that the most elite members of baseball history deserve quicker entry, which leads to an artificial hierarchy that separates first ballot entrants from those deemed less qualified. But how does the BBWAA make that decision? How do the voters filter the select few worthy of the inner circle from the rest of the general Hall of Fame population?

(A technical note that applies to the rest of this article: I’m going to use a data set that includes all BBWAA-elected Hall of Famers from 1968 to the present. Nothing before 1968, and no Hall of Famers elected by the Veteran’s Committee.)

The obvious place to start would be total career WAR. A quick perusal of first balloters turns up a reasonably complete list of who’s who in the 100 WAR plateau—guys likeStan Musial, Al Kaline, Willie Mays, Nolan Ryan and a handful of others. The numbers back this idea.

	Batters	Pitchers
First Ballot HoFers	93.9	83.7
2nd-15th Ballot HoFers	67.0	61.6

If we throw every Hall of Fame batter onto a graph, with the years they spent on a BBWAA ballot on one axis and their total career WAR on the other, you get a similar grouping where the first ballot Hall of Famers are mostly on a different tier than the rest. More interestingly, another pattern emerges—or more accurately, a lack of one. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a pattern after the first ballot, and that's something that could be an interesting avenue for a more in-depth look later on.

So far so good, but this just corroborates pretty much everything that the BBWAA has all but officially said—better players get in more quickly. But how does the BBWAA define "better"? What statistics do they value over others, when it comes to judging player value? And what about more traditional statistics? A large majority of the voting bloc appear to be members of the old guard, seemingly more likely to champion metrics like pitcher wins and batting average over WAR and wOBA. Do the data agree?

Rather than a simple sum of first balloters against the rest, I found correlation coefficients between the number of years a Hall of Famer spent on the ballot and various statistics, traditional and sabermetric. To put it simply, the correlation coefficient ranges from zero to one. If it’s zero, the variable has no relation to a player’s number of years on the ballot. A coefficient of one indicates a perfect match. Rate stats and counting stats act differently here, so it's important to compare within each group, but not across it. Compare batting average to on-base percentage and RBIs to WAR, but not vice versa, because playing time is valued fairly highly among the voters. First up, batters. I'll list rate stats first, followed by counting stats.

	Correlation Coefficient (R)
AVG	0.06
OBP	0.17
SLG	-0.07
ISO	-0.09
wOBA	-0.05

H	0.45
HR	0.14
RBI	0.23
SB	0.27
WAR	0.45

And for pitchers.

	Correlation Coefficient (R)
K/9	0.09
BB/9	-0.04
HR/9	0.19
ERA	0.01
FIP	-0.08

Wins	0.41
WAR	0.32

Traditional stats seem to be slightly favored across the board, although WAR certainly puts up a good fight. Intriguingly, the BBWAA has historically favored on-base percentage over batting average or slugging percentage, which seems to indicate that OBP may have been a larger part of how people internally judged player value before sabermetrics enjoyed a sharp rise in popularity over the last 10 to 20 years or so. On the pitching side of things, however, wins are still the leading indicator of ballot years, compared to a set of every pitching counting statistic I could find.

I'd love to see this how these figures change over the decades, as more and more sabermetric-oriented writers are given the right to vote. Will the BBWAA's voting practices change accordingly?

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Each line corresponds to a player who appeared on at least two BBWAA ballots, or in other words, every player who made it through the five percent threshold in his first year on the ballot. The yellow dots represent every player's first year on the ballot, which makes the scattering of yellow dots above the 75 percent election threshold correspond to first ballot Hall of Famers. Voting was tracked from 1968, which is the last time the Hall of Fame voting rules were significantly revised. Colored lines refer to players who were eventually elected to the Hall, either by BBWAA ballots or the Veteran's Committee (which explains the small handful of colored lines which end before touching the 75 percent threshold). Gray faded lines and dots refer to those who were not elected. This includes players still on the ballot.

I have a database full of ballot results and career WAR marks, and I'd like to turn this one over to the comment section down below. What correlations, relationships, patterns, or miscellaneous Hall trivia would you like to see? I'll try to answer the simpler requests in the comment section, while the bigger, more involved ideas may end up being part of an article down the road.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan Lependorf 2013-01-31T09:05:15+00:00 What baseball must learn from Lance Armstrong http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/what-baseball-must-learn-from-lance-armstrong/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/what-baseball-must-learn-from-lance-armstrong/#When:09:17:15
What I find most interesting about the recent developments in the Lance Armstrong fiasco isn’t the admission of guilt or the incredibly sophisticated methods cyclists have used to skirt around the rules, but the public reaction. The public should have reacted similarly to how they did when Barry Bonds was caught up in his own steroid mess, no? So why does it seem so much more widespread and so much more negative?

Let me be clear—Barry Bonds clearly received a harsh public treatment after his steroid allegations entered the mainstream. Arguments revolving around game purity have been tossed around for years. And this year, in his first year of eligibility, the greatest hitter of his generation (and his father’s generation, for that matter) received 36.2 percent of the vote, presumably all due to his shadowed history with performance-enhancing substances. I’m not arguing that the public has ignored his steroid use, by any means. But when the Bonds’ allegations were at a peak, he didn’t garner 24-hour news coverage with headlines ending in “-gate” in bold red letters. Why?

I’m convinced a significant portion of the difference is due to the public’s opinion of these two athletes before anything happened. Lance Armstrong was an incredibly popular national icon who reached levels of popularity usually reserved for Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks and Oscar-winning actors, not for athletes in a sport with a relatively low fanbase like road cycling. He was the United States’ gleaming pride. He beat cancer, for Christ’s sake. And most importantly of all, he was as outspoken of an advocate for stricter drug-testing measures in sports as there ever was. In such a dirty sport, he was a clean, shining beacon of integrity. What wasn’t to love?

Obviously, Bonds never enjoyed such popularity. He was incredibly talented all the same, but to call him “likeable” would be a bit of an exaggeration. The public never warmed up to him in quite the same way they usually look up to sport stars, and when steroid allegations piled up, he denied everything in a way that didn’t change very many opinions.

On the other hand, Armstrong took pride in being clean. He repeatedly insisted he was the lone clean voice in a filthy room, even going as far as taking legal action against those who claimed otherwise. Wouldn’t you? If you had won seven grueling races in clean, legitimate fashion, and people started questioning your cleanliness, wouldn’t you want to scream it from the rooftops? And when the allegations got louder and more frequent, it’s easy to see that the hypothetically-clean Lance had a natural reaction. He held his ground and screamed louder. In a sort of now-perverse fashion, Lance’s defiance in the face of the steroid allegations made one of the most untouchably great athletes of all time relatable.

And that’s why the public reaction to Armstrong was sharper and more negative than most anything that Bonds faced. The public can deal with a villain doing bad things. The relative indifference Alex Rodriguez faced when admitting steroid use can attest to that. But a sterling role model who betrayed everybody by engaging in the very same behavior than those he repeatedly decried? It’s not the actions, but the betrayal of trust. It’s the height of the fall.

It’s this hero worship that baseball needs to watch out for. If a large portion of baseball players are indeed doping, as people like Jose Canseco have claimed, baseball obviously has significant issues to sort out. Cycling’s reputation in the public eye is irreparably damaged not only from the breadth of its steroid problem, but because the sport had all of its eggs in one enormous gleaming basket. Baseball is still recovering from a similar situation with Mark McGwire and Bonds, but all of the forward progress of the last decade can come to a screeching halt in a hurry with every failed test.

It’s nice to think that we’re far enough away from the steroid era that the public’s trust is all the way back, but re-opening that wound is something baseball simply can’t afford.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan Lependorf 2013-01-17T09:17:15+00:00 Josh Hamilton and the jumbled up AL West http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/josh-hamilton-and-the-jumbled-up-al-west/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/josh-hamilton-and-the-jumbled-up-al-west/#When:09:02:15 mystery team. The Rangers are interested in re-signing Josh Hamilton. The Red Sox are having discussions about the guy. The Mariners have been pushing hard this whole time. The Yankees and the Phillies may or may not be in some kind of possibly external dialogue with somebody who may or may not be Hamilton’s agent. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Well hello, Los Angeles.

Not pictured: Rangers fans smiling. Anywhere. (US Presswire)

Hamilton is obviously an incredibly talented baseball player, and any time a player with an eight WAR season under his belt changes teams, the balance of power will shift into a new direction. The magnitude of that shift depends not only on the quality of the moving player, but on a handful of factors like the quality of the two teams involved in the move and the state of both of their division races. It’s an analysis that can get really complicated really quickly, and it’s more than safe to say that a lot of moves that initially seem to be world shatterers end up playing no part in the eventual outcome of things.

But I’d be hard-pressed to think of a recent move that turned the narrative of an upcoming pennant chase upside down more than this one. Josh Hamilton just grabbed the AL West chessboard and sent all of the pieces flying onto the floor. Let’s recap.

Last season (that means 2012, since we’re in that awkward this/last/next phase of the baseball calendar), the A’s finished on top of the division with 94 wins. The Rangers finished in second place with 93, while the Angels finished four games further behind with 89. A simple Pythagorean expectation calculation narrows the gap a little bit at 92, 91, and 88 wins, respectively. Baseball Prospectus’ third order wins calculation, which strips away context-dependence while adjusting for strength of schedule, had Oakland at 89, Texas at 95, and Los Angeles at 93. To make a long story short, it was an incredibly close division with three teams bunched up at the front of the pack. All three teams could have made very good arguments detailing why they would be the team to beat going into 2013.

It’s obviously difficult to say with any sort of precision, but most indications pointed towards a slightly less muddy division picture in 2013, even if only because two of the three teams didn’t change very much. Before losing Hamilton, the Rangers looked to field a mostly similar team in 2013 as they did last year, losing a few interesting names like Mike Napoli and Koji Uehara, while adding Joakim Soria. The net result shouldn’t have been too far removed from their 2012 endpoint, which would have put the Rangers in a prime position to contend for the division title once again. The A’s made even fewer moves, counting on their young starting pitching gaining another notch on their belts, while losing the talented, yet oft-injured starter Brandon McCarthy.

The Angels, on the other hand, were all set to lose two fifths of their starting rotation in Zack Greinke and Dan Haren, in addition to right fielder Torii Hunter. It’s hard to lose a guy of Greinke’s caliber and stay competitive in a division where the margin for error is razor thin. By no means were the Angels out of the race, but a small uphill climb to pull ahead of Texas and Oakland wasn’t sounding too farfetched. Before last season, the A’s revamped their starting rotation and the Angels added Albert Pujols, Mike Trout, and C.J. Wilson. If those 2012 moves were two division rivals pulling out all of the stops in a bold attempt to take down the American League juggernaut Rangers, the 2013 AL West fight looked to be more of a second try than an entirely new fight.

And then in swept the mystery team.

Is Hamilton’s presence large enough to push the Angels out of being just another contender and into a position as the division favorite? How will the Rangers cope with losing not only their best player, but a national icon who starred in a real life Home Run Derby so unrealistic that Lifetime would probably pass on a made-for-TV movie adaptation for being too cloying and saccharine? Did the Angels and the Rangers just balance themselves out to the point that the A’s will end up looking down at the both of them in September?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that the tightest division race in baseball just got a whole lot more interesting.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan Lependorf 2012-12-20T09:02:15+00:00 Using WPA to grade bullpen management, part two http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/using-wpa-to-grade-bullpen-management-part-two/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/using-wpa-to-grade-bullpen-management-part-two/#When:06:27:15 last article, I outlined a method of analyzing bullpens by making a small tweak to the inside of the WPA Clutch metric. To quickly recap, Clutch gives the difference between how a player performed and how that player would have performed in a luck-neutral context-independent environment. Clutch was designed for batters who cannot choose when and where to bat, so the first term has a pLI denominator that puts every batter on an equal footing regarding the number of high leverage plate appearances they participated in.

But since we're measuring relievers, who don't get equal amounts of leverage by design, the pLI denominator excises some pretty useful information. By stripping away the pLI denominator from the first term, the Clutch metric changes what the stat is measuring. By taking it out, we arrive at a number that is a sum of how a player performed in the clutch added to how efficiently a manager deployed his relievers. To put it in mathematical terms:

If we want to remove player effects and isolate the manager’s contribution, all it takes is some simple algebra.

Which finally leaves us with this.

It's really quite simple. WPA gives a total picture of a player's contributions to a team's win. Subtracting context-independent WPA/LI leaves behind only the effects from the timing of game events. Subtracting away Clutch from that total pares WPA down even further, so all that remains is how a manager helped or hurt his team with his bullpen management decisions.

And now, of course, the fun part. Here's 2012's leaderboard.

Team	Manager WPA
Orioles	5.06
Athletics	4.73
Cubs	4.51
Angels	4.09
Padres	4.08
Blue Jays	3.45
Giants	3.06
Braves	2.65
Mets	2.43
Royals	2.25
Cardinals	2.24
Mariners	1.90
Reds	1.75
Rangers	1.53
Rockies	1.52
Marlins	1.50
Rays	1.49
Yankees	1.46
Twins	1.42
Tigers	1.20
White Sox	1.17
Pirates	1.04
Astros	0.80
Indians	0.54
Diamondbacks	0.42
Phillies	0.37
Brewers	-0.41
Dodgers	-0.46
Red Sox	-0.73
Nationals	-1.01

I find this absolutely fascinating. Two teams that surprised everyone by making the playoffs are ranked one and two, with bullpen management responsible for five wins over the course of the season. Keep in mind that this doesn't mean that Buck Showalter and Bob Melvin were five wins better than the average manager. Zero wins would mean that a manager's bullpen management was no better than drawing names out of a hat, and as you might imagine, most managers are better than that. The average, as counted from the beginning of WPA data on Fangraphs, is a hair shy of two wins.

So what does it all mean? Managers who use their bullpens efficiently generally add somewhere around two or three wins to a team's season total, as compared to an average two-win manager. By the same coin, managers with inefficient bullpen management can cost their teams a win or two by using the wrong pitchers in critical situations.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan Lependorf 2012-11-23T06:27:15+00:00