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chrysamere posted:Is it just me, or do the playoffs seem like a total crapshoot? I don't feel like a season that is 162 games long can be accurately decided by a best of 5 or 7 games series. Some of the winners like the '06 Cardinals, '10 Giants and losers, like the '07 Rockies seem woefully insufficient to me. I have made this exact post like 40 times now in SAS but there is a great book about probability and statistics called The Drunkard's Walk that uses baseball playoff series specifically in one chapter to prove a point about people underestimating the randomness involved in short series of events.
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| # ¿ Mar 7, 2011 16:49 |
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| # ¿ May 26, 2013 00:33 |
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R.D. Mangles posted:I missed out on the "Citoball" meme, can someone explain to me why Cito's managerial style was so despised/ironically revered? Not sure on this but I think at the beginning of the year Cito had a great quote about "doing some crazy things to score runs," implying Ozzieball/smallball type poo poo, and then the Blue Jays just mashed solo home runs constantly. I think the Citoball moniker was mostly ironic.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 04:19 |
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Also a lot of people mistake the Citoball meme as referring to low BA and dingers, but it's actually low OBA and dingers. Adam Dunn is not citoball, but Alfonso Soriano and Juan Uribe are.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 04:24 |
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bigwave posted:So at the end of the day. Are steroids going to make you instantly a great hitter? Not at all, there's SOOO much more to it. But, at the highest level where guys cork their bats for the slightest advantage - steroids are almost mandatory. Your post is fairly reasonable, although most people here will disagree with it. However, the bat corking reference really kind of unwinds your whole argument because bat corking doesn't do anything good for a hitter, and if anything that demonstrates that myths and superstitions about things that make you better are widespread enough for it to be plausible that steroids aren't the big deal people make them out to be. However, I'm firmly in the camp of not giving a poo poo whether steroids help or not, because I see no moral difference between using a drug to help build your body and doing it the natural way. One is more efficient, so what?
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 04:37 |
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bigwave posted:I only mention it as an example of what lengths baseball player's go to get "an edge". I understand that but I didn't really get the relevance. Are you arguing about the physiological effects of steroids or the morality or..? I agree that steroids probably provide a benefit. I don't agree with definitively saying it's a "huge" benefit, and I don't agree with distinguishing it ethically from any of the other many things players, as you said, do to get an edge in sports.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 04:43 |
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bigwave posted:I don't see how there is any ambiguity. Because hitting is a complicated science with a lot of variables involved and I'm neither a sports trainer nor a nutritionist/fitness expert or whatever, and even those who are sometimes seem to disagree. If you want to boil it down to its most basic components and say it provides a benefit to being able to hit balls far when you make contact, fine, but I don't consider that analogous to an automatic increase in general offensive skill as a baseball player--as if it's a video game and pressing the steroid button gives you PLUS FIVE POWER.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 04:59 |
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BIZORT posted:Didn't someone do a study on whether corking your bat helps or not and found that it actually slows your bat down enough that it hurts you as a hitter? I want to say it was on Myth Busters or something like that. I thought it was that the bat actually becomes slightly faster but loses power, but I'm going off a hazy memory of some article on the back page of the Trib seven years ago.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 05:04 |
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bigwave posted:I'm sorry if this has been rehashed to death. I may not have posted in MLB threads - but I'm certainly not a casual baseball fan. It's cool, it is a pretty tired subject for most of us but it's not really your fault if you don't know that. It's not like there's a rule against steroid chat.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 05:28 |
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Monkey Wrangler posted:Let's shift topics. wOBA is a linear weights metric which means it tries to incorporate the objective value of every single offensive event, so no problems like walks counting the same as hits toward OBA and also accounting for minutiae like stolen bases and double plays. Linear weights formulas can be slightly different depending on the person who makes them but all basically share that trait of trying to be a sort of offensive singularity based on run values (I might even be getting some of this wrong, I'm not a super expert). Lots of people here use wOBA and wRC+ (basically the + version of wOBA), but not everyone. I generally think it's a pretty good thing to look at but not better than OPS/OPS+ by a factor large enough to justify how complex and arcane it is. Most of the time I use OPS/OPS+ and I think even a lot of people who are into advanced metrics would probably admit the same. Offense is by far the simplest because offensive run values are easy as heck to calculate and BABIP/LD% give us a passable ability to adjust for luck and variance. Pitching is trickier because people tend to disagree on lots of little factors like a) whether a pitcher can control BABIP and home run rates, b) how much precedence should be given to peripherals (K/BB/HR) as opposed to general hit/run results, etc., and then there are other oddball things like how team defense factors into pitching. ERA+ is not a terrible stat to use for starters if you're looking for direct comparisons. FIP (peripherals scaled roughly to ERA) and xFIP (FIP adjusted to league average home run rates) are useful, especially for relievers, but are very exclusive of a lot of factors and should be used with caution. There is also super advanced stuff out there like tERA which is based partly on batted ball data and I don't really understand or trust but someone could teach you about them if you wanted. Just anecdotally it seems like tERA in particular was "in" for a while and then people stopped talking about it--although it may be an availability problem. Defense is a fairly big crapshoot still. Logic says that you can never trust your eyes, and I agree with that--imagine if you had to trust your eyes for a player's batting or pitching skill for a whole season, do you think you would get their stats right? You might get close if you watched 162 games, but you wouldn't pinpoint much. So that said, defensive metrics are tricky and sometimes disagree. I'm not going to go into individual stats because frankly I don't know a ton about them and I don't care much about them, but my general rule for defensive stats is "if a guy scores really well or really poorly in several different metrics, it's safe to say he's good/bad, everything else is a push." Not everyone agrees with that, but there you go. It's why I prefer o(ffensive)WAR over WAR. Finally, I think an important attitude to have is rejecting the singularity--not rejecting any individual stat, just the usage of one to evaluate players. I disagree with the way some people here throw around WAR. When you add up more and more components, the level of uncertainty in each of those components is factored against itself and you have something that seems shiny and nice but ultimately just tricks you into thinking you've found the statistical Holy Grail. I find myself falling back on it sometimes, but I don't care for WAR conceptually and I think it's intellectually less lazy and more productive to examine components individually. Medical Sword fucked around with this message at Mar 8, 2011 around 06:53 |
| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 06:40 |
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tadashi posted:And learning this lesson will make you squirm every time you hear a manager say: We're going to steal more. As though he can just will his players to be better at it. I was watching a Cubs ST game and apparently Mike Quade has talked about running "smarter" and being more efficient on the bases, which seemed impressive given how most baseball fans/people seem to think break even is 1 SB = 1 CS. OdinsBeard posted:yes. Statistically, batters do worse in ABs when there was a stolen base attempt during the AB. I read this somewhere but I do not have the source, unfortunately.
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| # ¿ Mar 8, 2011 22:05 |
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stuart scott irl posted:Yep, Jayson Werth did it against the Dodgers in 2009. To clarify, although I know he was asking about specific cases where the ball stays live, if the ball goes dead because of a foul ball or other circumstance, it's not live again until the pitcher steps on the rubber, so that wouldn't be possible (I think). Probably obvious but yeah.
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| # ¿ Mar 9, 2011 05:30 |
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Baseball is a hard sport to explain, not even because it's super intellectual or anything, it's just kind of convoluted. Obviously you would start with the object of the game being to touch all four bases, thereby scoring a point, but where do you go from there? There are so many retarded little things about when you can and can't advance that it can become confusing for a newcomer within seconds. Baseball is a lot easier to pick up just by watching and playing it as a kid.
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| # ¿ Mar 9, 2011 05:37 |
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KIM JONG TRILL posted:I wish someone would put an island in the middle of center field where if the ball landed there it was a home run. Every center fielder would just stand by the island. Although it would probably cause a lot of hilarious inside the park home runs when they trip over the hill, so it could still work out.
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2011 01:19 |
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I know most of us already know that speed is an overblown concept in baseball, but wasn't there a study showing that speed has basically zero correlation to team success?
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2011 19:25 |
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Gee Wizard posted:Okay, I'm fully on board the baseball train. My local team is the Rockies, who I know have a few young promising players, like Ubaldo Jimenez, Carlos Gonzalez, and Troy Tulowitzki. Plus, I get to skip all of the tortured-fan bullshit by jumping on board now Before 2007, when the Rockies had an incredible run of like 20 wins in 21 games to make the playoffs by a single game (I think) Rockies fans were perceived as Broncos fans with nothing to do in the summer, but since then they've had a pretty solid fanbase for obvious reasons. In the '90s, the Rockies were known for having a bunch of dudes who hit a bunch of home runs, Larry Walker, Andres Galarraga, Vinny Castilla, Dante Bichette and Ellis Burks. Most of those guys turned out to actually be pretty mediocre/bad and a lot of their performance was due to Coors field. You probably know this by now, but Coors has a reputation as a major hitters' park, because it is. Right now it's one of the top 3 or so hitters' parks in the league, but in the '90s, before the humidor, it was even more insanely skewed toward hitters. Speaking of Coors, there's a decent chance that Carlos Gonzalez isn't really that good. The media has a love affair with him because he's from a young upstart team and he's viewed as "toolsy" (power, contact, speed, defense all together), but he had a huge home/away split last year. Similarly, Ubaldo Jimenez had a pretty near historic start to last year where he gave up like three loving runs in 10 starts or some poo poo like that, but he's not actually *that* good. He's good though. Tulo is golden though, he's a top player in the game without a doubt. Finally, your team has a reputation for being run by evangelical fundamentalist Christians, and sometimes people make jokes about that. That's all I can think of.
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| # ¿ Mar 10, 2011 23:28 |
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Jolo posted:how did baseball in general not say, "woah, no." I'm not sure but hopefully it was because "baseball in general" realized it was an awesome idea and made the sport better.
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| # ¿ Mar 11, 2011 23:04 |
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Another thing to know if you're going to be a Rockies fan in SAS is that, despite Spaceman Future!, no one has a bias against Rockies players and the Coors effect is real and scientific.
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| # ¿ Mar 12, 2011 07:55 |
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Grozz Nuy posted:Just to elaborate, Pierzynski not only played like poo poo while he was on the Giants but also trashed the rest of the team, the fans, and the city itself at basically every opportunity. Ownage. I literally support baseball players being trolls 100%. I heard a story about him kneeing some trainer in the groin in SF or something like that, and that's not cool, but not caring about the fans or the city is unironically really really cool and funny. Abel Wingnut posted:Papelbon is a pretty despised character. Ozzie Guillen is polarizing, too. The only legitimately offensive thing I can recall coming from Ozzie was the Jay Mariotti fag comment which it was pretty clear wasn't homophobic or anything it was just a bad choice of words to be saying to the public. Whether he's a good manager can be polarizing but Ozzie is a big hilarious goofball no matter who you are! Medical Sword fucked around with this message at Mar 17, 2011 around 06:03 |
| # ¿ Mar 17, 2011 06:01 |
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kensei posted:You've gotten to the point where you can change your name But not to the point where we'll read his posts
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| # ¿ Mar 23, 2011 04:36 |
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Joe Don Baker posted:In the N/V thread I said that the Pirates' Pedro Alvarez had ok rookie numbers and people were expecting more. Someone questioned that when he had an OPS+ of 111. Uh yeah all the stuff other people said but also .461 slg would be well above average even in the thick of the steroid era so it's not some wonky ballpark thing.
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| # ¿ Apr 1, 2011 05:25 |
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Technically isn't AB the convoluted thing, not batting average? Also keep in mind that if batting average were H / PA there would probably be a lot more backlash at players like Swish and Dunn, so it's probably good that it is the way it is.
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 16:54 |
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I've always thought that + should be league average and ++ should include park factors. It might be confusing for casual fans but I would really like to be able to glance at both.
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 17:10 |
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Unearned Runs: A really bad stat.
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 19:00 |
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Deathlove posted:Basically this. How would Hudson be unearned if he makes it around the bases as the result of four solid singles? And conversely how is a blooper or dribbler that drives in a run any more "earned" than a run that comes on a fielding miscue? Just accept chance as part of the game and treat runs as runs.
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 19:03 |
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nnnAdam posted:Is it more writing for the audience Almost certainly this, he's just offering up stats he thinks his readers are interested in. Especially since the first mention of RBI on that page is him saying "I put almost no weight on RBIs"
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| # ¿ Apr 8, 2011 00:37 |
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chrysamere posted:Can anyone explain how Jeff Bagwell wasn't a 1st ballot Hall of Famer? Lack of 500 HR's? http://www.jeffpearlman.com/jeff-ba...-joe-posnanski/ Sportswriters are retarded babies who literally make up random opinions and then defend them to the death for pageviews.
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| # ¿ Apr 10, 2011 13:49 |
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JediGandalf posted:How come MLB has pretty much done away with double-headers? Financial reasons? Not sure but I'm guessing it's a players/agents/MLBPA thing that they don't want undue stress on the players. Baseball isn't that intensive but still 6+ hours of baseball in a row is pretty ridiculous.
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| # ¿ Apr 14, 2011 22:32 |
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kensei posted:Post this in the steroid thread and close it. People complained to keep steroid chat out of N/V saying "make a steroid thread," now there's a steroid thread and people want it closed
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| # ¿ Apr 14, 2011 22:54 |
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R.D. Mangles posted:Is hitting a part of pitcher WAR for national league pitchers? I'm just curious how much above average (so merely bad rather than abysmal) hitting is worth for pitchers over the course of a season. This stuff confuses me sometimes so I might be making an idiot of myself, but I'm pretty sure since WAR takes position into account pitchers wouldn't be punished for being lovely hitters. Like when you look at league OPS+ on b-r the NL average is always technically 94 or 96 or something like that due to no DH (I know that's not replacement but it's similar). e: Oh wait that wasn't really your question was it? No I don't think it's part of pitcher WAR, on FG it shows all the components lined up to the left of the total WAR and it's all pitching stuff, so I think they're calculated separately. You could always just take a pitcher's batting WAR and subtract/add it with his pitching WAR. Medical Sword fucked around with this message at Apr 15, 2011 around 01:14 |
| # ¿ Apr 15, 2011 01:09 |
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Proposition Joe posted:Is there an SAS IRC channel? I've been to #SAS but it seems empty. I have IRC but have never used it for SA. I recommend twitter instead, all the cool baseball posters are on it.
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| # ¿ Apr 15, 2011 02:30 |
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Badfinger posted:Nah, it's for high pop ups. The more people that can communicate where the ball is headed the better. Both as a player and a fan I never ever understood this. I played infield plenty of times and I never found myself in a situation where I was looking at the pitcher to explain where the ball went. I don't see how you could fail to follow the ball off the bat. If you lose it in the sun that's one thing, but in that case the pitcher pointing at it isn't going to help you. As a fielder your eyes are supposed to be following the ball, why would you ever be looking at the pitcher, and even if you were how would his arm be able to communicate something that helps you catch the ball? This one really baffles me. As a pitcher the only time I ever did this was actually on the last out of a 7-inning little league perfect game I threw at age 13, and I'm 99% sure the only reason I did it was because I had seen it on TV and was delirious/wanted to look cool.
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2011 01:41 |
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I never played with an umpire who called swinging strikes on the first two strikes. Everyone just knew it was a strike. Some dudes said "strike three you're out" or whatever on a swinging third though.
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2011 14:50 |
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Can someone post the actual difference of a realistic (no ".200/.600") gap in slg heavy/oba heavy OPSes, using wOBA or something that adjusts for it? Like, all else being exactly equal, what's the real wOBAcular difference between .300/.325/.475 and .300/.375/.425? I'm going for something plausible that doesn't represent any extremes (like .400 OBA and not much power, since that doesn't happen a lot).
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2011 14:16 |
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ManifunkDestiny posted:giving up hope now is like not believing in Santa Claus on Dec. 23. Give it time, the Royals have a slew of talent coming up in a very winnable division. The amount of talent in the Royals minor league system can best be described as an embarrassment of riches. I agree with this analogy based on the fact that Santa Claus does not, in fact, exist
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2011 03:49 |
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toadee posted:He was highly touted, but then Josh Beckett was a perennial cy young contender, which is basically what you can hope for a prospect to pan out as. At the time, Hanley was considered very toolsy but very raw, there were some concerns about his plate discipline, and his fielding had some wondering if he would stick at shortstop. He had just put up a .271/.335/.385 line in AA (in a good sized 465 AB) as a 22 year old when traded. Again, he was raw and had a clearly very high ceiling, but trading ceiling for current performance (that is projectably sustainable) is almost always a good trade for the team getting the current star, and is usually done as a cost cutting measure by a team, collecting as many high ceiling guys as they can in the hopes that a couple of them stick. Hanley stuck real well. I agree that Beckett was a huge asset as a 26-year-old SP with a 120 ERA+ and 2.8 K/BB from 03-05, but to be fair I wouldn't call Beckett a "perennial Cy Young contender" as he never got a single CY vote with the Marlins, partially due to frequent injury problems that kept him under 180 innings until '06. But yeah hot young starting pitching is really really good to get and Hanley would have had to be a near sure-thing generational talent at the time to not be worth trading for a Beckett.
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2011 23:29 |
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Groucho Marxist posted:No because 90% of the time the catcher is the worst hitting starter on the team. Isn't that due to the physical difficulty and talent scarcity though? It's possible that they can have a large disadvantage and a small advantage and come out behind. It's still interesting to think about. vvv Yeah I know it's negated, I was just saying it's still interesting to think if it affects them at the plate. If the newbie question involves catchers actually being better hitters overall, obviously the answer is no Medical Sword fucked around with this message at Apr 21, 2011 around 15:08 |
| # ¿ Apr 21, 2011 15:02 |
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I CHALLENGE THEE posted:No, the best Cameron article was the one where he said that Nyjer Morgan was equally valuable to Adam Dunn. The Dunn/Morgan thing was an exercise in the ridiculous extremes and unpredictability of UZR. I'm not saying he was right or that I like UZR, but I get mixed signals sometimes about what people generally think of UZR/Fangraphs WAR, because people here still regularly use those stats. It seems like there's a kind of cognitive dissonance: They're used as casual go-to stats, but when those same stats say something that doesn't seem possible, people cry "no way that's true!" Why have the stats if we're just going to override them? I'm not singling anyone out here, just saying I'm confused what the consensus about these stats is. A lot of people still adhere to UZR, some people say UZR IS BULLSHIT, yet no one really talks about it. Are we using b-r WAR instead? What makes that "better" other than that their defensive stats go to less extremes? What makes them more reliable?
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2011 16:37 |
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I agree Cameron is dumb, I just think that his dumbness was (is?) reflective of a major problem in the SABR community about defense.
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2011 17:02 |
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TUS posted:I don't think this is what I'm looking for, LOB% seems to be a pitching dependent stat so I'll ask it a different way since I'm looking for it as a team batting stat- 
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2011 16:50 |
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| # ¿ May 26, 2013 00:33 |
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Did my pic show up for you? It's a regular stat on baseball-reference under "baserunning/misc," it's tracked under the name RS%. According to b-r league average is 31% and 3-for-15 would be 20%, so you're right, it was relatively low. White Sox are sitting at 29% for the year.
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2011 23:57 |
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