De civitate sabermetricarum

Breaking a Wand

2010-08-24T15:11:00.003+01:00

The firestorm over Rob Dibble's comments on Strasburg's injury scare has simply underlined for me the fact that I can no longer be a fan of the Nationals' franchise so long as they employ Mr Dibble. This isn't the first time my support for the Expos/Nationals has been strained by off-field events, but I don't need to tell Washington fans that it's quite an awkward time when the team you love changes cities.

Federal Baseball published part of a response by Mr Dibble to the alarm expressed by bloggers at his remarks. In it, Mr Dibble appears intelligent, articulate and well-informed. If only he could avoid 'simpleton speak' more frequently, I might have been able to take this latest example with more equanimity.

I've been having difficulty following baseball this season, one even more disrupted by work/personal life, than the last one. So perhaps I am overreacting on account of a more general ennui. Removing myself from the Nationals' blogosphere will not do it any damage at all. Regardless, if I write here about baseball, it won't be about the Nationals.

Nationals' Fielding Review #2

2010-06-14T21:43:00.002+01:00

Being five hours ahead of North America is making it difficult for me to keep up with the games, although that's partly because I have to help with homework and read bedtime stories, as well as going up to the University of London during the day.

Anyway, here is some fielding data. I've replaced the in-season cumulative UZR with Chris Dial's Defensive Runs Saved. You can find an explanation of what he's up to here. UZR/150 is the current UZR extrapolated to 150 games. RZR is Revised Zone Rating, which is like a fielding average but counts balls hit into a zone, rather than those the fielder actually reached.

Player              DRS   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman (3B)       4    +2      24.7     +3.0   .755    +.008       .704
Desmond (SS)         3    -2      14.8     +0.2   .833    -.034       .811
Gonzalez (3b)        3    -1      44.0     -1.9   .882    +.007       .704
Maxwell (RF)         2     -      21.6     -6.1   .857    +.018       .885
Harris (RF)          0     -      13.3     -0.7   .852    +.044       .885
Kennedy (2b)         0     -     - 4.8    -12.2   .800    -.039       .819
Guzmán (SS)          1    +1       8.9     +1.8   .750    -.017       .811
Willingham (LF)     -2     -       5.8     +4.9   .880    +.021       .871
Guzmán (2B)          3    +3     - 2.6     +0.5   .839    +.022       .819
Dunn (1B)           -2    +1     - 2.7     +2.4   .776    -.006       .772
Bernadina (RF)       1    +1     -11.3     +3.0   .915    +.015       .885
Morgan (CF)          0    -1     -11.8     +0.3   .883    +.009       .916
minimum 73 innings

Harper commented after the last fielding review on how we need more like three years' data to get a sense of a player's talent as a fielder. This is true, but one of my old-fashioned sabermetric principles is that we should be more interested, as fans, in what happened rather than what we can expect to happen. Over three years, Dunn might turn out to be the worst first-baseman in the league. However, for the moment he's been doing better than I thought we had any right to expect. I'll keep singing praises for his effort and dedication so long as he keeps that up — and even if he starts having difficulties, because he's clearly trying his best. Jolly good show!

Nationals Fielding Review #1

2010-05-28T14:54:00.002+01:00

Sorry about the hiatus. I have been working hard and crossing oceans, despite volcanic ash, and then adjusting to new time zones and new routines. Worse, this post is something of a holding action, as I'm off again on Sunday. Hopefully I'll be back on regular posting starting after 6 June.

In the mean time, I'll try to post one or two tidbits, starting with a review of the Nationals' fielding so far, using the same measures as last season — Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) and Revised Zone Rating (RZR).

Zone Rating involves a person deciding whether a ball was in a notional fielding zone, then noting whether or not someone caught it. UZR converts this data and turns it into a +/- rating in relation to average, showing the number of rns. RZR converts this data into a percentage, while make an accounting distinction between Balls In Zone (which should be caught) and Balls Out of Zone (which are to be regarded as bonuses). There's been a bit of a stink about UZR recently, which included its creator, MGL, behaving most unconscionably towards a critic, Baseball Prospectus' Colin Wyers. I'd link to it but the crucial contributions have been edited out. However, the point is that UZR shouldn't be taken necessarily as the 'Gold Standard' in fielding metrics. For my part, I've always preferred humble RZR between the three, but Colin has had a go at that, too.

The table shows UZR, the anticipated UZR per 150 games, RZR and the NL average RZR for that player's position. I would have liked to have included Chris Dial's defensive runs calculation, but I haven't asked him to send me the data. Maybe next time. In the future, the Change column will show the change from last time.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman (3B)      4.1     -      21.7       -   .742     -       .698
Desmond (SS)        3.8     -      14.6       -   .867     -       .800
Gonzalez (3b)       2.7     -      45.9       -   .875     -       .815
Maxwell (RF)        1.4     -      27.7       -   .833     -       .898
Harris (RF)         1.1     -      14.0       -   .818     -       .898
Kennedy (2b)        1.1     -       7.4       -   .839     -       .803
Guzmán (SS)         0.5     -       7.1       -   .767     -       .800
Willingham (LF)     0.4     -       0.9       -   .859     -       .865
Guzmán (2B)        -0.8     -     - 3.1       -   .817     -       .803
Dunn (1B)          -1.4     -     - 5.1       -   .782     -       .782
Bernadina (RF)     -1.7     -     -14.3       -   .897     -       .898
Morgan (CF)        -4.3     -     -12.1       -   .874     -       .916
minimum 61 innings

The interesting thing, for me, is how well Dunn is doing at first base. I was quite the sceptic last season, but he's proved me wrong. Complimenti, Adam. He'd be my favourite National if it wasn't for a long-standing appreciation of mine for Pudge. The next interesting thing is Morgan's decline. What's going on? Third, is how the outfield generally is poor. All hail the infield though, as Guzmán has done just as well making the shift to second base as Dunn has to first.

End-of-Term Catch Up: Why I hate Brian O'Nora

2010-05-04T04:53:00.003+01:00

Well, first there was this game, which the play-by-play doesn't note that Brian O'Nora blew the call on the Luis Rivas home run. It was a foul ball.

Then, just recently, he gave the Dodgers' the edge on calling strikes out of zone, as this wonderful graph from Brooks Baseball shows. (Click on it to make it bigger.)

Plus, he called Pudge out at home.

He hates the franchise, so I hate him.

End-of-term Catch Up: Teach Your Kids to Throw Left-Handed

2010-04-27T03:31:00.003+01:00

The end of the academic term is M-U-R-D-E-R on the baseball commentary.

Measuring the Corps of Relievers, after 14 April 2010. (Yes, you remember - Philadelphia 14 — 7 Washington. And Bergmann got the Black Spot.)

Matt Capps      .352
Tyler Clippard  .188
Brian Bruney   -.056
Jesse English  -.074
Tyler Walker   -.123
Miguel Batista -.259
Jason Bergmann -.485
Sean Burnett   -.509

Those numbers are the cumulative amounts of win probability added or deducted during all the individual relievers' stints between Opening Day and 14 April. Really, Burnett, loser of half a game all by himself, was the man doing the least. (Plus he was more evenly bad, while Bergmann loaded all his bad into one outing.)

But Burnett's left-handed.

So boys and girls, remember — baseball is more forgiving of left-handed pitchers.

What a difference a year makes?

2010-04-18T17:30:00.006+01:00

From 1-10 to 6-5. .500 baseball. Huzzah!

Not to rain on everyone's parade, but this year's start puts last year's in perspective:


          Runs Scored     Runs Allowed
2009         54              75
2010         53              66

The difference in runs allowed would actually only add up to about half a win.

QMAX is a system from the old Big Bad Baseball Annuals of adding some 'granularity' to the Quality Start, showing that some Quality Starts are better than others. 2009:
2010:

Click on the images to make them bigger. The blue area marks the 'Success Square' outings, where the combination of hits allowed and walks surrendered is good enough to mean you should win half the time. The red zone shows the 'Hit Hard' starts, games one is unlikely to win. There's not a whole lot of difference between this year and last: one fewer hit hard and an elite quality start, and that was Livo!'s of yesterday. That one also probably skewed our runs allowed statistic.

The 2009 edition of the Nationals underperformed badly. The 2010 one has overperformed slightly. You could put it down to Mr Rizzo's choice of 'winners' versus Bowden's 'lollygaggers'. You could put it down to a firmer hand on the tiller than last season, when Mr Acta seemed to be on borrowed time from the autumn, and MLB wouldn't let Mr Rizzo shed the 'interim' tag. You could put it down to luck. I know which one I think. How about you?

Dodgy Data?

2010-04-13T17:59:00.003+01:00

Colin Wyers' has written an interesting article at BaseballProspectus.com about differences in baseball batted-ball data depending on who is assembling it. Since I never regarded batted-ball data as being anything better than an approximation of longitude while at sea without a chronometer, I'm not undergoing quite the crisis of faith that Wyers is. Nonetheless, it is worth bearing in mind when reading about sabermetrics based on batted-ball data.

3,000-and-some words on Garrett Mock

2010-04-12T04:59:00.006+01:00

Garret Mock was sent down to AAA Syracuse today to make room for Livan Hernandez. At first, this move sent me into a momentary despondency. I thought he would get five or six starts, and the final decision of whether he has a future on the Nationals' big-league staff could be made. One start is not enough. Mock was being handled very poorly, in spite of his pitching shortcomings. This is the Big Moan I have about the Nationals, that they seem to handle personnel decisions very poorly.

The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense in terms of roster strategy. The Phillies just showed us last week we need plenty of relievers. Furthermore, there are good reasons not to give up hope on Garrett Mock. However, pictures speak a thousand words so I'm going to show you a picture:

Then I'm going to show you another picture:

And finally a third picture:

(Images courtesy of the wonderful Brooks Baseball.)

Everybody says Mock has got good stuff. These three pictures highlight what that means in practical terms.

The top one shows the location of Livo!'s pitches in his start yesterday. The middle Stammen's Thursday start. The bottom is Mock's last start for the Nationals.

First I draw your attention to the blue rectangles. These represent the case for Mock. Stammen can't beat bats in that zone. Livo! avoids it altogether. Mock can pitch in that zone, and beat bats. If you study these three diagrams you'll see that batters do best at getting hits in that zone. Mock can challenge hitters; Stammen needs the batters to make weak contact so his fielders can get him the outs. It's much safer to beat hitters, if you can.

Next, I point you to the red circles. What on Earth are all those pitches from Mock doing there? They have no apparent relationship to the strike zone. Note how both Livo! and Stammen managed to keep almost all their pitches closer to the strike zone.

Mock has his objective very clear down in AAA. Stay out of the red circle.

It's the Lineup?!?!

2010-04-10T16:19:00.005+01:00

After handing out a Hero award, I didn't have to wait long at all to hand out a Goat one. Jesse English claimed it, in spite of Tyler Walker making a late run at it.

Why not Batista, who got the loss?

The reality is that the real goat yesterday was the lineup. (You could also argue that Mike Pelfrey, whom I thought pitched very well yesterday, won this game.) Batista gave up one run. The lineup had two chances to get that back. In the top of the fifth, the heart of the lineup went meekly 1-2-3. In the top of the sixth, we had Willingham on third with one out, and neither Pudge nor Desmond could score him.

In the end it made no difference, because Bergmann and English gave up two hits that increased the Mets' lead to two runs, then Walker came out with a flamethrower and an entire P-O-L dump to put the game out of sight.

I'm looking at the Nationals' lineup with some concern now. It's not really working, and it doesn't help that Kennedy is in a funk. This was supposed to be our strongest piece, and it's just not helping.

First Bullpen Hero Award for 2010

2010-04-09T14:33:00.003+01:00

Last year my frustration with the bullpen drove me to create the Bullpen Goat of the Day awards, which I later in less churlish mood supplemented with Bullpen Heroes of the Day. I fully anticipated that the first award of 2010 would be a Goat, but Matt Capps managed to snatch the Hero's palm away from Brian Bruney yesterday.

These awards are based on the concept of 'P', the work of sabermetrician Doug Drinen which first appeared in the 1990s-era Big Bad Baseball Annual (previously known as the Baseball Sabermetric and the lineal line of descent from Bill James' original Baseball Abstract series). 'P' calculates the win probability at the moment when a reliever enters the game, and what it will be if he retires the side from that point. I've added the actual result of the pitcher's work, and calculated the difference between the ideal and the actual. Here are the scores from yesterday's game:

Capps         .175
Bruney        .127
Clippard     -.004
Burnett      -.352

Another statistic I have lifted from the Big Bad Baseball Annual stable is QMAX, which is a more sophisticated way of analysing starts than the Quality Start/Not Quality Start binary opposition. The interesting thing is that Craig Stammen pitched the worst kind of start (in the 'Hit Hard' category), and yet the Nationals' still won. That means the lineup and the bullpen were the difference in this game. And with a 1-2 record after three 'Hit Hard' starts in a row, against the tough Phillies' lineup, it shows that the despair that many may have felt going into yesterday's game might be a trifle misplaced.

Astonishing! Yes, It Is!

2010-04-08T15:18:00.004+01:00

When Cristian Guzmán took over from Mike Morse in rightfield last night, I was astonished. Yes I was. Weren't we told Guzmán's arm wasn't up to playing at shortstop? It is actions like this that give sober men pause. Now it seems that according to an Adam Kilgore 'tweet', Desmond-of-the-two-errors is going to make way for Guzmán from time to time.

You could look at Fangraphs win probability chart and see that Josh Willingham was our batting star of the game. Or you could look at my own spreadsheet, with my own version of leveraged win value (which cumulatively appears in the sidebar), and see that Josh Willingham was the batting star of the game. This gives me confidence in my own system.

Finally, I'll just comment that despite Federal Baseball's headline, Marquis' outing was actually worse, by my measure, than Lannan's.

Astonishing! Or is it?

2010-04-07T15:49:00.004+01:00

Prowling the Internet this A.M., I came across Federal Baseball's report of Bill Ladson's original MLB.com article on the right-field situation for the Nationals.

My first thought, based on reading headlines, was 'How can you be so fickle as to abandon your plan after one game?' Looking at Ladson's article, and doing a bit of NatsTownology™,* I'm in a slightly less censorious mood. It is not at all apparent that the Taveras/Harris platoon is going to be abandoned, although that might happen. The reality is that with Jason Marquis on the mound, and his groundball tendencies (49.8/31.7 GB/FB per cent on career), outfield defence is not as critical as it might otherwise be.†

(Nevertheless, I reserve the right to be disagreeably abusive if they have dispensed with the announced plan after only one game.)
___________
* The twenty-first century's replacement for Kremlinology.
† But once the bullpen comes in to protect a lead, please, please put a glove man out there.

Opening Day 2009 2010

2010-04-06T14:35:00.003+01:00

This game was almost the epitome of the 2009 season for the Washington Nationals.
a) The bullpen coughed up enough runs to put the game out of reach.
b) There were costly fielding blunders.
c) The lineup was unbalanced, with half of it seriously underperforming.

On top of that, we had two unwelcome new developments.
d) The starting pitching put in a worthless outing.
e) Some of the top bats went missing.

What really concerns me, having listened to the radio boys talking to Phil Wood after the game, is that some catastrophes hid the existence of other problems. Pay attention, people!
1) It's easy to forget that the Phillies nearly took the lead in the first inning. Desmond's error on Howard's grounder did not lead to a run only because Adam Dunn made a heads-up play to get Rollins at home. Whether that was Adam's or Pudge's idea, I know not; but I do know that Dunn is still learning the position so I'm not counting on him to pull my chestnuts out the fire on a regular basis.
2) It's easy to blame John Lannan's poor showing in the fourth for losing us the game, but it's only because the offense went to sleep about the same time that we really got into trouble. Gonzalez, pinch-hitting in the fifth, grounded into a very costly double play, the worst single offensive event of the game at a point where Jesse English had kept us still in it.
3) It's easy to regard Placido Polanco's home run off Jason Bergmann as the nail in the coffin, but remember that after English had held the Phillies for an inning, Miguel Batista came in and gave up two runs, which combined with the offensive outage the preceding two innings to put a game against Roy Halladay out of reach.

It's also very easy to get carried away with this kind of game. Mark Zuckerman, in his Nats' Insider recap, quotes Ryan Zimmerman to put it all in perspective:

We can't afford to go through those spells like we did last year where we played four, five, six games in a row like this.

Off-Season 2009-10, Final Grade

2010-04-05T20:52:00.003+01:00

Spring training is over and the first game is today. Thus, the off-season is officially closed. How do we rate Mike Rizzo's performance?

Rather than moan about what I think he should have done, I'm more interested in interpreting the targets he set himself. Back in January he gave an interview to my favourite punch-bag, Old Leatherpants, and by reading between the lines one can establish some priorities. Here are my grades.

We're trying to get better defensively up the middle. [...] And we think we've helped ourselves with Pudge behind the plate and Morgan in center. Guzzie at shortstop, he's got fairly good hands and fairly good feet but his range obviously has backed up on him a little bit, and we do need to get better at second base

Grade: C+
In this case, Guzmán's shoulder has simply shifted the second-base instability to shortstop. The knock on Desmond has always been his glove. Pudge, Kennedy and Morgan give stability on paper to the other positions, but none of them is a long-term solution, and all of them are injury risks to one degree or another.

the moves like a Marquis and others have given us time for our minor leaguers, the guys that we've grown through our system, to reach their fulfillment in the big leagues

Grade: B+
The Marquis signing, and the return of Livan!, have bought a bit of time for Balester, Martin, Stammen, Martis, Chico and Strasburg. Whether any of them other than Strasburg is really good enough to benefit from the time is a rather different matter. The move I liked best was putting Mock on the 25-man roster. It's time for us to know if he has any long-term future here, regardless of his poor showing last week. That's part of the same overall project of gaining time for younger pitchers.

to get him on a two-year deal kind of gives us a timetable to get our other catching prospect, Derek Norris, into the big leagues. We think the timetable worked out well for us. We needed a guy who was more than a backup, a guy who could play on a every-day level for 80, 90 games, in case Jesus Flores is not coming back from shoulder and elbow surgery that he's had over the winter.

Grade: A
Jesus Flores did not come back from surgery, so Rizzo did a good job anticipating a problem and fixing it with a stable solution that also will potentially lead to a long-term solution. Pudge isn't the All-Star he once was, but he's got leadership abilities to match his ego.

I think that we've improved our bullpen.

Grade: D+
Oh really? Taking a gamble on Capps was a shrewd move, and picking up English shows promise, but Walker had a difficult spring. Last year the bullpen was a trainwreck and the highest hurdle for the Nationals' trying leap away from the dreaded '100' number in the loss column. It tripped them up then, and I could see Capps doing a Hanrahan 2009. The holdovers are a mixed bunch, to be honest. Fixing the bullpen would have required a more solid acquisition than these hopefuls we've got now.

Overall grade: B-
There are still far too many uncertainties in the team, and more worrisome is the mediocrity of the farm system, rated 21st overall by Baseball America. Any gains made this year could easily bleed away as the Nationals lack the young talent in the system to keep the forward march going. The biggest concern to my mind is that few players have been developed from within, which suggests that either development staff or philosophy needs a major overhaul. Low-level prospects seem to stagnate at the A+ and AA stage, and the AAA roster is populated with retreads. Keep things in perspective, though. This was Mike Rizzo's first offseason; a B- grade is a decent showing. His problem is a lack of room to manoeuvre, and he faces a major challenge in offseason 2010-11.

Season of Silence Ends (plus bullpen observations)

2010-03-09T13:29:00.002Z

You cannot imagine my delight yesterday when, via MLB's GameDay Audio, I tuned into to the splendid efforts of Charlie Slowes and Dave Jagler. Listening to other teams' radio broadcasters just reminds me what a treasure the Nationals' have assembled here. Sadly we only have eight more broadcasts during Spring Training, with another one today.

I promised to write some more observations about the bullpen, which is probably the most intriguing battle going on at Nationals' spring training this year. It's also quite an important one, given the terrific problems the bullpen gave the ball club last year. Here's a run-down of how I think things are going with each pitcher. Remember, I have no inside information, I just listen to broadcasts and note statistics.

Jason Bergmann Poor first showing, giving up a home run, but his second appearance went much better. A place on the 25-man is his to lose.
Brian Bruney He may be feeling some pressure. Although he struck out the side yesterday, it took over 20 pitches; his first outing wasn't very good. He still seems likely to head north, though.
Sean Burnett Roughed up in one outing. Still, he's the first-choice lefty.
Matt Capps His second outing was better than his first. He'll have to maintain a consistent badness to lose his place in the major-league pen.
Tyler Clippard Really laboured yesterday. Like Bruney, he'll get the benefit of the doubt, though.
Jesse English Two outings, one absolutely awful, yesterday's effort wasn't bad. At the moment, he's headed for the minors.
Eddie Guardado First time out, he stunk. Second time out, his fielders let him down. He'll get more chances, but at best he's a long shot for the second lefty role.
Atahualpa Severino One outing so far. He gave up a soft hit, then got a pop-up (as good as a strikeout, in the sabermetric book) and a double play. It actually seemed more impressive than it sounds, because it was all over so quickly.
Doug Slaten Don't see him making it based on his current form. He might be released in the first cut-down.
Drew Storen He's done very well indeed. It's going to be hard to send him to the minors, but I think they will. It would be interesting to bet on who comes up first, Storen or Strasburg.
Aaron Thompson Only one outing so far, sounded strong. Dark horse candidate.
Ron Villone Not looked very good at all. He's got a mountain to climb at this point.
Tyler Walker This is an interesting test case. He did not impress, but he's out of options. I've pencilled him in to go north because so far we've only got one outing to look at; but, like Slaten, he could lose his place if he doesn't show signs of improvement.
Josh Wilkie His stock is rising. He was the first pitcher to get a second look, in Saturday's game, and it sounded like it was an unplanned appearance. He's done well, too, but he'll be a fallback position if one of the men without options flops.
Also running: Luis Atilano (-), Victor Garate (-), Logan Kensing (+), Joel Peralta (-), Ryan Speier (?).

The astute among you will notice that I've only highlighted six names. That's because I think the seventh man will be a starter candidate who will be brought north in the bullpen, someone like Chico, Mock or Stammen.

Mr Riggleman seems to be taking the horrendous showing by the bullpen so far in his stride:

"The first time through everybody struggled," said manager Jim Riggleman. "They didn't really throw strikes so we just give everybody the benefit of the doubt and hope for better outings next time through."

Setting Up the Bullpen

2010-03-07T18:28:00.001Z

Let me start by assuming that the five starting pitchers will be backed out of spring training by seven relief pitchers. Of these seven, two will be lefthanders. Preference will be given to pitchers out of options and those signed to major-league contracts in the off-season. So we've got, on that basis, the following men on the 40-man roster:

Jason Bergmann RHP
Brian Bruney RHP
Sean Burnett LHP
Matt Capps RHP
Tyler Clippard RHP
Tyler Walker RHP

That's six places. That leaves left-handers on the inside track for the last position. The 40-man candiates are:

Matt Chico (If he can't make the rotation, he's almost a lock here, I suspect)
Jesse English (Still with two option years.)
Atahualpa Severino (Just added to 40-man this past off-season, still with three options left.)
Aaron Thompson (Ditto.)

By 15th March, it's quite possible that one or two names from my first list will have been let go. I'll be back after today's game with some thoughts about the bullpen story so far.

36 runs — OW!

2010-03-06T15:22:00.003Z

Did you know the Nationals had used 21 pitchers in three spring training games so far? That seems... a little high. (2 starters x 2 IP + 4 relievers = 18 pitchers).

Here's an aggregate stat line for the starters (Mock, Martin, Balester, Martis, Batista, Stammen):

IP    H    R    ER   BB   K    HR
10.2  17   13   12   5    3     2

And one for relievers (everybody else):

IP    H    R    ER   BB   K    HR
13.1  30   23   22    9   8     5

Good thing these spring training games don't mean much, eh?

Except they might. I'll be taking particular interest in the second outings of Bergmann, Bruney and Capps.

Dinger Danger?

2010-03-04T13:50:00.005Z

Hurrah! The first broadcasts of 2010 Nationals' games are made today. Even better, there's a choice of two games. At least that's what the MLB media centre tells me, as I find both the Marlins and Astros are listed as giving play-by-play of today's split squad games.

While you are waiting, here's a fun tool to play around with. It allows you to superimpose on any currently in-use ballpark of your choice the balls-in-play hit by a player or given up by a pitcher in a different 2009 ballpark. It's based on mlb.com's HitTracker, I think.

I've translated Jason Marquis from Coors Field to Nationals Park. I've limited my selection to extra-base hits and fly balls. Looks like he might give up a few more home runs.

Hat-tip to Tangotiger at The Book Blog.

Riggleman's Pitch Counts

2010-03-03T17:04:00.003Z

This study was half-finished a few days ago, but then I went to a conference. I hadn't even planned to do more work with the starting pitching, intending to look at another facet of the Nationals' spring training questions instead. But Mr Riggleman brought up suspicions some of us have had about whether he puts too much stress on his pitchers' arms.

To make a stab at seeing whether Mr Riggleman has adopted a new approach, I used Baseball Reference to assemble game-by-game data for all the starters used during Mr Riggleman's tenure. They included three starters used by Manny Acta, so looking at them together, we might get a sense of it all.

The study found the average pitch counts, the standard deviation of these and, based on the standard deviation, an anticipated maximum number of pitches per start, the number of outings and the number of times the anticipated maxium was exceeded. I also added in the average percent of Win Probability Added, to see whether more successful pitchers were kept on a longer pitch-count leash; and age, to see if older pitchers were allowed to go deeper.

Under Manny Acta:

Pitcher    Age   AvgPC   PCStDev     Max    Out    Max+    WPA%
Lannan       24    95      11.7      107    17      2        4
Stammen      25    88       9.6       98    10      1       -8
Detwiler     23    88      10.7       99    10      1      -12

Under Mr Riggleman:

Pitcher    Age   AvgPC   PCStDev     Max    Out    Max+     WPA%
Lannan       24    94      19.4      113    16      2       -1
Stammen      25    77      20.5       98     9      0      -10
Detwiler     23    75      25.2      100     5      0       12
Mock         26    93      12.4      105    15      3      -11
Martin       26    86      19.5      106    15      0       -3
Balester     23    73      15.7       89     7      1      -13
Livan        34    98      10.5      109     8      1       -8

This isn't quite what I expected to see. The big difference between Riggleman and Acta is not pitch counts (although there is a difference), but whether or not to leave a pitcher in. Acta appears to have quite a strict 'pitch count' mentality, setting a target for a pitcher and pulling him quite quickly once the target is reached, thus being a relatively 'slow hook'. Riggleman, by contrast, was more mercurial in the sense that he might pull a pitcher very quickly (Martin, 25 July, 28 pitches!) or leave them in for a very long time (Lannan, 25 September, 122 pitches!). This isn't in the table, but based on Win Probability, pitchers under both these men were more likely to run up maximum-busting totals if they were not pitching well.

I'd say Mr Riggleman, relative to Manny Acta, is a quick hook. I'm also not convinced that he's learned as much as he thinks.

Pitcher Options

2010-02-25T00:51:00.004Z

You probably already know that Livan Hernandez has signed with the Nationals. Here's his Marcel projection, in line with those at this entry I posted yesterday. I'll throw in Miguel Batista as a bonus.

            ERA      FIP
Livan      5.29     4.79
Batista    5.28     5.18

On the basis of their projections, Batista looks the weakest candidate. Livan's FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, which just counts home runs, walks and strikeouts) puts him ahead of Balester, JD Martin and Olsen(!), but his ERA is the worst of everyone's.

I actually came to write a post about rotation candidates with options still available, and the Livan news ensures that I get a longer post than I had planned.

The simple fact is most of our rotation candidates still have options. We can be confident that Lannan and Marquis are set. Olsen seems to be 'a lock' according to Mr Riggleman. The people who fill out the last two spots will presumably be those who do well in spring training, with one caveat — if they are out of options, they have to clear waivers to make it down to the minors.

This may affect two pitchers. One, I'm sure of: Matt Chico is out of options. I also think he's potentially good enough to draw a waiver claim. The other — JD Martin — might have option problems. The option rules are a bit complicated, given the kind of data one can access easily. Martin appears to have been a six-year free agent, so if he's been on a 40-man roster any length of time he can easily have used up his options.

As a consequence, I'm designating Chico as the likely #4 starter. He could get a bullpen role, but there's actually a logjam there. That's a story for another time.

6 March 2010 EDIT: Brian @ Nationals Farm Authority has a full options run-down here. Seems JD Martin still has all his options left.

All Pitching, All the Time

2010-02-23T13:46:00.004Z

That's the spirit of Nationals' coverage so far this season. We've had the excitement of Stephen Strasburg's bullpen session combined with the news that Mr Riggleman thinks he'll be starting the season in the minor leagues. We had Mr Riggleman's word that Drew Storen was headed in the same direction. Finally, we have all sorts of rumours.

I did a bespoke projection for Chien-Ming Wang just the other day, but this time, more as food for thought, I'm going to present the straight Marcel projected ERA for Nationals' rotation options as listed by CBS Sportsline. ERA is obviously earned-run average. FIP is one of those relatively newfangled sabermetric stats that gives a value to home runs, walks and strikeouts that can be turned into an ERA value. It has a better predictive ability than ERA. It's worth mentally adjusting it for defence, in that a good defence will reduce the FIP, and a bad one will increase it.

           ERA        FIP
Lannan     3.98      4.58
Marquis    4.23      4.35
Olsen      4.66      4.85 (shoulder injury)
JD Martin  4.41      4.81
Mock       4.76      4.21
Martis     4.37      4.76
Detwiler   4.26      3.95 (hip surgery)
Balester   4.83      4.90 (ribcage woes)
Stammen    4.42      4.45 (elbow chips)
Chico      4.65      4.72 (elbow surgery)
Wang       4.81      4.19 (shoulder surgery)

I've left off a few names, like Jordan Zimmermann, who isn't going to pitch this season, and some of the veterans lurking around the camp.

To say the least, we've got a lot of options. Also, there are some things that are hard to credit based on what we have seen so far, such as Balester posting an ERA under 5. Basically, going forward, one would expect on this basis to open the season with a rotation of:

Lannan, Marquis, Olsen, JD Martin and Mock.

Next man off the cab rank would be Martis, or maybe Chico. What will happen when Wang is fit is anyone's guess.

Of course, player options are going to play a part in the final outcome. And spring training will render these statistics more or less believable. After all, they are projections, not predictions.

Looking Forward to: Chien-Ming Wang

2010-02-21T15:11:00.005Z

The general consensus is that Wang is a very good deal for the Nationals. He once was a decent mid-rotation pitcher, and his 2009 season looks like an aberration, possibly the result of some injury troubles. (You can find a very good summary of all this here.) Consequently, he projects none too badly, with a Marcel* ERA of 4.86, as the worst case.

We can use some new-fangled sabermetrics to take more measured assessment, perhaps. One of the problems with the widely available projections is that they are mass-produced. They take a bunch of assumptions and throw them at all players indiscriminately. There is nothing wrong with this. Bespoke projections would take a lot of time, and not actually add very much to the accuracy. In the case of someone like Wang, though, it's worthwhile to dig deeper.

Last year, David Gassko of The Hardball Times introduced something he called Luck-Independent Pitching Statistics (work out the unsightly acronym for yourself). I'm going to look at Wang using some of Gassko's ideas, with a leavening of my own 'keep it simple, silly' mentality.

What I'm going to do is to use the ratio of different types of outcomes to a plate appearance. I'm limiting myself to balls hit on the ground, balls hit in the air, line drives, strikeouts and walks. Enough work has been done to tell us what a given batted ball is worth. Using this data, and imposing it on a pitcher's own career patterns, can give us some idea of what is likely to happen.

First of all, what patterns can we deduce from Wang's career so far? The interesting ones for our purposes are a steady fall in groundballs in play, a steady rise in strikeouts and walks. His line drive rate started low and has risen to around the average. His outfield fly ball rate has been in the low 20s except for 2009. My educated guesses based on the data is that these trends are going to produce in 2010 something like:

LD%      GB%      OFFB%      IFFB%      K/9      BB/9      
18.8    52.0      22.4        6.8       7.7       4.9
(MLB 09 
median)

For the strikeouts and walks I used the average rate of change on a year-to-year basis and added it to the 2009 ratios. That may overestimate things, especially if Wang alters his approach under a new pitching coach. That's an eye-watering BB/9, and I won't be surprised if he does.

To translate that into something more meaningful in terms of traditional statistics, we need to take a guess as to how much playing time Wang will get. I've assumed 15 starts, which converts on the basis of his past seasons to about 97.3 innings pitched. His worst-case projected Batting Average Against is .279 (Marcel again). That altogether means:

In-Play Outs     Strikeouts     Walks     Non-HR hits     Home Runs
  209                83           53         93              10

Yesterday you caught me using Runs Created, but this time I'm going to use a different run estimator, because it's better. This is BaseRuns. Converting those totals of Strikeouts, Non-HR hits, etc into runs, we get an estimate of 57 runs allowed by Wang, in 97.3 innings.

Which works out to an ERA of 5.28. Ugh.

Riggleman's comments are interesting. He's basically saying that he anticipates Wang to be a good fall-back option if Balester and/or Mock don't turn out well. Balester's 2010 Marcel projection (since that seems to be the projection du jour) is for a 6.72 ERA. Mock comes in at 4.81, but his projection doesn't show a full-time starter's innings, and relievers generally have better ERAs than starters. Mock's starting ERA might be a lot closer to 5.28 than 4.81.

Wang's an interesting gamble, but he's still a gamble. If he can cut his walk rate, the Nationals might win the gamble. Otherwise, it's more of the same again in NatsTown.
________

* Marcel is a very basic projection system, monitored by TangoTiger of The Book Blog.

Looking Forward to: the 2010 Nationals Lineup

2010-02-20T15:49:00.003Z

I visited Rotoworld today and looked at their depth chart for the Washington Nationals. So, we all want to know, how good is that lineup?

Of course, we all know there are several decent projections systems available. These take three or four years worth of a player's statistics, weight them, average them out, and then adjust for things like age and park to make a guess as to what the player will do during the next season. Out of every seven projections, about five will be reasonably accurate. Projections tend to underestimate good players, and overestimate bad ones. En masse, you're hoping things even up. There's BPro's 'deadly accurate' PECOTA, there's ZiPS at Baseball Think Factory, there's CAIRO at Replacement Level Yankee Weblog. We can use these to take a stab at just how many runs the 2010 Nationals' lineup will produce. In this case, I'm going to work with the CHONE projections, rather than do the proper thing and average them all out. (I'm lazy/busy — take your pick.)

First, though, let's set some parameters here. Using basic Runs Created per 27 outs (as opposed to one of the Tech versions), let's see the average for each position in the 2009 National League:

C          2.7
1b         4.1
2b         3.2
3b         3.2
ss         3.1
lf         3.5
cf         3.4
rf         3.4
Avg        3.3

Now, using the same formula, and the CHONE projections, let's see how Rotoworld's starters compare:

Pudge      1.7
Dunn       3.5
Kennedy    2.0
Zimmerman  4.0
Guzman     2.5
Willingham 2.8
Morgan     1.9
Dukes      2.3
Avg        2.6

The word for it is 'ugh'. The Nationals only beat the average at one position. Worse, they are markedly below average everywhere else.

But, as Charlie Slowes puts it, 'You never know'. Maybe the 2010 Nationals can defy statistical tendencies, and beat enough of those projections that the team can seem respectable.

Capitol Punishment...

2010-02-20T14:33:00.002Z

...is back. And added to the list, left.

Mr Needham's blog was my first encounter with a real Washington baseball fan, and the one I followed most regularly. Nothing like a bit of East Coast passion.

Looking Forward to 2011: New Triumvir Wanted?

2010-02-14T23:06:00.004Z

Murray Chass, whom I think is pretty cool, a definite minority view in the Internet world I inhabit, is in fine form with a paean to Bobby Cox. But that got me thinking, the consensus view is that we've got three truly historic managers at work in the Major Leagues at the moment. In addition to Cox, one finds at St Louis the innovative Tony LaRussa, while the Dodgers can boast mild-mannered Joe Torre. If Cox retires, who inherits his place among the triumvirs?

No active managers come within five years' service of Cox' twenty-eight years. Mike Scioscia has the same .556 winning percentage as Cox, and a couple of names beat Tony LaRussa's .535 winning percentage. Lou Piniella has seven playoff appearances, to top the list of those not members of the triumvirate. LaRussa has got the fewest of the three, with thirteen of his seasons ending at some point in the postseason.

Here's a chart, showing all active managers with at least nine years of service and five postseason appearances, in each case roughly one-third of Bobby Cox' totals.


Manager       Years      Win Pct.     Postseasons
Lou Piniella    22         .521            7
Mike Scioscia   10         .556            6
Terry Francona  10         .525            5
Jim Leyland     18         .496            5

Outside of these four, Ron Gardenhire will make the list if he starts next season in a manager's job. Charlie Manuel, Dusty Baker, Cito Gaston, and Bruce Bochy all need to make the postseason as well as keeping a managing job through to next season. But, as with Leyland, the postseason section of the curricula vitarum of the last three will look a bit weak.

Lou Piniella will certainly lay claim to Cox' triumvir status if Cox retires after this season, but whether he'll hold it for long is an interesting discussion point. I don't think he has enough postseasons to make a solid claim, which makes the long-term bets one of Scioscia and Francona. Who do you think is the best claimant? Answers on a postcard, or in the comments box.

Roberto Alomar and the Hall of Fame

2010-01-08T15:09:00.002Z

A Blue Jays' fan of my acquaintance is cutting up rough on Facebook about the failure of Alomar, just, to reach the 75 per cent threshold for election. He probably feels the same way as Ken Rosenthal. I can't agree, and reproduce on my blog my post at this Baseball Think Factory thread.

This article is a good piece of advocacy journalism, but in its substance is not really that different to the piñatas that regularly get posted here from Chass, Pearlman and whomever.

Rosenthal basically wants to strip people of their votes because they don't put in the work. He says:

I’m still trying to figure out why 143 voters failed to endorse Alomar

He then enunciates the following reasons:
1) The First-Ballot honour - he 'respects' the view that maybe Alomar isn't inner-circle.
2) The spitting incident - yes, people should move on, and they've got 14 more years to do so. Penance involves a penalty.
3) The cliff-diving once he joined the Mets.

Having then described three sound reasons for not voting for Alomar the first time round, Rosenthal appoints himself judge and jury to say

Put it all together, and it’s easy to understand why he might have lost small pockets of support. But 143 “no” votes? Sorry, that number is too high to make sense.

Is it? You don't have to be a New York sportswriter or fan to be annoyed about Alomar's time with the Mets, if you are really being objective about his claim to Fame. It's just as meaningful to anyone who is a real baseball fan.

If this article needs to be written next year, I'm more likely to think he's right, and we need a Pride's Purge of the BBWAA. But at the moment, this is an overreaction.

"If I were a Nats fan, I'd be embarrassed"

2009-12-08T12:30:00.009Z

So wrote someone in the comments on the MLB Trade Rumours' report of the signing of Ivan Rodriguez for 2009-10.

Stuff and nonsense, I say! This is one of my favourite players of the current 'era' of baseball. I haven't got time to research it now, but he's made comments in the past (specifically when he was with the Tigers) that have led me to believe he's a thoughtful catcher who will work well with young pitchers.

Call me delighted, not embarrassed.

Projection numbers from CHONE:


           AB   R   H   2B   3B   HR   RBI   BB  SO  HBP  BatAve   OBP   SLG  DEF
Rodriguez 428  48  107   21    2    9   45   19  82   2   .250   .285   .371    3
Nieves    257  23   64   12    1    3   29   18  45   2   .249   .303   .339   -5

DEF is a projection of defensive ability, where 0 is average.

EDIT: Brian Oliver, at Nationals Farm Authority, whose blog I have inexplicably left off my list in spite of visiting it most regularly since 2005, is less impressed.

The Spirit of James Bowden

2009-11-28T14:39:00.004Z

I've been so immersed in the Hall of Merit and some spin-off research from that, that I haven't been paying much attention to the Nationals' 2010 Hot Stove season.

A quick scan of MLB Trade Rumours reveals very litte of interest for Nationals' fans in the last ten days or so (unless you were, like me, with the Expos in 2003-4, and remember Livan Hernandez' more fondly - he's now unlikely to come back according to Bill Ladson).

"Our goal is to trade for pitching, pitching, pitching," our old friend and mentor, Jim Bowden was once quoted as saying. Mike Rizzo's first offseason has much the same theme, as so far the Nationals have only been linked to big-name pitchers.

I do enjoy the pursuit of John Lackey, though. He's headlined not only the article I linked to above, but also another one by Bill Ladson that ties the Nationals to Mike Gonzalez and Billy Wagner.

Whoa, let's think about this here. I have always been a fan of Wagner, especially when his 2004 version helped a Diamond Mind team of mine make the playeoffs, but Wagner's a Type A, so that's a lost draft pick (quite probably a second-rounder, as .500 ball still strikes me as another season away). Gonzalez is a Type A, too, and I find this worrying sentence in Ladson's article:

Gonzalez played for the Braves in 2009 and had one of his best seasons, appearing in 80 games, recording a 2.92 ERA with 10 saves and 90 strikeouts.

That's the bullpen equivalent of buying into a bubble - signing a player who just had his best season, so can demand more money. Well, I guess if you have it, you can spend it, but I'm out of a more frugal tradition. Save your money until you need it.

Now that the Soviet Union is gone, enigma-lovers have two options - Vaticanology or NatsTownology to amuse us. Since Vatican City isn't a baseball team, I'll stick to the latter. Let's look at that Ladson article again. What do Billy Wagner, Mike Gonzalez and Ron Villone have in common? Why, they are all left-handers! And then there's this sentence:

[Villone] has a fan in manager Jim Riggleman.

Sorry, Billy and Mike, but I don't think you'll be on our team next year.

When Might Replacement Level Be Higher Than Average?

2009-11-27T03:29:00.005Z

When you're talking about shortstops batting in the 1972 National League!

There's been an interesting discussion at Baseball Think Factory's Hall of Merit about replacement level under different one-big-number systems of rating players. You can read it here starting at post 39. One of the debaters, DanR, has been suggesting for some time that the replacement level for shortstops was very low in the early 1970s, which is another way of saying there weren't many good shortstops then. You can read in that thread a suggestion of why that might be.

Anyway, DanR has one method, derived from Baseball Prospectus' erstwhile contributor Nate Silver, and Tom Tango, of The Book Blog (see sidebar), suggested that as an alternative one might take anyone who wasn't in the top 50 playing at a given position as 'replacement-level players'. I thought I'd try a real example of that.

So I adjusted this on the principle that 50 suited the 30-team major leagues of today, while 42 would be better for the 24-team major leagues of 1972. Then I got the 43rd through about 96th ranked shortstops in terms of putouts (should have used assists, but I have an excuse), and calculated their wOBA (weighted On-Base Average). Then I made a similar list of the top 42 at second base and third base, and took those people out of the shortstop list. Then I aggregated the shortstops' batting by individual leagues and overall. Here's what I got:


                   wOBA
NL replacements    .274
NL regulars        .263
ML regulars        .262
AL regulars        .260
ML replacements    .257
AL replacements    .243

These replacements in the NL are guys who don't have more than 85 at bats, and include people like Larvell Blanks, a 22 year-old utility player with a .355 wOBA who actually was more of a secondbaseman, but got 30 innings at shortstop. Or Craig Robinson, Larry Bowa's understudy at Philadelphia, with 16 assists and a .235 wOBA or Rafael Robles, who split time at third and short for San Diego, who also managed 16 assists but only a .150 wOBA.

Just looking at the list, I suspect the number would be closer to the AL level if it hadn't been for Blanks and another Brave, Gil Garrido, whose .302 wOBA in 75 at bats means that between them these two count for a little over 20 per cent of all replacement at-bats at shortstop in the 1972 NL.

EDIT: I meant to say something about the Braves' full-time shortstop, Marty Perez. He managed a below-avera wOBA of .247, and his TotalZone fielding runs were -14.8. He was only 25, though, and did manage to improve with both bat and glove after that, although he got moved to second in 1974.

DIERA??

2009-11-18T01:03:00.003Z

Moving away from the Nationals postmortems for a bit, it's Hall of Merit time in the Sabermetric City. I was a latecomer to the Hall of Merit, but it's given me hours of fun. Just like last night!

To fill you in - I'd filed a preliminary ballot based on some people who'd been getting lots of votes, when I noticed from Rick Reuschel's Davenport Translationspage at Baseball Prospectus that he had an awful lot of WARP3. Anyway, I prefer to home-brew my own stats than use other people's. (Unless they are from the Big Bad Baseball Annual!) So, how to get a quick-and-dirty One Big Number for a pitcher?

I failed on the 'quick' part, but I made a stab at creating a Defense Independent Earned Run Average, based on Clay Davenport's article on his Fielding Translations in the 2002 Baseball Prospectus. Here's how it works.

Stats you need:
A pitcher's seasonal Games, Innings Pitched, Hits, Home Runs, Bases on Balls, Hit Batsmen, Strike Outs and Earned Runs.

1) Create a new category, called FldgHits. Subtract Home Runs from Hits.
2) Multiply the IP by 3. Subtract strikeouts. Take 30% of that number and add the strike outs back in. Divide by 3. This is 'PitchIP'.
3) Use a modified version of Equivalent Average and calculate the PitchingEqA and the FieldingEqA as follows
Pitching (2*(30% of FldgHits))+(3*HR)+(1.5*(BB+BP))/(IP*3)+(FldgHits)+BB+HBP
Fielding (2*(70% of FldgHits))/(FldgHits)+(IP*3)
4) Divide the PitchingEqA by the FieldingEqA.
5) Subtract 1 from the ratio in step (4). This gives you PitResp.
6) (PitchIP*3)+(30% of FldgHits)+HR+BB+HBP = PitchPA
7) (70% of ((IP-SO)*3))+(70% of FldgHits)=FldgPA
8) [(1+PitResp)*PitchPA]/[(1+PitResp)*(PitchPA+FldgPA)] = PERmultiplier
9) [(Earned runs)*(PERmultiplier)/PitchIP]/9 = DIERA

Ah, but you're not done there. The big number has to be a 'winning percentage', and to get that you need to perform all the same calculations for his league. But we'll come back to that after you've had some time to digest this.

Reuschel's best season on this measure is 1985. ERA+ agrees but says his second best is 1977. I think I might take a look at 1981 with the Yankees.

What's the Shortstop's Name?

2009-11-13T13:15:00.003Z

Well, Jim Riggleman was named manager. When Mr Acta was on the rack, I fretted because I didn't think replacing him with Riggleman would make much difference. I'll get round to looking at whether I was right later in this off-season. For now, I wish Mr Riggleman all the luck in the world, and hope that he's not thrown to the wolves at some later date.

However, with Hot Stove Season now in full swing, I look at MLB Trade Rumors to start my day, and I find the Nationals are in the news. A couple of Fox bloggers refer to 'a major-league source' saying that the Nationals are interested in a slick-fielding shortstop. Well, that's much too vague, and Rosenthal was wrong about Mr Acta getting fired in Tampa Bay. I can't be bothered to go look if 'major-league sources' were involved in that one.

Meanwhile, straight from Mr Riggleman, Bill Ladson of MLB.com tells us that Desmond is the front runner for the job. Well, why not? If you have two shortstops, play 'em both!

Except that, Mr Riggleman has this to say: 'I was probably the last one to see that [moving Guzmán to second] was a move we need to make.' Now, what does that mean? I guess it could mean simply what it says. But could it also mean that Mr Riggleman had to be convinced? That maybe he is concerned about the ability of Guzmán to turn the pivot or something?

Being a humble blogger, at the end I always have to confess that 'I don't know'. If Guzmán can no longer make a throw from shortstop that'll reach Dunn in time to beat the runner, well he's got to be moved. But if you have two shortstops, maybe trading one for a secondbaseman is a better answer than trying to make an old guy, who wasn't all that great in the field, learn a new position. Or, you could sign a second baseman. Would Orlando Hudson take a two-year deal?

Nationals' 2009 Postmortem #4: Leadoff Spot

2009-11-11T20:06:00.003Z

Hmm, I had the chart done about ten days again, then I wound up with too much to do. (Some of that was watching the World Series.)

The Nationals did suffer from a problem here this past season. For some reason, even the supposedly sabermetrically minded Acta seemed to look for a 'classic' leadoff hitter to fill the spot. They did have a 'sabermetric' leadoff hitter, until they traded him to Florida. The chart tells us more than any amount of words by me could possibly do:

Remember, this is not a measure of quality, but of how the different elements in a player's stat line convert to Runs Created. So neither Nyjer Morgan nor Cristian Guzmán walk anything like as much as an archetypal NL leadoff hitter. Most of their offensive 'oomph' comes from batting average, way more than the archetypal NL anything. Willie Harris does walk a lot more, and hits for power, but he doesn't hit for average. Also, Harris is a good player in the sense that he's versatile, but is he really a major-league regular?

The Nationals may feel that they solved their leadoff issues by trading for Morgan, but I'd say they should still be looking.

Nationals' Postmortem #3 - 'Batting Third, Ryan Zimmerman'

2009-10-21T13:31:00.006+01:00

So, armed with the Ashley Hexagon, let's take a look at the Nationals' lineup in more detail. In this series of posts, I propose to look at each lineup slot, and the players who batted there, to see if they are more or less like the average National League batter at that position. Then, we'll see what that might tell us about who the Nationals might like to target this offseason, in the 'drive to 75'.

As a benchmark, I'm going to focus in each position on the player who got at least 80 per cent of the Plate Appearances. If nobody reached 80 per cent, then I'll add in players, in order of total Plate Appearances (PA), starting with the largest, until I hit 80 per cent. To make my life easy, I'll start with the third spot, filled by Ryan Zimmerman for about 86 per cent of the total PA. First, let's see how his hitting profile matched the National League generally:

The right-hand axis is an indication of power. The closer one is to that side, the more likely one has power. The bottom axis shows batting average, the further to the left, the more runs are created through batting average. The left-hand axis is how much walks contribute to runs created. The chart shows the proportions of the average National-League batter at the various positions in the lineup. It doesn't actually tell us anything about the quantity of runs created (using Bill James' most basic formula), only how the different elements are weighted in the total.

The data is based not on Zimmerman's performance batting third, but on his totals for the year batting in all positions, and as a pinch hitter. The key thing to note here is that Ryan Zimmerman's 2009 profile is more like that of a cleanup hitter than that of a batter in the third spot. The question becomes whether the fact that he was hitting out the 'wrong' spot hurt the Nationals' ability to score runs. That's something I intend to cover in a later post, but there's food for thought here.

I see two alternatives. Either Zimmerman should be moved to the cleanup position, or one could consider the possibility that he should bat second, since he has the walk rate, but a lot more power. Sabermetric theory tells us the best hitter should bat second, to optimize his contribution in terms of getting to the plate with men on base.

It's an interesting question. Keep him where he is or move him? What would you do?

Nationals' Postmortem #'2 - Lineup Overview

2009-10-17T18:28:00.006+01:00

This post is an introduction to an in-depth analysis of the 2009 Washington Nationals' batting lineup using some old-fashioned sabermetric methods. Throughout it all, I'm interested in how Nationals' players compared to the league average. Before we get to the actual measure of quality, I'm going to offer a profile of how the Nationals put together hits, power and walks in the different lineup slots in order to generate runs. As a first step, I'm going to excavate the Ashley Hexagon, which first appeared in the 1997 Big Bad Baseball Abstract.

The Ashley Hexagon was described by Gerry Myerson on pages 100-106 It doesn't tell you a whole lot about quality. What it analyses, using a basic form of Bill James' Runs Created, is where a given batter sources his offensive contribution. 'X' percent came from his hits, 'y' from walks and 'z' from power. Usefully, we can compare that to the league average.

Here's a graph (click on it to see it bigger) showing you the National League average. There are three components. The left-hand graph measures the walk component. The bottom is a contact component, but the right-had graph is power, so a negative number at the bottom means not much power.

Here's another graph, showing the Nationals' average by batting order position. As you can see, the Nationals' get more of their runs created by power than the league average in the heart of the lineup.

That 'z-axis' marks the right-hand boundary of the NL average, but the Nationals' push w-a-a-a-y over to make space for their cleanup hitter. Basically, the heart of the Nationals' order was more likely than the league to create runs through extra-base hits. They also tended to walk a bit more. However, at either end of the lineup there's a distinct shortage of both power and, in the leadoff spot especially, walks. It's a peculiar sort of bifurcation. Sock and eye is all in one place.

Finally, let's take a snapshot of actual quality by utilizing the Big Bad Baseball Annual's Offensive Index. Here, we have one line showing the league average of Runs Created per batting order position matched against another showing that of the Washington Nationals.

Well, there's a couple of surprises there. All that power didn't actually generate a lot of Runs Created by those 3, 4, 5 and 6 hitters. Who'd have thought the number three slot for the Nationals offered below-league-average production? And the leadoff slot was about average? What, you did? [Exeunt, red-faced.]

2009 Nationals' Postmortem #1 - Fielding Overview

2009-10-10T22:55:00.004+01:00

Sorry about not keeping up with the Fielding Weekly for the last seven weeks of the season. The trip to England messed up my routine too much, and then returning my roots to the groves of academe didn't help either. I didn't pay much attention to baseball until the last week of the season.

With the mea culpa out the way, let's talk leather. No, not Jim Bowden's supposed trouser preferences, but the gloves of our ballplayers. Actually, maybe you wouldn't want me to draw attention to this. I've seen the figures already.

To recapitulate, the columns below show the Nationals' fielding as measured by Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), a fielding metric devised by Mitchell Lichtman of The Book fame. It's widely accepted as the 'gold standard' of fielding. The first column is 'raw UZR', which measures the total effect of a player's fielding at a given position, in terms of runs above or below a notional 'average fielder' over the innings he played this past season. The second column is the gain or loss since the last time I did this exercise. The third column is UZR/150, or the total UZR score normalized to what it would be over 150 games. It has a comparative value—you immediately can see how one player at a position compares to another. The fourth column is the gain or loss in UZR/150 since last time. Next we have Revised Zone Rating RZR, which measures how many times a player caught the ball, given the chances to catch the ball. Then the gain or loss, etc. Finally, the average RZR at that player's position in MLB. The order is total innings played at that position. The guys in bold are the biggest gainers in each of the three columns. The cut-off point is 120 innings.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman (3B)     17.9   + 5.2    14.1    - 2.8  .748   -.021     .712
Guzmán (SS)       - 2.5   + 1.9   - 1.8    + 1.2  .785   +.016     .801
Johnson (1B)      - 5.8   + 0.2   - 5.9    + 0.9  .776   +.006     .782
Willingham (LF)   - 4.7   - 2.3   - 7.1    - 1.1  .925   +.006     .894
Dukes (RF)          3.6   - 3.6   - 5.8    - 4.3  .893   -.005     .908
Dunn (1b)         -13.9   - 6.6   -18.7    +16.7  .651   +.115     .782
Dunn (LF)         -14.4   - 2.0   -28.4    - 4.1  .832   n.c.      .894
Hernandez (2B)      2.0   + 0.8     3.7    + 1.4  .859   +.005     .813
Harris (CF)       - 6.1   - 1.0   -13.6    + 2.4  .935   -.003     .931
Morgan (CF)        13.0   - 0.2    31.7    - 4.2  .960   -.004     .931
Kearns (RF)         2.1   + 0.4    11.1    + 5.8  .893   n.c.      .908
Gonzalez (2b)     - 3.0   + 0.8   - 5.8    +10.5  .775   +.018     .813
Belliard (2B)       2.2   - 1.1     5.0    - 6.3  .871   -.022     .813
Gonzalez (SS)     - 3.6   + 2.2   -26.2    +13.8  .691   +.043     .801
Dukes (CF)        - 4.8   + 0.3   -15.1    + 3.5  .898   n.c.      .931
Willingham (RF)   - 1.0   - 0.3    -5.3    - 3.0  .966   +.004     .905
Maxwell (CF)        5.0   n/a      26.2     n/a   .932   n/a       .931
Dunn (RF)         - 8.1   + 0.2   -33.0    + 5.8  .761   n.c.      .908
Harris (LF)         1.9   n/a      12.6     n/a   .846   n/a       .894
Desmond (ss)        0.3   n/a       0.9     n/a   .738   n/a       .801
Orr (2B)            3.9   n/a      27.4     n/a   .891   n/a       .813

Trying to estimate the impact of fielding, of course, is an inexact business. UZR doesn't think Willingham is as good a fielder as RZR does, for example. Nonetheless, we can make some assessments.

1) Going by RZR, which for various reasons I prefer, the Nationals' fielding wasn't as bad as one might think, but it's really not at all good.
2) Adam Dunn dramatically improved as a firstbaseman; but he still was the worst in the league.
3) Alberto Gonzalez was not an improvement over Anderson Hernandez.
4) Desmond probably isn't a significant improvement over Guzmán at shortstop. It may be that Guzmán still ought to be the starting shortstop next season. Unless he's traded.
5) Zimmerman might be a Gold Glove thirdbaseman, but his statistics are not conclusive evidence. Nonetheless, he is a singular bright spot on the infield.
6) Dukes was an average fielder for a while, but by season's end he wasn't. Combine that with his batting problems, and one has to wonder if his off-field baggage really renders him a marginal major-leaguer.
7) Maxwell and Morgan are pretty good centrefielders.
8) Willingham is an enigma. Is he average or not?
9) Rizzo basically traded away his best infield options, where he had a choice, suggesting he doesn't rate fielding particularly highly.

I'll return to the fielding again, but my thoughts are currently moving toward the lineup.

How Clutch Is Ronnie Belliard?

2009-10-09T03:16:00.004+01:00

In tonight's game between the St Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers, I found myself rooting for Casey Blake to get on base in the bottom of the ninth just so we could see Ronnie Belliard come up. Washington Nationals' radio listeners will remember the commercial - 'Belliard bats over .300 with runners in scoring position'. (It's currently at .281.) So how clutch is he?

It's well known in the sabermetric world that clutch hitting doesn't exist. Actually, that's not true. Sabermetrics actually argues that by the time we work out whether a hitter is clutch or not, his career is almost over. It takes that many plate appearances to remove the uncertainty. From season-to-season it's not supposed to be a repeatable skill. How does Belliard look on that basis? Is he feasting one year, only to suffer famine the next?

Season-by-season, excluding a 1998 cup of coffee, here's how he did. (Slash line = batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage)


         Season totals   RISP            Close&Late
1999     294/379/429     339/435/527     368/444/500
2000     268/354/389     307/423/474     247/348/289
2001     264/335/443     317/397/475     200/286/260
2002     211/257/287     167/232/200     208/295/264
2003     277/351/409     316/398/439     184/298/265
2004     282/348/425     284/394/454     316/400/453
2005     284/328/450     259/299/468     247/281/461
2006 CLE 291/387/420     269/352/355     320/393/480
2006 StL 237/295/371     192/288/269     125/152/156
2007     290/332/427     267/321/422     311/337/378
2008     287/372/473     305/380/524     200/375/380

When you break it out this way, you see that his record Close & Late is very wayward. Some season's he's hot, others he's not. There's almost no consistent sign of improvement with RISP, either. You could almost argue that he had a talent for rising to the occasion through about 2003, but after that he seems to get worse, until 2008.

How about New Yankee Stadium?

2009-10-03T13:16:00.003+01:00

Back in my misspent youth, a buddy of mine worked out that hitting 20 home runs usually got you a single column on an APBA card with a '1' on 66. So for the rest of my life, whenever a player hits 20 home runs, I always think 'That's a "1" on his card.' (I don't play APBA any more. I went through a Strat-O-Matic phase, and then have been a Diamond Mind-er ever since.)

About a month ago, on Baseball Think Factory, there was a thread about the 1961 Yankees. Don Malcolm, blessings and peace be upon him, made the point (in post 15) that the 1961 Yankees were the first team to have SIX players in the lineup who hit 20 or more home runs.

Then, earlier this week, the New York Daily News published an article saying that the early-season 'home-run glut' had abated, and New Yankee Stadium was in no danger of getting anywhere near the all-time single-season record, set in 1999 by the Colorado Rockies.

Be that as it may, the Yankees currently have SEVEN players in the lineup who hit 20 or more home runs, and actually have a good shot at making it EIGHT. The Captain, Derek Jeter, is currently on 18. So, if you're looking for something to make this final weekend of the regular season interesting, you can keep an eye on this unusual development. Personally, I think it reflects an unhealthy obsession with the home run. Is there anything more boring? Isn't it more exciting to have a single, a walk, a double? Well, I think so.

Since the offensive explosion of the mid-1990s, the most 20-plus homer hitters the Yankees had in their lineup was SIX, in 2004. The most common total of 20-plus homer hitters is only THREE, in 1997 (ALDS), 1999 (Champs), 2000 (Champs), 2003 (AL), 2007 (ALDS). Which is my way of saying, an amazingly powerful lineup doesn't make it easier to win a World Championship. Eight would, however, be a new record.

Trying to Get Back in the Groove

2009-10-03T00:53:00.004+01:00

Well, I went home to Blighty for a month and wrote a bit about cricket. I caught a couple of Nationals games via GameDay Audio, but baseball fell off my radar more or less. Then I returned to Canada, and got immersed in the first weeks of the first year of a Ph.D. And then last weekend I went to see the Blue Jays' last home game. At some point that weekend I checked the standings and saw my old home town team, the Detroit Tigers, had an Elimination Number of 7, with the Twins coming to Detroit for four games. So I caught three of them.

So, let's see if I can use these past few days to get me back in the groove of blogging.

Catching Up #3 The Zimmermann Injury

2009-08-21T10:30:00.002+01:00

When the Washington Nationals' Jordan Zimmermann was diagnosed as needing Tommy John surgery, I possibly took it more philosophically than other bloggers.

I dealt with Zimmermann's PECOTA comparables before. Two of the three didn't have particularly long careers, and the third, John Maine, is by no means a stud. His ERA+ has been in decline since 2006, and his K/9 since 2007. I suspect he'll join Erik Hanson and Bobby Jones on their career paths, not getting much past 30.

And We Enter the Rizzo Era

2009-08-20T22:45:00.002+01:00

Mike Rizzo has finally lost the 'interim' tag.

I understand that part of the half-year delay in removing that tag must be laid at the feet of Major League Baseball, who insisted on a minority candidate being interviewed. It's at times like that when I wonder whether the owners should think a little more carefully before handing more power to the commissioner's office. To fix any issues about minority representation, it would be better to force the interviews at the stage when Assistant GMs are appointed, and that's something better administered at the League level, not at the Commissioner level.

Rizzo clearly has a sort of organizational philosophy - groundball pitchers, guys who don't make trouble (Dukes' days are numbered, I suspect) and, it appears, a tendency to prefer bats over fielding (which sits oddly with the groundball pitching philosophy). Realistically, we ought to recognize that we're stuck with him and any of his shortcomings for four or five years. Let's just hope those shortcomings don't get in the way of playoff contention.

Catching Up #2 - Nationals' Fielding 'Weekly' #8

2009-08-18T10:21:00.003+01:00

Here's the latest fielding statistics for Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) and Revised Zone Rating (RZR), as I've been keeping them throughout the season. There's loads of stuff I want to say, but if I say too much I'll steal some of my thunder from other 'Catching Up' posts I have planned. So let's try and stick to players still with the Nationals.

Adam Dunn is doing as well as I expected. It's just a terrible mistake to expect him to be a tolerable fielder at 1B. Gonzalez has defied confidence in his glove all year. I'm told Belliard is deceiving me with his good numbers. But, here we are, and there's little alternative to them.

When you think about what the Nationals have now, you'd have to say that overall their fielding is potentially worse than it was in the first half of the season, when it was bad enough. They consequences of various moves has been to upgrade the outfield, but to degrade the infield. Since the outfield was way below average, and the infield only a little bit below, I guess if you were paying the price in one place for an upgrade you'd do it like that. But they didn't. They dealt away better infielders and replaced them with weaker ones. The upgrade in the outfield came independently of the degraded infield.

Guzmán's improvement is their only sign that they might be saved from the potential disaster in the infield. Is he regressing to his true talent level? Or is this a misleading glimpse of sun during a perfect storm at sea? I'm putting my life jacket on, just to be safe.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman          12.7   + 3.3    16.9     +1.6  .748   +.008     .715
Johnson           - 6.0   + 0.4   - 6.8     +0.3  .770   +.006     .785
Guzman            - 4.4   + 1.9   - 3.0     +3.2  .769   +.010     .802
Dunn (LF)         -12.4   n.c.    -24.3     +0.2  .832   n.c.      .889
Hernandez           1.2   + 0.2     2.3     +0.2  .854   +.002     .814
Willingham (LF)   - 2.4   - 0.7   - 6.0     -0.8  .919   +.009     .889
Kearns (RF)         1.7   + 0.2     5.3     +1.9  .893   n.c.      .905
Morgan (CF)        13.2   + 6.0    35.9     +5.5  .964   +.007     .933
Harris (CF)       - 5.1   - 0.1   -16.0     -0.6  .938   n.c.      .933
Dukes (CF)        - 5.1   + 0.5   -18.6     +1.7  .898   n.c.      .933
Belliard (2B)       3.3   n.c.     11.3     -2.3  .893   +.003     .814
Dukes (RF)          0.0   - 0.5   - 1.5     -4.7  .898   -.078     .905
Gonzalez (SS)     - 5.8   - 0.6   -26.2     -1.5  .691   -.001     .802
Willingham (RF)   - 0.7   - 0.1    -2.3     -1.3  .962   +.002     .905
Dunn (1b)         - 7.3   - 3.8   -35.4     -3.6  .536   +.007     .785
Gonzalez (2b)     - 3.8   - 2.6   -16.3     -7.1  .757   -.009     .814
Dunn (RF)         - 8.3   - 0.9   -38.8     -4.2  .761   n.c.      .905

The table is in order of innings played at the position, with the cut-off at 180 innings. The biggest moves, either up or down, in each of the three measures are in bold.

UZR converts fielding statistics into a +/- rating reflecting the number of runs saved or given away. There is a basic version, which is based on the number of innings played by the player, and a normalized version that assumes everybody plays 150 games. It also is forced to sum to zero, so a player can have his UZR adjusted even when he doesn't play.
RZR is like a fielding 'batting average', dividing the number of plays made by the number of opportunities. Unlike old Zone Rating, it excludes plays made 'out of zone'. (Zone Rating divides the field into zones, and assigns responsibility among the players.) For comparative purposes, I've put at the end of each player's line the MLB average RZR for position.

Catching Up #1 - Riggleman's Running Game

2009-08-18T09:00:00.003+01:00

What with one thing and another, including a flight back home to London for a month's visit, I've not been tracking the Nationals so closely as before. So, time to catch up on so many things.

Let's start with an observation I noted from last Wednesday's game against the Atlanta Braves. It really relates to Jim Riggleman. 'What a horrible job he was handed. The team was badly built to start and dogged by constant injuries to the starting rotation particularly...' Well, actually, that relates to his Mariners' experience, but it might sound eerily familiar. Tom Boswell, in a chat, had this to say about Riggleman and the lack of aggressive baserunning under Acta: 'But I think Jim wants to fiddle with the lineup, maybe try to use Morgan, Harris, Gonzalez and Guzman to have more of a running game, more hit-and-runs, which he likes.'

If you check that Baseball-Reference.com play-by-play, you'll see in the first inning that Nyjer Morgan was out stealing. He went on a 1-0 count to Guzmán. If the objective had been to get Morgan to second, the fact that Guzmán worked a 4-0 walk achieved the same goal, but by that time it was too late. Worse still, Zimmerman and Dunn both came up and singled, and the Nationals took a 1-0 lead. Except it would have been 2-0 had Riggleman not wanted to 'have more of a running game'.

Unlike the Acta-bashers of earlier this season, I'm not trying to show my contempt of Riggleman in making this point. I merely illustrate that small ball comes with costs, and philosophically some managers think their players make those risks unacceptable. What were the chances of Guzmán getting a walk? Actually, in the second half of the season much better than in the first. He's got 6 walks in 105 plate appearances already, against 7 walks in 323 in the first half.

I wish Riggleman well, but the Actaphobes and their small-ball fetish (and I use the word most precisely) can go to heck in a handbasket, because they are full of muck, for the most part.

Apologies

2009-08-11T12:32:00.003+01:00

I've been AWOL not only during the best run of play this season for the Washington Nationals, but also at a time when significant changes have occurred to the roster. It's partly because I've been blogging about cricket, but also tied in with work and an impending trip to London. Why does everything always happen at once?

Nationals 'Fielding Weekly' #7

2009-08-04T23:48:00.003+01:00

This covers more than a week, owing to a delay caused by the SABR annual convention in Washington, D.C. The data is drawn from Fangraphs' Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) data and Revised Zone Rating (RZR) at The Hardball Times. I've put the biggest movers in each category in bold.

Not such a strong sign of a 'Riggleman effect' on the fielding after two weeks. For some reason, Dunn looks good in UZR but not so good in RZR. This probably has some connection with different structures to the zones in each. I still believe that it is a mistake to consider Dunn an acceptable Major-League 1B. He does less damage in LF. However, the Nationals are committed to finding out if I'm wrong. Belliard puts up some good numbers at 2B, but that belies the evidence of last year.

Let's assess the UZR effect of trading Johnson and moving Dunn to 1B

Johnson 1B, Hernandez 2B, Dunn LF, Willingham RF  +10.6
Dunn 1B, Hernandez 2B, Willingham LF, Dukes RF    + 5.8
Dunn 1B, Belliard 2B, Willingham LF, Dukes RF     +17.3

As things stand, the Nationals are liable to be giving away half a win over 150 games with the new alignment, and Hernandez at 2B, or gaining over half a win with Belliard at 2B. Hernandez, however, appears to be the better hitter.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman          12.7   - 0.6    16.9     -2.5  .740   -.013     .717
Johnson           - 6.4   + 0.4   - 7.1     +0.7  .764   +.004     .785
Guzman            - 4.4   - 0.4   - 6.2     n.c.  .759   -.008     .803
Dunn (LF)         -12.4   - 0.4   -24.5     -1.4  .832   -.017     .890
Hernandez           1.0   n.c.      2.1     +0.1  .852   +.004     .815
Kearns (RF)         1.5   + 1.1     3.4     +4.5  .893   n.c.      .907
Willingham (LF)   - 1.7   - 0.4   - 5.2     -1.2  .910   +.002     .890
Harris (CF)       - 5.0   n.c.    -15.4     -0.4  .938   n.c.      .933
Dukes (CF)        - 5.6   n.c.    -20.3     +0.8  .898   n.c.      .933
Morgan (cf)         7.2   + 2.3    30.4     +3.9  .957   -.012     .933
Gonzalez (ss)     - 5.2   - 0.7   -24.7     -2.2  .692   +.004     .803
Belliard (2b)       3.3   + 1.8    13.6     -6.8  .890   +.001     .815
Willingham (RF)   - 0.6   + 0.7    -1.0     +3.4  .961   -.016     .907
Dunn (RF)         - 7.4   - 0.7   -34.6     -1.7  .761   +.005     .907
Dukes (RF)          0.5   + 0.7     3.2     +6.6  .960   +.008     .907
Gonzalez (2b)     - 1.2   + 0.7   - 9.2     +5.3  .766   -.028     .815
Dunn (1b)         - 3.5   + 0.1   -35.4     +9.1  .529   -.016     .785

The table is in order of innings played at the position, with the cut-off at 100 innings.

UZR converts fielding statistics into a +/- rating reflecting the number of runs saved or given away. There is a basic version, which is based on the number of innings played by the player, and a normalized version that assumes everybody plays 150 games. It also is forced to sum to zero, so a player can have his UZR adjusted even when he doesn't play.
RZR is like a fielding 'batting average', dividing the number of plays made by the number of opportunities. Unlike old Zone Rating, it excludes plays made 'out of zone'. (Zone Rating divides the field into zones, and assigns responsibility among the players.) For comparative purposes, I've put at the end of each player's line the MLB average RZR for position.

Sabermetric Christmas

2009-07-29T13:26:00.003+01:00

Illness delayed a project to look at the bullpen under Riggleman. Now it'll probably never see the light of day as I'm off to Washington for the annual conference of the Society for American Baseball Research, the sabermetrics' equivalent of Christmas. If I get a chance, I'll blog about some of the things I hear.

Nationals' Fielding 'Weekly' #6

2009-07-28T03:12:00.005+01:00

I took a break in posting the Fielding Weekly for the Washington Nationals last week because there had only been four games after the All-Star Break. (Also, I had a lot of work on last week.) This week's figures could be read as giving some support to the notion that Mr Riggleman's new routine is having some effect, nothwithstanding this horror story. The problem with taking that too far is that Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) is not so enthusiastic as Revised Zone Rating (RZR). See an explanation for these stats after the table.

The big movers are Dunn, Dunn and Morgan, which sounds like an old-fashioned firm of stockbrokers. Morgan's really made a big difference, and I wonder if he's responsible for some of Dunn's improvement in leftfield this week. Anyone who tells you to trade Nick Johnson and move Dunn to first base should be shown Dunn's RZR. It makes this grown man cry.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   MLBaverage
Zimmerman          13.3   + 3.7    19.4     +2.6  .753   +.014     .717
Johnson           - 6.4   - 1.8   - 7.8     -1.0  .760   +.008     .783
Guzman            - 4.0   - 0.1   - 6.2     +0.5  .767   +.010     .803
Dunn (LF)         -12.0   - 0.3   -23.1     +4.3  .849   +.036     .890
Hernandez           1.0   - 0.2     2.0     -0.6  .848   +.004     .816
Kearns (RF)         0.4   + 0.3   - 0.9     +2.3  .887   +.006     .907
Willingham (LF)   - 1.3   + 0.5   - 4.0     +1.3  .908   +.003     .890
Harris (CF)       - 5.0   - 0.3   -15.0     -0.6  .938   +.002     .933
Dukes (CF)        - 5.6   + 0.3   -21.1     +0.7  .898   n.c.      .933
Gonzalez (ss)     - 4.5   - 1.3   -22.5     -0.1  .689   +.007     .803
Belliard (2b)       1.5   + 2.6     6.8     -0.2  .889   +.020     .816
Willingham (RF)   - 1.3   - 1.5    -4.4     -5.9  .977   -.023     .907
Dunn (RF)         - 6.7   + 0.1   -33.9     -0.2  .756   n.c.      .907
Morgan (cf)         4.9   + 4.2    26.5    +22.0  .969   +.027     .933
Dukes (RF)        - 0.2    n.c.   - 3.4     +0.1  .952   n.c.      .907
Gonzalez (2b)     - 1.9   - 1.0   -14.5     -1.5  .794   +.021     .816
Harris (2b)       - 2.4    n/a    -27.6     n/a   .739   n.c.      .816
Dunn (1b)         - 3.6   - 0.5   -44.5     -1.7  .545   -.055     .783

The table is in order of innings played at the position, with the cut-off at 75 innings.

UZR converts fielding statistics into a +/- rating reflecting the number of runs saved or given away. There is a basic version, which is based on the number of innings played by the player, and a normalized version that assumes everybody plays 150 games. It also is forced to sum to zero, so a player can have his UZR adjusted even when he doesn't play.
RZR is like a fielding 'batting average', dividing the number of plays made by the number of opportunities. Unlike old Zone Rating, it excludes plays made 'out of zone'. (Zone Rating divides the field into zones, and assigns responsibility among the players.) For comparative purposes, I've put at the end of each player's line the MLB average RZR for position.

So long, Julian

2009-07-21T02:36:00.005+01:00

Julian Tavárez, who was really (no, really!) my favourite Washington Nationals' pitcher, has been designated for assignment. People have been a little unfair towards him, as he hasn't been as bad at blowing games as Joe Beimel, but seemed to attract more hostility. Nor do I complain. He's been shockingly poor these last few weeks, finding the plate with difficulty, which is the unforgivable sin in a major-league pitcher. (Kip Wells—another player I liked—got into a similar funk, and was gone even more quickly.) I don't have a positive-scoring outing for him since 27 June.

Ron Villone may be the next to go. The signs are not good. I'd even argue that his stats are worse than Tavárez', although he hasn't committed that unforgivable sin to quite the same degree.

I'm not sure who my favourite Washington Nationals' pitcher is now. Probably Clippard or Mock. Sorry guys.

Zambrano, Ramírez, Fontenot, Bradley

2009-07-18T20:36:00.003+01:00

Messing around with the leverage index during yesterday's game and comparing it with the win probability reveals a disagreement. My method of multiplying the 'win value' of an event by the leverage does not have the same results as the win probability effect. Does that mean I'm doing it wrong? Maybe it does.

Player/Event/Inning       WPA        WV*LI
Zambrano/double/2nd       18%        13.9%
Ramirez/homer/3rd         11          4.9
Zimmerman/DP/1st          10         11.9*
Harris/BB/1st              9          7.6
Fontenot/double/2nd        9          8.6
Bradley/GDP/8th            5          7.6

I was a surprised at how the Ramirez homer scored so low in my method, not even as high as the Bradley double play. Curiously, though, it was the point at which the balance of the game shifted towards the Cubs permanently. It may be,in this case, that I'm rating double plays too highly. Are they the same as two outs, or the same as an out plus a caught stealing?
______________
* I'm not sure I call this a double play. I've got two events, the Zimmerman strike out and Morgan being thrown out at third.

First-Half Nationals' Review: the Pitching

2009-07-16T04:50:00.004+01:00

Pitching is 75 per cent of the game. Or something like that. Maybe 52 per cent, but there's some defence in there, too. Actually, where the Washington Nationals and the fabled 'Plan' are concerned, pitching is probably 75 per cent, if not more. As Definitely-Not-Interim-or-Acting President Stan Kasten said the other day, 'It's hard to amass a core of young future starters. That took us time. I've always believed that that was the most important thing, that was Job One.'

And, frankly, it's still a work in progress. There are signs of a rosy dawn in the future, but not necessarily where you'd think. But right now it's still night.

Rather than trot out some traditional statistics, or even some old-fashioned sabermetric ones, I'm going straight to the 21st-century granular approach here. I'm going to talk about LD% (Line-Drive percentage) and HR/FB ratio (home runs as a percentage of fly balls). I'll throw in K/9 and BB/9, just for retro effect.

Basically, LD% has an impact on the batting average by a pitcher's opponents. If the LD% is high, the BABIP (batting average on balls in play) will probably be high, too. Young pitchers who don't make quick progress with getting a high LD% lower are likely to have short big-league careers. HR/FB is pretty constant for most pitchers, so if there's some deviation from the league average there, for a young pitcher it's safer to assume that it will drift towards that league average. Taking the pitchers currently on the 40-man, this is the statistical snapshot.

Starter      K/9   BB/9    LD%   HR/FB
Olsen        6.0    3.6   22.5   13.7
Martis       3.6    4.1   15.4   10.2
Detwiler     5.7    3.8   24.5    5.6
Zimmermann   8.8    2.9   25.3   13.9
Stammen      4.0    1.8   19.1    8.8
Lannan       4.0    3.1   18.7   11.8

League Ave   6.9    3.2   19.2   10.3

Martis, Stammen and Lannan are doing a Mark Fidrych impersonation. If they don't get that K/9 up, their careers will be short. Otherwise, Martis needs to get his walk rate down, and the other two are doing a fine job. You can fit guys like this into the 4 and 5 slots in the rotation, and not complain.

Olsen's a league-average innings eater type, with numbers like that, great for spot 3 or 4 in the rotation.

Detwiler and Zimmermann are supposed to be the future studs. Unfortunately, they look pretty uneven here. Zimmermann's got the Ks, but that LD% worries me. It's remained stubbornly high all season. Detwiler's not quite got the stuff, and also has a high LD%, but something about that line fills me with more confidence that you're looking at a future Scott Olsen type, who might turn into a #2 for a season or two. That's actually pretty good, because one never knows. Sometimes people raise their game even higher. But, being realistic, a young pitcher's best seasons for strikeouts are at the start of their career. Then they go down.

Well, this review is partly about the coming 'Riggleman Era'. My advice? Keep Stammen in the rotation. At one time their was a rumour that he was headed for the bullpen, but he's doing too good a job starting. I think that plan has been set aside with Detwiler's return to the minors, but you never can tell.

As for the bullpen, I'll just go straight to the chart

Starter      K/9   BB/9    LD%   HR/FB
Beimel       5.6    3.8   16.7    6.2
Bergmann     6.2    3.9   23.5   15.3
Burnett      7.1    1.4   11.9   17.0
Clippard     9.0    3.9   10.0    7.8
Kensing      3.6    7.2   29.2   14.6
MacDougal    3.7    7.4   14.3    8.5
Mock         4.2    5.5   10.9    0.0
Tavárez      8.4    6.8   17.2    3.4
Villone      4.9    6.4   20.3    6.2

League Ave   7.4    4.0   18.7    8.8

Well, what a mess. Walks are killing this bullpen. Look at MacDougal, he's got the numbers the wrong way round. 7.4 would be acceptable as a K/9, but as a BB/9 it's a sentence to transportation. Here's where Mr Riggleman has his work cut out for him.

I'd do something like this:

Closer: Burnett
Setup: MacDougal, Clippard, Tavárez, Beimel
Mop-up, Long Relief: Bergmann, Villone.

Villone I'd keep on a short lease. The Nationals have Dave Williams, a former big league left-hander, at Syracuse. If Villone doesn't pick up his game, I'd DFA him and try Williams.

Beimel has tolerable numbers, but his performance doesn't measure up. I believe he's added a few goats to his existing collection.

Tavárez may be done. If he could get his walks down, though, that's a closer there. MacDougal may well be in the same boat, to be honest.

The rest are a bit mix and match at the moment. I have a feeling they are going to miss Kip Wells. He somehow could dial it up for an inning, but he was screwed if he had to go two. Then he got hurt, and didn't come back the same pitcher. They won't miss Kensing, though. Didn't he cost them a real, live player?

First Half Nationals Review: The Fielding (incorporating Nationals Fielding Weekly #5)

2009-07-14T17:21:00.002+01:00

Probably you'd have to go to some forsaken place that knows nothing about baseball, like Ys or Norumbega to find someone who didn't know that the Washington Nationals had the worst fielding in the National League. If that doesn't make you want to go out and fire someone from their job, you've got no future as a senior baseball executive. Let's hold an investigation. Who is to blame for this sorry situation?

One of the things Bill James learned while inventing Sabermetrics was that a lot of what one perceives as pitching is, in fact, fielding. However, one of the things I've learned is that fielding responsibility is very difficult to apportion individually. There are 'fielding theorists' who argue that you have to start at the level of the player, with stuff like fielding percentage or zone rating. I'm more inclined to see it the other way: you have to start from the top, then start sharing out the blame further down. However, nobody knows the truth! Nothing's been proven! How do you evaluate defensive statistics anyway?

Defensive Efficiency Rating was a Bill James' invention, I think, which basically tells you what percentage of balls hit into play against a team are converted into outs. It's a bit deceptive in that not all balls hit are really playable. This demonstrates that some of what one perceives as fielding is, in fact, pitching. It's useful, nonetheless, in giving a rough idea of one team's defence in relation to another's. By this measure, the Nationals rest at the bottom of the league, with a DER of .695. This is very bad, considering the Dodgers are at the top with a DER of .729. That means out of every 100 balls in play, the Dodgers convert three more of them into outs than the Nationals do. Now, realistically, that means about one ball-in-play per game. But over 162 games that's 162 hits, or worth something approaching one Chase Utley per season. Would you like your pitchers to face Chase Ultey in every game?

The Nationals aren't good at turning the double play (13th in the league). They're good at making errors (1st in the league). They're last in putouts (but 4th in assists—they must like helping old ladies across the street). They're also worst in fielding percentage. And that's about all you can say at the team level.

Well, except the good folks at The Hardball Times have published a team Revised Zone Rating. (Kind of like DER, a rate of converting balls in play into outs, but one that allows for those hard-to-reach balls.) Yes, the Nationals are last, at .809. (But Milwaukee's best, at .860.) However, they take it a step further, and break RZR out into Infield RZR and Outfield RZR. Nationals' infielders manage to be 14th in the league, but the outfield is dead last.

So, I'll conclude this analysis with the current Ultimate Zone Rating* and Revised Zone Ratings by player (minimum 60 innings at position), then tell you what I think Mr Riggleman ought to do.

Player              UZR   Change  UZR/150  Change  RZR   Change   LgMedian
Zimmerman           9.6   + 2.0    16.8     -1.0  .739   -.018     .716
Johnson           - 4.6   + 1.8   - 6.8     +3.6  .752   +.023     .778
Guzman            - 3.9   - 0.1   - 6.7     +0.4  .757   +.003     .802
Hernandez           1.2   - 0.3     2.6     -0.6  .844   -.002   .813/.801
Dunn (LF)         -11.7   - 2.2   -27.4     -4.1  .813   +.001     .865
Kearns (RF)         0.1   + 0.6   - 3.2     +2.4  .881   +.004   .916/.910
Willingham (LF)   - 1.8   + 0.4   - 5.3     +1.2  .905   +.003     .865
Dukes (CF)        - 5.9   + 0.1   -21.8     +1.5  .898   n.c.    .947/.943
Harris (CF)       - 4.7   + 0.2   -14.4     +1.0  .936   +.001   .947/.943
Dunn (RF)         - 6.8   + 0.1   -34.1     +1.0  .756   n.c.    .916/.910
Belliard (2b)     - 1.1   - 2.5     7.0     -2.0  .869   -.012   .813/.801
Gonzalez (ss)     - 3.1   - 1.1   -22.4     -7.3  .682   -.036     .802
Dukes (RF)        - 0.2   - 1.1   - 3.5     n.c.  .952   n.c.    .916/.910
Willingham (RF)     0.2   - 0.2     1.5     -4.2 1.000   n.c.    .916/.910
Morgan (cf)         0.7    n/a      4.5     n/a   .938   n/a     .947/.943
Dunn (1b)         - 3.1   - 1.1   -42.8    -7.4   .600   -.114     .778
Gonzalez (2b)     - 0.9    n/a    -14.5     n/a   .773   n/a     .813/.801

Well, really, I don't see what Mr Riggleman can do that Mr Acta hadn't done already, by taking Dukes out of centre and keeping Dunn out of right. Is there any room to improve the infield? Belliard's numbers were good earlier on, but he's been in sharp decline since getting more playing time. Use him in games with flyball pitchers. Gonzalez is sinking like a stone. He's worse than Guzmán now. Nick Johnson shows some improvement this week, balanced by Zimmerman's decline. My one piece of helpful advice—keep Dunn OFF first base. Don't listen to the Sirens calling for Johnson's trade because Dunn can fill in at first. Hecan'thecan'thecan't.
___________
* Ultimate Zone Rating was developed by Mitchel Lichtman, one of the authors of The Book. (See link to blog at left.) It has to sum to zero, which is why players who get no playing time still see their numbers change each week. It's highly regarded, and gives you a number that represents runs saved (the pluses) or given away (minuses).

First Half Nationals Review: The Lineup

2009-07-13T23:24:00.004+01:00

So, here we stand, looking forward to the Riggleman phase of the 2009 Washington Nationals. The team is on pace to lose a hundred games, and on a pace not to win more than 50. Teams with that kind of record more than likely have so many flaws that a mere change of manager won't achieve much. de civitate sabermetricarum takes this All Star Break to review the situation that will welcome Mr Riggleman when he gets back to work. Since there are conveniently three days between now and the return of the team to action, I've divided this survey, like Gaul, into three parts: the lineup, the fielding, and the pitching. What has Mr Riggleman got? What can he do about the areas that need work?

This survey of the batting isn't going to focus on players so much as the lineup. Comparing this to the league will, one hopes, indicate how it contributes to this losing season so far. In spite of an offense not being too bad, in relation to the rest of the league, the Nationals aren't winning. They are not short of baserunners, as the team OBP is second in the league. But it seems that these opportunities are not being converted into enough runs. We know that lately the Nationals are leaving a lot of men on base. In the 86 games played so far, the Nationals have left 699 men on base. Is that a lot?

The National League team with the lowest percentage of its baserunners scoring is San Diego, which has only managed to put 12% of them across the plate. They've left 613 on base. But they also have the fewest number of baserunners to begin with. The best team at driving them in is Colorado, with 16% of baserunners scoring. They've left on base 612 runners. The closest in total number of baserunners with a batter at the plate is the Mets, with 2235 to the Nationals 2317. The Mets have left 660 runners on base. So, the short answer is, yes, 699 is a lot.

Looking at the batting order, and using Runs Created per 27 Outs, the old Bill James formula, we get the following for each batting order position:

1st     4.17
2nd     6.87
3rd     5.67
4th     7.48
5th     5.46
6th     4.16
7th     3.76
8th     4.72
9th     1.83

That leadoff number is a bit of a shocker, isn't it? The leadoff spot's OBP is .317, worse than any other spot except the pitcher's and the guys who have batted 7th. So, chances are there's one out by the time the better performing slots of 2 and 3 get to the plate. It's absolutely vital to get the first man at bat on base to maximize the chance of scoring runs. However, the chances are the leadoff man will only leadoff one or two innings.

Let's do this another way, and track the OBP and SLG of the Nationals' batting order against the league average:


Spot    Nationals     League
1st     .317/.372     .327/.383
2nd     .416/.429     .348/.413
3rd     .363/.477     .373/.490
4th     .384/.541     .351/.472
5th     .352/.489     .337/.433
6th     .337/.347     .332/.403
7th     .310/.379     .316/.399
8th     .348/.369     .328/.377
9th     .256/.251     .247/.262

Here's another question for you: where do you think the Nationals rank in the league in slugging? The answer is 6th. Pretty good, but when you compare the slugging by batting order, an interesting pattern emerges. The Nationals' slugging is concentrated in a handful of spots in the order. They beat the league average at the 2nd, 4th and 5th, but are behind elsewhere. An awful lot of the Nationals' slugging is tied up in Adam Dunn. The rest of the lineup, with the exception of the 5th spot, is hovering around league average or, in the case of spots 6 and 7, a worryingly amount below.

I think we have an answer here as to why the Nationals are leaving so many men on base. The production is too concentrated, rather than being spread around the lineup. Adam Dunn, with the lion's share of plate appearances in the 4 slot, can't carry the team on his own. That's something Riggleman needs to fix. Sadly, I don't see a solution on the team at the moment.

Manny Acta Fired

2009-07-13T14:28:00.003+01:00

The Nationals have fired Manny Acta.

My first reaction is a 'so what'? The team is in such a mess that firing the manager is probably the daftest thing one could do. No bullpen, shockingly bad fielding, inability to drive the runners in - these are not things that a manager can do much about. Those all reflect the personnel who are assembled by the general manager.

On the other hand, Mr Acta did make some queer decisions sometimes. His eagerness to play the infield in, for example. And sometimes you wonder if his bullpen management made matters worse.

I might write some more about this later, once I've finished the mid-season analysis I've started. But I might not.

Hilaripus projection from 2002

2009-07-12T17:07:00.004+01:00

Looking at Baseball Prospectus from 2002, one finds this projection (a 'Wilton' in the parlance of the day) for Jose Ortiz: .330/.385/.534.

Ortiz was traded from Oakland to Colorado in 2001, after putting up a horrendous .167/.217/.167 in 46 plate appearances.

In Sacramento, before going to the Rockies, he put up .273/.345/.449

Once in Colorado, his line read .255/.314/.495 in 224 plate appearances.

So where did the .330/.385/.534 come from? Well, for that you have to go back to 2000, in Scramento .351/.408/.575. At age 23. In over 500 PAs.

The thing is, this looked way out of line with his production in Vancouver in 1999: .284/.346/.483

Eyeballing the lines, you'd have asked him to do that 2000 season over again before you gave him full credit. Yet the fact is, if you just weight the lines appropriately, and throw in a boost from Coors, you probably would get a .919 OPS.

I wouldn't like to say we've advanced so far in projection that such an error couldn't occur again. I suspect it has something to do with just automating a lot of calculations, and not checking what might appear anomalous. I don't doubt, regardless of whether the formulae are better, that a lot of these outcomes just get spat out of the computer still. But maybe they check them more.

Oh, Ortiz' real 2002 line? .250/.315/.313. In Coors. In 215 PA.

Nationals Fielding Weekly #4

2009-07-06T13:20:00.002+01:00

There's no real pattern I can see to the figures this week. Using Ultimate Zone Rating, a method for converting fielding chances into a +/- runs figure, which is complex and is adjusted according to how other players perform as well as to the peculiarities of the park, the non-Zimmerman infield improved sharply. The same sort of applies to Revised Zone Rating, which gives an average like batting average. However, UZR suggests the outfield play deteriorated. As far as I can tell, which isn't very far, these adjustments relate to some of Harris's play, some of Dunn's play and, on the infield, some of Zimmerman's play.*

'Median' refers to the zone ratings at the midpoint of the National League RZR chart at that position. I've put those players who are fielding above this level in bold.


Player           UZR   Change     UZR/150   Change   RZR    Change    Median
Zimmerman (3b)   7.6    - 1.2      17.8    - 3.9    .757    -.018     .709-.701
Johnson (1b)    -6.4    + 0.5     -10.4    + 1.5    .729    +.011     .781-.776
Guzman (ss)     -3.8    - 0.9     - 7.4    + 6.3    .754    +.011     .807-.793
Hernandez (2b)   1.5    + 0.6       3.2    + 1.2    .846    -.010     .820-.806
Dunn (lf)       -9.5    - 3.8     -23.4    - 9.7    .812    +.006       .873
Kearns (rf)     -0.5    - 0.3     - 5.6    - 0.4    .877    +.002       .912
Willingham (lf) -2.2     n.c.     - 6.5    - 0.1    .902    +.002       .873
Dukes (cf)      -6.0     n.c.     -23.3    + 0.4    .898    +.001     .944-.942
Harris (cf)     -4.9    + 0.9     -15.4    + 8.4    .935    +.010     .944-.942
Dunn (rf)       -6.7    - 0.2     -35.1    - 1.4    .756     n.c.        .912
Belliard (2b)    1.4    - 0.2       9.0    - 0.8    .881    -.012     .820-.806    
Gonzalez (ss)   -2.0     n.c.     -15.1    + 0.4    .718     n.c.     .807-.793
Dukes (rf)       0.9    + 1.1     - 3.5    + 9.1    .952    +.005        .912
Willingham (rf)  0.4      n/a       5.7      n/a   1.000     n/a         .912
Dunn (1b)       -2.0    - 0.1     -37.4    - 0.6    .714     n.c.     .781-.776
Maxwell (cf)     1.9    + 0.1      36.9    + 1.7    .833     n.c.     .944-.942

__________
* As I've said before, I don't think UZR is really designed to be used in this way. It's more of an end-of-season thing. The best it can do in-season is give a guide as to who is the most valuable fielder on a team, and how he is doing relative to other fielders at his postion.

Adventures in Independence Day Leverage

2009-07-05T16:03:00.003+01:00

Yesterday's game is what baseball is all about, for me. The score wasn't too high, the game was dominated by pitching, and neither of the two contending teams gave up on the game.

During the game, I performed an exercise of calculating Leverage x Win Value in order to create a number that would represent the value of each event to winning the game. Instead of using the run value of each event, I used the win value as detailed in Tango, Litchtman, Dolphin's The Book. (Run values are used in the famous linear weights formula devised by Thorn and Palmer in The Hidden Game of Baseball.)

It was an interesting exercise, because it highlighted how a well-timed single can be far more valuable than a home run, and why on-base percentage is more valuable than slugging.

Dunn's home run in the bottom of the 7th, leading off, was worth 14.76 per cent of a win. But Zimmerman's single in the bottom of the 8th was worth 24.78 per cent of a win. Even Dunn's single in the next plate appearance was worth more than Dunn's homer, at 15.96 per cent of a win. By the time we get to Willingham's single, the cumulative effects of the runs scored up to that point have substantially reduced the leverage, and he only gets 4.62 per cent of a win.

The reason is the multiplier effect of leverage. The base runners and the differential in score added up to making those 8th-inning situations of greater significance. A typical linear-weights formula wouldn't have captured this, and just awarded Dunn a 1.44 runs for his home run and 0.44 runs for each of the three singles. Furthermore, it also accounts better for the effect of piling up baserunners, each additional runner pushes those already on base closer to home plate. Bard would not have scored from first on any of the Zimmerman-Dunn-Willingham hits; he had to get to second.

On another matter, anyone following this game would think bunting was a brilliant strategy. A bunt made the Braves' first run possible, and a bunt arguably resulted in the Nationals' being in a position to tie the game quickly, although in the subsequent walk meant the bunt really had no effect. I'm not trying to argue the point, just observing that in this game bunting worked.

Finally, I'm awarding a Hero of the Day to MacDougal, for defending the lead in the top of the 9th.

Primer Cross Post: No to Trades for Trading's Sake

2009-07-05T15:58:00.004+01:00

This article in the Washington Post generated this thread on Baseball Think Factory. I've posted an adapted version of my comment here.

I don't see the point of trading a veteran simply because he's got trade value. What you get back is equally important. Either it helps you or you don't do the deal.

Everyone wants the Nationals to trade Nick Johnson and to move Adam Dunn to first base. Dunn has shown no greater ability to play that position than left-field. If anything, he's looked worse. Johnson's injury history is going to count against him in deals, reducing his value to quarters on the dollar. And it's not as if the Nationals have a sure-fire can't miss long-term replacement in the organization.

Nobody talks about Cristian Guzmán much for reasons that are not quite clear to me, but appear to be related to fielding. Are these the same people who want to move Dunn to first? The Nationals actually do have a replacement in the organization for him, although it's a definite downgrade - Alberto Gonzalez, the former Attorney General. He definitely doesn't hit as well as Guzmán, and his fielding seems to be about the same.

The Nationals do have a surfeit of corner oufielders, including the aforementioned Dunn, but only Josh Willingham is at all marketable, unless someone wants Dunn. Nobody accepts Elijah Dukes' good behaviour represents a genuine conversion. (We'll know when they do when we start seeing articles about it in the paper.) Austin Kearns is playing too badly for his contract.

The Nationals have no depth anywhere else, except young pitching. If I were them, I'd see what I could get for Stammen or maybe Balester. But that would probably be an older guy like Nyjer Morgan again.

Manny Being Manny, Jesus Being Jesus, Adam Being...

2009-07-04T16:12:00.003+01:00

Yesterday's game was a return to the bad old days of the middle of May. You remember that awful stretch, surely, when the offense was firing on all cylinders, but could not rely on any part of the pitching game (nor fielding for that matter). Actually, I wouldn't blame you if you'd chose to forget.

OK, so let's dissect this a bit.

1. Ross Detwiler stunk. This was without doubt his worst outing since he was brought up. He gave up too many hits, and the only other game where his control was as poor was the 14th June one. Shairon Martis was doing better than him just before he got sent down. Having said all that, my inclination is to give him one more outing. He's got a pattern of following two poor starts with a good one.

2. Let's see, top of the seventh, Jesus Colome trying to defend a tie with runners on first and second. Villone's warmed up in the bullpen, switch hitter at the plate. I remember thinking, 'don't do it Manny, bring in Villone'. Oh well, we know how that ended. Not that Villone would have been much of an improvement, lately...

3. ...as we saw in the very next inning. Villone loaded up the bases. The only out he got was given to him by a sacrifice bunt. I'm not sure how much I blame Villone/Tavárez for the run that came in, though. Villone was ordered to walk Escobar. Tavárez then walked in a run, what proved to be, in the end, the winning run. I think Mr Acta sometimes doesn't help his pitchers, because he gives them no room for mistakes—like not knowing the umpire's strike zone yet. Really, though, although I'm a fan of Tavárez, running through a sequence of Colome/Villone/Tavárez is just asking for trouble.

4. So, then, the Nationals' rally. And Adam Dunn is up. And he pops out! But that's Adam, what the English call a 'success or bust' player. I don't blame him for that. Adam's a very good player to me, with an outside chance at the Hall of Fame. He's got a better eye than most umpires. I've been doing some fiddling with the idea of Leverage, that each given plate appearance has a multiplier that indicates how significant it is. This one was very high, and Adam gave away about ten per cent of the game with it.

For me, the turning point of the game came on that intentional walk to Escobar. Mr Acta has a right to leave Colome in there, and not expect him to give up a home run. He has a right to expect Dunn (or Bard, who made the final out, and also gave away about ten per cent of the game) to come through in the clutch. He doesn't have a right to load the bases for a new pitcher. That's asking a heck of a lot.

Mr Acta has got a reputation as a sabermetric manager, but I think he sometimes overmanages. This is one instance where it bit him. (Unless, of course, it was Riggleman's suggestion.)


                   Effect on
Pitcher            Win Expectancy
Colome              -.624
Villone             -.140
Tavárez             -.081
Clippard            -.052
Beimel               .010
Burnett              .044

Bullpen Tragic Week

2009-07-03T23:29:00.004+01:00

The curse of the Nationals' bullpen struck again this week, as they proved unable to defend leads or even to keep the team in the game.

27th June


Pitcher          Win Expectancy
                 Effect
Beimel            -.213
MacDougal         -.075
Tavárez            .054

28th June


Pitcher          Win Expectancy
                 Effect
MacDougal         -.103
Beimel            -.053

29th June


Pitcher          Win Expectancy
                 Effect
Villone           -.554
Tavárez           -.177

30th June


Pitcher          Win Expectancy
                 Effect
Beimel           -1.155
Clippard         - .163

1st July


Pitcher          Win Expectancy
                 Effect
MacDougal         -.661
Burnett           -.308
Tavárez           -.285

I've only awarded Goat status in losses, but making good leads into precarious ones really does deserve some kind of notice, so I've posted the evidence here.

The "Big Trade"

2009-07-01T21:42:00.004+01:00

When the Nationals acquired Nyjer Morgan yesterday, the reaction from the sabermetric community was almost unanimously negative towards the move for Washington.

Thus Dave Cameron at Fangraphs writes on the trade between the Washington Nationals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. (The comments are pretty good, too.) I'm a late ballot, but count me as a sabermetric community member who thinks the trade was a good one for Washington.

The big negatives directed at the trade can be reduced to two elements: Lastings Milledge's potential and the idea that Joel Hanrahan can be a good reliever.

I've not seen Milledge play, having last season been following the Detroit Tigers. I've heard of his reputation among the sabermetric community for a couple of years now, but he's a former New York Mets' prospect, and my empirical observations lead me to find Mets' prospects are routinely overhyped. I have, however, seen Elijah Dukes play. I like Dukes. He's not particularly fast, having trouble with the initial acceleration. Consequently, he routinely has problems on the basepaths and in the field. However, he's got an accurate, strong arm. He's a solid, if unspectacular hitter. He'll do in rightfield.

What the Nationals need is a centrefielder who will make up for the defensively challenged Dunn in left and Dukes' mediocrity in right. The Nationals' outfield is a bigger problem than the infield, and easier to fix. As Dave Cameron's defensive analysis illustrated, Morgan is probably about average in centre. This is an improvement and an important one.

Hanrahan is indeed a pitcher with potential, but his experience this season in Washington has just destroyed him. The fans appear to despise him, and management has lost all confidence in him. He may indeed have lost confidence in himself. No lead is safe with Hanrahan on the mound.

The thing is, going forward the Nationals have placed all their bets on a young starting pitching rotation. Tearing up their confidence by having bad defence in the outfield and a bullpen that can't hold a lead is probably the biggest failing of the current roster. Getting rid of Hanrahan and improving the outfield defence are actions that fix the problem. Milledge was surplus to requirements, unless the sabermetric community thinks that it was better to keep Milledge than Dunn. Maybe that's what they do think. But none of them have really addressed this point, that the Nationals have a surplus of corner outfielders. Isn't that what a good GM is supposed to do? Deal from a surplus to fix a problem?

A hearty 'well done, Mr Rizzo' from this corner of the sabermetric community.

Nationals' Fielding Weekly #3

2009-06-29T13:51:00.005+01:00

This week's chart is less exciting than last week's and just shows how Ultimate Zone Rating is rather opaque on a week-to-week basis. (I don't think it's designer, The Book author Mitchel Lichtman, intended it to be used the way I am doing.) Revised Zone Rating, meanwhile, shows that the good play in the outfield has continued, although the gains are not as dramatic.*

The story of the week is really the flubs on the infield. The only infielder to post a gain this week was Adam Dunn, who got a few innings at first base after Nick the Sick was hit by a pitch. I've already highlighted an error by Zimmerman in one of my Goats of the Day presentations as having played a significant part in a defeat. That, to me, has taken on symbolic status of how the significance of fielding remains a subject for debate. The average sabermetrically inclined person (i.e., me) can wonder whether the real fault lay in the inability of the Nationals to score runs up to that point? Or was Zimmerman's fielding muff the real culprit in a collapse in morale? Or was it Jesus Colome? Inquiring minds, blah, blah, blah.


Player           UZR   Change     UZR/150   Change   RZR    Change
Zimmerman (3b)   8.8    + 0.4      17.8    - 1.2    .757    -.010
Johnson (1b)    -6.9    - 1.0     -11.9    - 0.6    .729    -.004
Guzman (ss)     -2.9    - 2.0     -13.7    - 2.1    .743    -.004
Hernandez (2b)   0.9    - 0.7       2.1    - 2.2    .856    -.006
Dunn (lf)       -5.7    - 0.8     -13.7    + 1.2    .806    +.006
Kearns (rf)     -0.2    - 0.5     - 5.2    - 0.9    .875     n.c.
Willingham (lf) -2.2    - 2.1     - 6.4    - 7.2    .900    +.020
Dukes (cf)      -6.0     n.c.     -23.7    - 4.5    .897     n.c.
Harris (cf)     -5.8    + 0.1     -23.8    + 4.6    .925    +.013
Dunn (rf)       -6.5    - 0.2     -33.7     n.c.    .756     n.c.
Belliard (2b)    1.6    - 0.5       9.8    + 3.4    .893    -.011    
Gonzalez (ss)   -2.3    - 1.0     -19.1    - 7.2    .718    -.012
Dukes (rf)      -0.2    - 1.5     - 3.5    -14.1    .947    +.009
Dunn (1b)       -2.0    - 0.1     -36.8    +10.7    .714    +.114
Maxwell (cf)     1.8    - 0.1      36.9    + 0.5    .833     n.c.

________________
* I really ought to introduce a table showing an average RZR score at each position. I've got acres of space on the sidebars I'm not using.

The Stalking Goats

2009-06-27T20:57:00.005+01:00

23rd June - Goat Award #19

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Colome                    -0.480
Tavárez                   -0.382
Wells                     -0.138
Villone                   -0.100
(Zimmerman                -0.056)
Hanrahan                   0.000

24th June No awards, Stammen hit hard

25th June - No awards, Zimmermann given big lead

26th June - Goat Award #20


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan                -0.258
Villone                 -0.039
Colome                   0.000

Call me guilty of playing favourites, but I adjusted Tavárez' effect on Win Expectancy, taking away the cost of an error in the game of 23 June. The fielding muff was charged to Ryan Zimmerman and led to the Red Sox getting a baserunner after Tavárez got the first out in the eighth. Thus, Colome gains yet another Goat award. So does Hanrahan. That's what shocks me about designating Kip Wells for assignment. I had Colome pencilled in as first to go. Does he have pictures of somebody?

It may seem harsh to give an award for yesterday. As you can see,looking at the effect Hanrahan and Villone had on Win Expectancy, there actually wasn't much of the game to lose. Looking at the context, the Washington Nationals' hitters failed against Brad Bergesen, and cost them a win. Nonetheless, I was particularly outraged by Hanrahan's inability to hold down the opposition lead to two runs, in a low-scoring contest. The hitters may have been failing, but no need to take the rug out from under them like that.

I'm preparing a set of 'Goat of the Day' standings, but I won't post them until the next off day. As you might imagine, its a close race, and there's a surprise there for the moment.

Nationals' Fielding Weekly #2

2009-06-23T18:53:00.002+01:00

Everybody asserted that the Nationals' broke their losing streak because they made more of the plays in the field they should have done. I'm not going to report that this is wrong; it's very right. Here's some numbers, showing Ultimate Zone Rating, Ultimate Zone Rating Adjusted to 150 Games (both from Fangraphs), and Revised Zone Rating (from The Hardball Times). I've also put in columns showing the changes from last week.


Player           UZR   Change     UZR/150   Change   RZR    Change
Zimmerman (3b)   8.4    + 0.4      19.0    - 0.9    .767    -.004
Johnson (1b)    -5.9    - 0.5     -11.3    + 0.9    .733    +.002
Guzman (ss)     -4.9    + 0.1     -11.6    + 1.0    .747    +.006
Hernandez (2b)   1.6    + 1.2       4.3    + 0.1    .862    -.006
Dunn (lf)       -4.9    - 0.3     -14.9    + 1.6    .800    +.031
Kearns (rf)      0.3    + 0.3     - 4.3    + 1.6    .875    -.004
Dukes (cf)      -6.0    - 1.6     -23.7    - 4.5    .897    -.014
Willingham (lf) -0.1    - 0.1       0.8    - 0.7    .880     n.c.
Harris (cf)     -5.9    + 1.3     -28.4    +14.5    .912    +.018
Dunn (rf)       -6.3      n.c.    -33.7    + 0.1    .756     n.c.
Belliard (2b)    2.1    + 0.1      13.2    + 0.2    .904     n.c.    
Gonzalez (ss)   -1.3    - 0.2     -11.9     n.c.    .730    +.008
Dukes (rf)       1.3    + 0.5      10.6    + 6.9    .938    +.038
Maxwell (cf)     1.9     n.c.      36.4    + 0.5    .833     n.c.
Dunn (1b)       -1.9     n.c.     -47.5    + 0.1    .600     n.c.
Harris (2b)     -1.7     n.c.     -36.8    + 0.1    .733     n.c.
Milledge (cf)   -0.5    - 0.1     - 9.4    - 1.0    .727     n.c.

Some notes.
1) UZR adjusts for other players and shows a +/- in terms of runs; RZR does not and works like batting average. That's why people who didn't actually play still get adjustments. It would help to know average RZR at each position, but instead you'll have to look at UZR to get an idea of how good they are relative to their peers.
2) In spite of all the noise in certain broadcasting quarters, the Nationals' problem with the leather was not on the infield, but the outfield. The top three RZR gains are all from outfielders. Result = 4 wins.
3) Dunn, Harris, Dukes, reading left to right, is probably the first-choice outfield at the moment. KEEP DUKES OUT OF CENTRE IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.
4) Gonzalez, given more playing time, hasn't risen to the occasion. I'd be inclined to abandon my 'groundball pitcher = Gonzalez at short' theory.

Bullpen Awards of the Week

2009-06-23T14:51:00.004+01:00

Hmm, I'm not keeping pace with the 'scores on the doors' here.

12th June - Goat Award #15

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan                -0.348
Beimel                   0.025

13th June - Goat Award #16


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Bergmann                -1.194
Colome                  -0.055
Tavárez                  0.092

14th June - Goat Award #17


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Villone                 -0.650
Beimel                   0.057

16th June - Goat Award #18


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Villone                 -0.825
MacDougal               -0.204
Beimel                   0.027

17th June - Hero Award #2

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
MacDougal                 0.225

18th June - Hero Award #3


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Tavárez                  0.101
Beimel                   0.059
MacDougal                0.047
Villone                 -0.034

19th June - Hero Award #4


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan                 0.442
Beimel                   0.149
Colome                   0.149
Tavárez                  0.092
Wells                    0.065
Villone                 -0.405

20th June - Hero Award #5


Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
MacDougal                0.298
Tavárez                  0.296
Colome                  -0.108
Wells                   -0.186
Hanrahan                -0.401

June 21st" - No awards. (Martis roughed up.)

A bad week for Ron Villone, and from outhouse to penthouse and back again for Hanrahan, but four Hero awards versus four Goat awards, though no more than .500 ball, is an improvement on what we've been used to. I'll be back later today with the fielding weekly.

Primer Cross Post: The Chaos Theory of Sabermetrics

2009-06-21T17:57:00.003+01:00

I've decided to cross-post some of my contributions at Primer to this blog. That way I can keep better track of some of my important reflections.

Brian Joseph, who may have been involved with Baseball Prospectus Idol (which I didn't follow, I think the whole idea of 'Idol' is stupid), made a stab at attacking sabermetrics here. It's a pretty poor effort, to be brutally honest; but I think I see where he's going with it. He wants more granularity in sabermetrics. A Primer discussion broke out here.

The most misguided point of Joseph's argument is here:

The notion that sabermetrics is truly objective is silly when there are a number of ways to “objectively” look at a situation statistically depending on your subjectiveness toward the game.

This statement is, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of what it is to be objective. And all the rest of the article's problems arise from here. I suspect that if 'objective' was replaced with 'scientific', the author would not have misunderstood. 'Scientific' refers to a method, nothing more, so history can be scientific. Sabermetrics sometimes is not purely scientific. (Think of James's 'subjective factor' in the New Historical Abstract.) But that's rare.

Joseph then wanders into various specific examples, which unfortunately don't clarify the matter. One problem is that 'neo-sabermetrics', to borrow a term from Don Malcolm, is concerned with evaluating True Talent Level. Joseph is arguing that on a day-to-day level, True Talent Level doesn't actually explain very much. Well, anyone who thought about the matter probably knew that already. But True Talent Level isn't the only way to use use sabermetric studies.

It's always worth reminding ourselves that Bill James didn't start from wanting to know how good players would be, but rather how good they had been. Malcolm and some other members of the Big Bad Annual (BBBA) crowd, which included Primer's own Jim Furtado, were sort of feeling around the theoretical foundation that the game, not the season, is the cornerstone of performance analysis. Then BPro's great success and certain unprofessional characteristics of BBBA strangled that initiative, not quite at birth, but in late childhood. However, many of those basic concepts are still out there. James himself gave us the Game Score for pitchers, but I don't find that helpful. I don't think want a number in that way, I prefer the categories of the Quality Matrix. The same with the idea of Leverage for bullpens. Leverage, and the related Win Expectancy, can tell us everything we need to know about what succeeded in a victory or what failed in a loss. Start totting that data up in columns and there's a handy explanation of a team's strengths and weaknesses.

Pecota, Zips, Chone and Marcel are great tools, but they are literally only half the picture.

Nationals' Fielding Weekly #1

2009-06-16T00:50:00.002+01:00

In two earlier posts, I outlined the sorry state of fielding by the Nationals. Some of the problems in holding a lead are related to the difficulty the fielders have in preventing hits and their propensity to make errors. Although media attention has focused on the infield, the real problems appear to lay in the outfield. The infield is hovering close enough to the league average to make it tolerable. (An exception could be made for Cristian Guzman, who is poor; anyone for shortstop practice?)

It might be a good idea, since this blog is turning gradually into a Nationals' blog, to look at this more systematically, rather than just when some mediot starts yapping. In that spirit, I'm going to start monitoring fielding on hopefully a weekly basis, in order to spot any trends. There are two measures at the moment that are easily available and make use of play-by-play data. Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), published at Fangraphs, and Revised Zone Rating (RZR), which can be found at the Hardball Times. For this exercise, I'm going to make use of both UZR and UZR/150. (The latter is an extrapolation of existing data for 150 games.) UZR/150 is good for getting a sense of 'true talent'.

So, here's the ratings for all players who have played at least 40 innings on defence at a given position. They are ranked in order of innings at position.


Player          UZR       UZR/150      RZR
Zimmerman (3b)   8.0       19.9        .771
Johnson (1b)    -5.4      -12.2        .731
Guzman (ss)     -5.0      -12.6        .741
Hernandez (2b)   0.4        1.5        .856
Kearns (rf)      0.0      - 5.9        .879
Dunn (lf)       -4.6      -16.5        .769
Willingham (lf)  0.0        1.5        .880
Dukes (cf)      -4.4      -19.2        .911
Dunn (rf)       -6.3      -33.8        .756
Harris (cf)     -7.7      -42.9        .894
Belliard (2b)    2.0       13.0        .904
Gonzalez (ss)   -1.1      -11.9        .722
Dukes (rf)       0.8        3.7        .900
Maxwell (cf)     1.9       35.9        .833
Dunn (1b)       -1.9      -47.6        .600
Milledge (cf)   -0.4      - 8.4        .727
Harris (2b)     -1.7      -36.9        .733

Why 40 innings? Because I wanted to demonstrate that trading Johnson and moving Dunn to first-base is arguably not a good idea. (Dunn has played 44 innings at first.) Johnson is enough of a handicap at first. Why make it worse?

It's harder to make sense of RZR unless you know what the league average is at each position. Maxwell's relatively low RZR yet excellent UZR reflects his ability to get to balls out of his zone. The same also applies to Gonzalez at shortstop.

As far as fielding goes, this is the lineup I'd want to see based on current personnel in the system:

1b Johnson
2b Hernandez
3b Zimmerman
ss Gonzalez with a groundball pitcher, otherwise Guzman
lf Dunn
cf Maxwell
rf Dukes

As you can see, the odd-men-out here are Willingham and Kearns. If either can play some first, that would be a big help because it would then make more sense to move Johnson in a trade. Kearns is probably worthless on the market given his current problems hitting. Putting a bat like that at first isn't really worthwhile, either. He's a fifth outfielder as things stand. Willingham might have some value, but I don't know if it's all that much. Could he play first? His bat won't give away quite as much as Kearns's would.

St Claire vs McCatty - Some Data

2009-06-14T15:55:00.003+01:00

So, on 2 June 2009 Randy St Claire was fired and replaced by Steve McCatty. There's been some favourable comment about the new regime — allegedly pitching has improved. The trouble with making direct comparisons of 'St Claire 2009' with 'McCatty in the Big Leagues' is that McCatty is working with significantly different personnel over a shorter period of time. So, before it's too late, I decided to take a look while the names they both had to deal with were much the same.

From 2nd June to today is about the same length of time as from 20th May to 1st June. (In fact, McCatty has had an extra game in that time.) By 20th May, Daniel Cabrera had been removed from the rotation, and Scott Olsen was on the disabled list. The youngsters Stammen and Detwiler entered the rotation and have remained since. The bullpen hasn't change dramatically, with Kip Wells going on the disabled list. So 20th May to 13th June involves much the same personnel.

First, let's use the old Big Bad Baseball Annual Quality Matrix (QMAX) to analyse the starters. (I like QMAX, because it actually uses individual starts, as opposed to lumping everything together, and offers a more nuanced picture than the Quality Start.)

Coach       Success (Elite 
            Square   Square)   Hit Hard      --- 
St Claire      3       0           5          2
McCatty        6       2           1          2

The Elite Square is a subset of the Success Square, so don't add those together. In this case, it's a solid win for McCatty. This makes sense, after a fashion, because St Claire built his reputation working with veteran pitchers, and suddenly there weren't any in the Nationals' rotation. McCatty's more 'instinctual' approach might work better than St Claire's 'technical' methods with younger pitchers still learning the broad principles of pitching.

For relief, I took two elements. The Win Expectancy (WE) situation when the relief pitcher entered the game, and the net plus/minus after comparing the ideal result (no change to the leader's advantage in runs if the change occurs at the start of an inning; or, if the change is made mid-inning, all batters faced make outs) with the actual result.

Coach      Average WE             WE       WE+
           at entry              effect
St Claire      .254             -1.378     -1.79     
McCatty        .330             -3.230     -2.49

The WE+ is an attempt to translate the win expectancy effect to a common standard. The problem with the raw numbers is that the better performance of the starters under McCatty mean there is more win expectancy to lose than there was under St Claire. (Think of it as a reliever having an 8 per cent better chance of entering a close game under McCatty; there's just more win expectancy to lose to begin with.)

Basically, the bullpen under McCatty is having an even more difficult time than it was under St Claire. Some of that may be down to the fielding. If you take away the 12th June game, lost in part by Nick Johnson misplaying a foul pop-up, the WE+ number comes down to -1.88. Maybe the difference isn't so big.

On balance, from this evidence, the improvement in the rotation probably justifies the switch from St Claire to McCatty. I'd go so far as to say that a pitching coach really must stand or fall on how effective the rotation is.

STOP PRESS - Acta Rumours

2009-06-13T23:49:00.004+01:00

Oleanders and Morning Glories tells of a Ken Rosenthal (RoboThal to the Baseball Primer cognoscenti) report that the Sword of Damocles has dropped lower over Manny Acta's head.

The Washington Times' blog has this quote from Kasten: "And yet, we have a record of 16-43, which is, to me, inexplicable."

Really? What would be explicable with this roster, with its inadequate bullpen and atrocious outfield defence? 30-24? 22-37? 17-42?

I really hate it when top-level management shove the middle-level management under the wheels of a passing bus. We all know Bowden was at the root of the problem, the Bowden that was kept on far too long by ownership. Mr Kasten, maybe you didn't want him, but your associates ensured that he stayed to cause even more damage. Don't blame Mr Acta for failings at your level of the operation.

Nationals' Bullpen Hero of the Day #1

2009-06-13T23:09:00.004+01:00

I like to be fair, and given the recent performance of the bullpen, it's about time I started highlighting their successes as well as their failures. The first award is made for the 11th June game against the Reds.

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Beimel                   0.175
Tavárez                  0.121

I considered awarding a Goat for yesterday's game, but I decided that the real failing lay with Nick Johnson's foul pop-up error. Sorry, Nick; Ron Villone will be heaving a sigh of relief — there's a pun to end the entry with.

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #14

2009-06-12T14:29:00.004+01:00

I had this post all ready to go yesterday, but then the bullpen came through in yesterday's game I put it on hold. Being the sort of fellow who likes to accentuate the positive, I was going to hide Goat#14 (for the game of 10 June) within a post celebrating yesterday's heroes of the bullpen, but I haven't got a moment to do the analysis just now.

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Bergmann                -0.643
Villone                 -0.508
Hanrahan                 0.034
Beimel                   0.021
MacDougal                0.343

I really thought Villone was going to get it.

Defensive Breakthroughs?

2009-06-11T04:07:00.003+01:00

It really started here. But that was a blogpost about this. And it was soon followed by something we perhaps didn't know we needed.

While there are many fine new fielding metrics around using PBP (play-by-play data), to me the really important breakthrough is going to come when we get a reliable metric for fielding in the pre-PBP days. That's going to involve some kind of assumption about a piece of information we'll never have for most of baseball history - how many hits was a fielder responsible for.

I suspect it's quite important to start from the team level when calculating the value of fielding. (See Clay Davenport's article in the 2002 Baseball Prospectus for an example.) You then have a choice - either you can calculate the total of opportunities from the assumption that all balls will fall for hits, and thus the caught balls represent runs saved. Or you can look at fielding in terms of runs allowed, by thinking in terms of the number of mistakes. I suspect for a decent 'all of baseball history' metric, we need to think more along the lines of the latter. We need to establish 'expected runs' baseline against which to measure fielding.

I also came to a key realization after reading all this. Looking at the statistics when I was developing my Defensive Winning Percentage, I was surprised at how narrow the band is of fielding effectiveness. This is, I think, a reflection that there's both a floor and a ceiling to the effectiveness of fielders. Some of the credit is all down to the pitcher. All home runs except those inside-the-park, for example, are the pitcher's fault. Only some of the runs scored by those who walk, however, are the pitcher's fault. So there's some fielding input on that. But a walk and home run equals all the pitcher's fault.

Probably, the Fielding Experts will say I'm not being very original here. But I hadn't thought of it that way before.

Draft Day & Unfinished Business

2009-06-09T20:54:00.004+01:00

Today is the amateur baseball draft. In the olden days, one didn't know much about it until the next day's papers. Then, mlb.com started offering the audio of the conference call. I loved that. Great soundtrack for a June afternoon. Now it's one big party. Can't we go back to the olden days?

I also owe this blog some links to very interesting work related to defensive statistics that appeared on the Web recently. It's made me look back over my Defensive Winning Percentage method. I'll get round to it, I promise.

Nationals' Bullpen Goats of the Day #s 10, 11, 12, 13

2009-06-08T00:50:00.005+01:00

I've been a bit remiss this week, not awarding Goats of the Day. In part this is because the bullpen has generally improved, and it seems unfair to fault them for problems elsewhere on the team. However, here's the roundup for the eight games prior to Sunday's.

29 May - No award, batting failure.

30 May vs Phillies

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Villone                 -0.349
MacDougal               -0.062
Tavárez                 -0.009
Colome                   0.008
Wells                    0.012
Bergmann                 0.024

31 May vs Phillies

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Beimel                  -0.191
Hanrahan                 0.017
Bergmann                 0.034

2 June - Nats Win!

4 June vs Giants (game 1)

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan                 -0.187
Beimel                   -0.022
MacDougal                 0.059
Villone                   0.062

4 June vs Giants (game 2) - rain stopped play in 6th. No bullpen usage.

5 June vs Mets

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan                 -0.794
Villone                  -0.114
Bergmann                 -0.078
Beimel                    0.114
MacDougal                 0.153

6 June - Nats Win!

So four more names in the book. Time I ran some standings, maybe.

Nats' xFIP Horror Show

2009-06-05T13:33:00.003+01:00

For me, the best thing about the Hardball Times' web site is the statistics. (Well, next to some excellent articles from time-to-time, a subject I shall return to, I hope, over the weekend.)

Of course, if one is a fan of the Washington Nationals, this can create some upsetting reading. When I first stumbled over baseball on 'teh Intertube', as they say at Baseball Primer, DIPS had just hit version 2.0, I think, or was about to. The theory of DIPS is that pitchers have very little influence on the outcomes of balls in play. Out of the DIPS debate emerged FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, a way of calculating an ERA that set to one side the balls in play. And then the chaps at Hardball Times developed xFIP, which adjusts the home runs allowed in relation to the ratio of fly balls allowed by the pitcher. (Their research seems to indicate that a pretty consistent percentage of fly balls go for home runs, once one adjusts for the effects of the ballpark, and random variations.)

The objective of xFIP is to find a number that will more accurately predict a pitcher's future ERA. It works a bit better for starters than for relievers, although you can use it with caution for relievers. So, how about those Nationals?


Pitcher                  xFIP
Zimmermann               3.36
Hanrahan                 3.90
Detwiler                 4.46
Colome                   4.66
Tavárez                  4.81
Lannan                   4.92
Olsen                    5.04
Wells                    5.05
Stammen                  5.06
Villone                  5.20
Beimel                   5.32
Martis                   5.61
Bergmann                 5.97

Remember, these numbers don't include fielders booting balls, or just not having the range to get to a grounder. This is strikeouts, walks and home runs. It's pretty horrific, especially a closer with a 3.90 xFIP — relievers, to be useful, generally need to be at least half a run better than an average starter, and closers more like a run or more.

Basically, going by xFIP, Zimmermann looks good going forward, Detwiler is about a league average pitcher, and Lannan and maybe Stammen can fill out the back of a competitive team's rotation. And, as of 5 June 2009, that's all Nationals' fans have in the whole bullpen that's really worth keeping.

Day of the Lunkhead

2009-06-04T01:20:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, one of the last links to the 2004 Expos, Randy St Claire, was fired. He was philosophical about it all, which is fair enough. He was unlikely to be part of a contending Nationals team, which is probably one more manager away from that destination. Pitching coaches are often cronies of the manager, and it seemed unlikely he'd survive the next change. He'd also had a good run, some seven years as a pitching coach, and built a good reputation. I imagine he'll get a new job soon enough.

In the evening, Broadcaster Dibble, who is chalk to my cheese, started the game preview with a comment that basically said St Claire wasn't really the problem, that the pitchers need to throw strikes. Fair enough. If he'd left it there, I would have had nothing to blog about. But that's the trouble with Broadcaster Dibble, he never leaves well enough alone. Later in the broadcast, he launched into an incoherent ramble that started with pitchers needing to throw strikes, wandered into enthusiasm over Steve McCatty's 'by the gut' approach in contrast with St Claire's cerebral emphasis on game plans and mechanics, highlighted the fact that it wasn't just this year that Nationals' pitching was below league par, and wound up on a note that St Claire couldn't carry the entire can because the talent pitching for the Nationals wasn't up to scratch.

You're left with three conclusions - Broadcaster Dibble doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings; Broadcaster Dibble doesn't like an intellectual approach to the game; Broadcaster Dibble will just say whatever sounds good at the moment. And why not? Broadcasting is a very ephemeral occupation, very much here now, gone in a second. Unless, of course, you can watch the game again on the Greatest Invention Before Matt Wieters, mlb.tv

Then, while listening to the rain delay for tonight's game, I hear Pitching Coach McCatty. He's a sincere enough fellow, it sounds like. However, he was asked some question about video and said something along the lines of 'Yeah, I liked Lethal Weapon.' Now, I ask you — is he being glib or sarcastic? The persona he evinces suggests glib. However, would any modern pitching coach not consult video? Is this just a humourous way to say, Weaver-style, 'that's a @#$%!+\*&/(>< dumb question'? I don't really like bright people who pretend to be stupid, though. It often carries this kind of double-message, and might take advantage of the innocent waïf in a cruel and un-Christian manner.

Finally, the whole business raises some questions about this odd organization. At the AAA level, they had McCatty, who at the very least pretends to a radically different method to St Claire. Once you graduate McCatty Academy, you get to the Collège de St Claire, where suddenly you are asked to learn a whole new approach to pitching. These guys come up from the minors, nervous as a virgin on her wedding day, and they start getting seminars in place of heart-to-hearts? This does not suggest a seamless garment of organizational philosophy from Rookie League to The Show. I think that tells us more than General Manager Mike Rizzo might have intended about The Nationals' Way.

More Field of Goats

2009-06-02T02:51:00.003+01:00

I didn't realize, but UZR (a/k/a Ultimate Zone Rating), another method of rating fielding, is now available through Fangraphs. It's a daunting set of numbers, but the key one to look at is the last column, which measures the number of runs that a given fielder will 'save' over 150 games.

So let's run that ranking I did yesterday again. This ranked each player's fielding rating against those of qualified players in the NL. In most cases, that's about twelve players per position.

1b: Johnson, last
2b: Belliard, 4th; Hernandez, 9th.
3b: Zimmerman, 1st.
ss: Guzman, 11th.
lf: Willingham, 7th; Dunn, last.
cf: Dukes, last; Harris, last.
rf: Kearns, 7th; Dunn, last.

They more or less agree. Zimmerman comes out a lot higher in UZR, Willingham a bit lower. UZR does suggest that Dukes would make a good rightfielder, and Maxwell a GREAT centrefielder. If Mr Acta was channelling the Ghost of Bill McKechnie, he'd put Maxwell in centre, regardless of how he hit. In the circumstances, I think I would, too.

Field of Goats

2009-06-01T03:42:00.003+01:00

I haven't decided whether to do a Goat of the Day for the loss today against the Phillies. I have, however, finally done something I've been meaning to do for a while.

Nationals fans don't need to be told that their fielding is poor. The real question is 'how poor?'. Your typical baseball fan looks at the players objectively, in a kind of philosophical way. Babe Ruth or Ted Williams is the 'ideal' major-league ballplayer. Someone like Willie Horton has certain ballplayer qualities, but is not so perfect. Then you have the Sandy Valdespinos of this world, who have been seen with major-league ballplayers, but few would mistake them for one.

However, in practical terms, a baseball 'manager' needs to look at a team relatively, not objectively. Relative to what? Why, to their peers, of course. If your team's players are universally in the lower regions of a skill set, you've got a problem that needs fixing. Compare all your problems, and the worst ones are the ones that most need attention.

Instead of trotting out some numbers, and pretending to be all scientific, I'm going to be wholly empirical. Let me take the RZR numbers from The Hardball Times' fielding statistics, and rank all Nationals' fielders who have played 96 innings against the National League qualifiers at each position. (Catchers don't get an RZR, so we'll ignore them.) Please note that at no position do we have sixteen qualifiers, but usually about twelve or so.

1b: Johnson, 9th.
2b: Hernandez, 8th; Belliard, 1st.
3b: Zimmerman, 5th.
ss: Guzman, last; Gonzalez, 12th (or one ahead of Guzman).
lf: Willingham, 4th; Dunn, last.
cf: Dukes, last; Harris, last.
rf: Kearns, 12th; Dunn, last.

So, any suggestions?

I have two. Use Belliard as a late-inning defensive replacement for Hernandez. He's doing quite well with the leather. Make Willingham the regular left-fielder. On the evidence so far he's a tolerable glove out there. Most everything else is a sinkhole, defensively, except for Zimmerman, and even he's not going to make anyone forget Brooks Robinson in a hurry. A centerfielder is probably the most urgent need, since none of the options tried so far (except possibly for Kearns, whose sample size is as yet too small) finish anything but last.

Wonders Never Cease!

2009-05-30T15:43:00.003+01:00

Mr Acta pinch-hit for Detwiler in the top of the fifth. The Nationals were down, 5-1. To my mind, it was one of those mystifying Manny moves. The bullpen would leak a few more runs, and the Nationals would lose.

Amazing - five relief pitchers went out there, and the Phillies could not add a single more run! This is against the Washington Nationals' bullpen, the worst in the league.

And then the Nationals' bats woke up. They scored three more runs. The last four innings of the game were quite entertaining.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, although the Nationals lost, awarding a Goat of the Day seems churlish. Instead, I award a Pat on the Back to the chaps who took the mound last night.

Whither the Blue Jays?

2009-05-29T20:15:00.003+01:00

Somehow, I managed to obliterate the original post for this, packed as it was with all kinds of helpful links. I guess I just don't know all the ins and outs of blogger.com

So, here's the Cliff's Notes version:

20-game chart, blue line = runs scored, orange = runs allowed.

The Blue Jays may have given up lots of runs recently, but look at that downward trend in runs scored. That's the real culprit, the sputtering offense.

Nationals' Bullpen Goats of the Day #s 7, 8, 9

2009-05-29T19:03:00.011+01:00

Several awards to hand out today owing to modem issues.

25 May vs Mets

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Colome                 -0.079
Cabrera                -0.012
Wells                   0.004
Bergmann                0.010

26 May vs Mets

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Bergmann               -0.172
Wells                   0.005
Tavárez                 0.001

27 May vs Mets

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Colome                 -0.118
Villone                -0.109
Wells                  -0.055
Hanrahan                0.002

Much as I don't like to kick a man when he is down, I feel obliged to point out that Colome has been the goat in all but one of his outings. I'd also like to point out that Wells is excellent for one inning - so, Mr Acta, don't get ambitious.

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #6

2009-05-24T16:57:00.004+01:00

Another easy one to identify. Or was it?

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Villone                 -0.386
Tavárez                  0.008
Hanrahan                 0.045
Bergmann                 0.059

Those numbers suggest that it's unfair to blame the bullpen for this one. In this case, the previously vaunted Nationals' lineup just couldn't score the needed runs. Manny Acta certainly made that point about Friday's loss: "We just couldn't get anything going offensively, and it cost us," Acta said.

It might be more applicable to this one.

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #5

2009-05-23T22:49:00.002+01:00

This one is obvious.

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Wells                -0.794
Villone               0.114
Bergmann              0.149

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #4

2009-05-22T03:05:00.006+01:00

What with one thing and another, and my eagerness to post the Interleague comments, I didn't get round to doing the latest Goat of the Day this morning. In the spirit of Respice post te! Hominem te memento!, I otherwise mutely post the Goat rankings for Wednesday's game.

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Hanrahan              -0.711
Villone                0.114

Improving Interleague Play

2009-05-21T18:25:00.004+01:00

I'm a baseball traditionalist. Even at age 12, I quit being a fan of the local team, an AL one, and switched to a nearby NL one whose radio station's clear channel signal reached my abode. So, as you can imagine, I'm generally of the view that interleague play is the abomination of desolation, and not worth improving.

However, like the Expos being in DC now, I'm forced to accept that the situation isn't changing for the foreseeable future, so I'm left with thinking how to make the best of it.

To me, the main problem is that while there are natural rivals, like two New York teams, or two Ohio teams, there are also teams that don't have any natural rivals. To make Interleague Play work better, they need to get manufactured rivals. How to do it?

One obvious way is to pick a nearby team that isn't someone else's rival but, because I'm an historian and a traditionalist, I'd prefer to do something more complicated that actually made sense from a temporal perspective. If you are going to invent tradition, do it properly, like the British do.

I sat down and made a list of all the teams by league, and then I paired them off, initially by 'natural rivals'

AL Philadelphia with NL Philadelphia
AL Chicago with NL Chicago
AL New York with NL New York
AL Boston with NL Boston
AL St Louis with NL St Louis
AL Cleveland with NL Cincinnati

That left Washington and Detroit in the AL and Brooklyn and Pittsburgh in the NL. Now I adopted the principle of vicinity, and matched Washington with Brooklyn and Detroit with Pittsburgh.

Keep applying this principle but move pairings around as teams move or expansion occurs. Thus, the Dodgers end up being paired with the Angels, even though they originally were matched with today's Twins. This is what you would end up with, before we try to deal with the significant problem in that the leagues have different numbers of teams:

AL New York with NL New York
AL Boston with NL Atlanta
AL Chicago with NL Chicago
AL Detroit with NL Pittsburgh
AL Cleveland with NL Cincinnati
AL Baltimore with NL Philadelphia
AL Oakland with NL San Francisco
AL Los Angeles with NL Los Angeles
AL Texas with NL Houston
AL Kansas City with NL St Louis
AL Seattle with NL San Diego
AL Tampa Bay with NL Florida

But that gives us some leftover teams. Until there are a couple of contractions or expansions, we really have to create a concept of a 'rivalry pool'. In the AL, there's Toronto and Minnesota. In the NL, there's Milwaukee, Colorado, Arizona and Washington. For each of these teams there's a certain amount of sense in plunging them into this pool. Milwaukee switched leagues, Toronto lost its 'natural rival', Minnesota and Washington moved, Colorado and Arizona would actually make a pretty good 'natural rival' pairing, but they are in the same league. Being among the most recent expansion teams hurts them.

My solution would be to have each of the natural rivals play home-and-home series with one another as the core of the interleague programme. Meanwhile, the AL rivalry pool plays one series against two from the NL pool, alternating home and away each year, and cycling through all four teams through four seasons. E

Like so:

Year One       Year Two         Year Three     Year Four
Tor v Col (h)  Tor v Col (a)    Tor v Ari (h)  Tor v Ari (a)  
Was v Tor (a)  Was v Tor (h)    Was v Min (a)  Was v Min (h)
Min v Ari (h)  Min v Ari (a)    Min v Col (h)  Min v Col (a)
Min v Mil (a)  Min v Mil (h)    Tor v Mil (a)  Tor v Mil (h)

Eventually, one hopes two more teams will be added to the AL, and we can actually have a sensible Interleague Series.

I know this does nothing about balancing the schedule, but that's not really the point of interleague. It also would cut the number of those games down, and hopefully allow the intraleague schedule to balance out better.

Between Hell and Hell

2009-05-21T04:44:00.006+01:00

Tonight, I put on the radio to hear the Blue Jays' game while I plugged the computer into this Interweb thingy in order to watch the Nationals on mlb.tv

I switched the Blue Jays off after all the home runs. At least the Nationals were involved in my favourite sort of game, the pitchers' duel.

Feel free to check in tomorrow to see the gory statistical details of another bullpen loss, but in the mean time, I offer a telling snapshot:

Nationals Bullpen Goat of the Day #3

2009-05-20T13:10:00.005+01:00

Manny Acta's Bullpen Follies of Aught-Nine continued yesterday, although fortunately for my workload he only used two pitchers. That reduces my calculating duties to the bare minimum. Thanks, Manny!

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Beimel                 -0.946
Villone                 0.116

My initial response was that Beimel is really a one-inning pitcher, and Acta just left him in too long. But, I see an insidious poison here which I first noticed with Kensing. By a substantial majority, most times Acta brings in a reliever with the Win Expectancy between .500 and .750, they blow it. It's something of a mental issue out there, and it's probably going to take a pitcher with an infectious level of self-belief to turn this round.

In a move calculated to relieve pressure on an overworked bullpen, the Nationals brought up Jason Bergmann to replace the ineffectual Alex Cintron. Now, I've felt for a few days that Cintron might have improved a little with a bit more playing time, but that begs a few questions about where you're going to play him. Guzman's wielding a hot bat, Zimmerman is the best player, and Anderson Hernandez is already getting rests when Belliard comes in.

Thankfully, Iron Man Guzman is unlikely to miss any playing time.

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #2

2009-05-19T14:01:00.005+01:00

I didn't expect this to become a daily feature, but the bullpen was handed the lead in yesterday's game and managed to pass it back to the Pirates.

The game was marred by some curious decision-making by Manny Acta. In the bottom of the fifth, he pinch-hit for the pitcher. Starter Detwiler had been going well, and we all know the bullpen is stretched to cover four innings at the end of the game, so why make it start the sixth when you don't have to? I like Alex Cintron more than most, perhaps, but it's not as if he's a terrific pinch-hitter. Check his 'As PH' line in this chart, if you don't believe me.

Later in the game, down by three, Acta plays the infield in. Huh? I can see playing the infield in if you're down by one, but by three? Naturally, another run scores. Then, after Wells has seen off two left-handed batters, Acta replaces him with Beimel, using up another bullpen pitcher. Finally, he leaves closer Hanrahan in to throw over thirty pitches, in a game the Nationals seem likely to lose.

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Colome                 -0.703
Mock                   -0.648
Hanrahan               -0.078
Wells                  -0.053
Beimel                  0.002

Mock got the blown save and the loss, but he's not the Goat of the Day.

What's Up With the Rays?

2009-05-19T04:08:00.005+01:00

When spring training opened, one of my colleagues and I were chatting about the AL East. Living as we do near Toronto,

we gave voice to our woe
at having a tough row to hoe
in our division, with the BEASTS
of the EAST.

'And,' said my chum, 'now there's the Rays.' 'Yes,' I said, 'but they might not do so well this season.' 'Really?' he queried, giving me an odd look. I started to explain the Bill James' notion of the Plexiglass Principle, of how a team that goes from a season of many losses to one of many wins may spring back again in the third season. But our meeting began, and he probably thinks I'm some kind of genius. (We haven't met in recent weeks.)

I'll be the first to say I'm no genius. (Check out my Ross Detwiler prediction for proof.) However, I'm kind of pleased that someone might think otherwise.

That said, what is up with the Rays? They've reached .500 with today's game, so maybe this post will quickly be overtaken by events, but we can still analyse a slow start and hope it becomes relevant to return to in September.

Let's run some numbers like I did the other day for the Jays and the Royals.

Versus teams under .500, the Rays are 11-14.
Versus teams over .500, the Rays are 9-6.
When they score only two runs or less, the Rays are 0-8.
When they score three, four or five runs, the Rays are 4-10.
When they score six runs or more, the Rays are 16-2.

It's pretty basic. It's the Rays' pitching that is at the root of their problem. They have to score at least six runs to have a chance at a win (which they've done quite a few times, actually), and that's like a run and a half over the average.

So, keep an eye on those pitching stats, if you're a fan of an AL East team. If the team ERA starts coming down, those Rays may have deathly effects on the ambitions of the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays.

Nationals' Bullpen Goat of the Day #1

2009-05-18T19:09:00.005+01:00

The Washington Nationals blew yesterday's game in spectacular fashion, as Anderson Hernandez apparently was confused by the old 'hidden ball' trick. Unfortunately, it was his own team playing the trick on him! To quote from the Post:

'Hernández initially thought Zimmerman picked up the ball. The second baseman watched for the throw from the wrong source...."I throw it on the bag," Colome said. "Anderson, he thought Zimmerman was throwing the ball, not me."
"I lost it," Hernández said. "I didn't even see who had it." '

Well, move along folks, nothing to see here.

I've decided to start a feature, identifying the bullpen reliever who does the most damage in a Nationals' defeat, after being handed a lead. So, here's yesterday's rankings, by Win Expectancy, for the inaugural Bullpen Goat of the Day

Reliever            Effect on 
                    Win Expectancy
Colome              -0.865
Tavárez             -0.519
Beimel              -0.133
Villone             0.123

There's an old soccer joke about 'Jesus saves; [insert striker's name of your choice] scores on the rebound.'

Jordan Zimmermann's QMAX Prospectus

2009-05-17T19:42:00.004+01:00

Jordan Zimmermann is being treated to a particularly narrow strike zone by home plate umpire Mike Reilly in today's game. Even before that, though, his Quality Matrix readings were somewhat deflating for any view that he might be the second coming of Alvin Crowder or somebody. The question is whether this would be par performance for a prospect of his age. Let's look first at Zimmermann's ratings prior to today:

Date          Stuff,Command     QMAX
                ratings         Category
Apr 20            4,3           Success Square
Apr 26            5,4           --
May  1            6,3           Hit Hard
May  7            4,4           --
May 12            5,3           --

Zimmermann's shown a lot of promise if you watch him pitch, with impressive movement, but he's not really putting up great results here. The problem is he's not doing particularly well either with his 'Stuff' (preventing hits) or his Command (preventing walks).

But who to compare him with? Baseball Prospectus' 'deadly accurate' PECOTA player-projection system uses minor-league and major-league statistics to locate players showing similar statistical profiles. In the 2009 edition, they show four players as comparables for Zimmermann — Bobby Jones, Erik Hanson, Terry Taylor and John Maine. Taylor only pitched one game in the majors, but the others have all had reasonable careers. Let's look at the first five starts of each of them in turn, in chronological order.

Erik Hanson (1988)

Start         Stuff,Command     QMAX
                ratings         Category
1                  3,2          Success Square
2                  1,3          Success Square
3                  4,1          Success Square
4                  2,3          Success Square
5                  4,4          --

Well, he was pretty good, much better than Zimmermann, yet didn't pitch well past his age-30 season.

Bobby Jones (1993)

Start         Stuff,Command     QMAX
                ratings         Category
1                  5,3          --
2                  7,3          Hit Hard
3                  5,3          --
4                  3,3          Success Square
5                  2,1          Elite Square

That's more Zimmermann-like, almost identical command numbers, but he shows an improving arc, not Zimmermann's decline. Jones wasn't particularly effective past his age-28 season. However, like Hanson, Jones started his career in September, so maybe he had the advantage of facing a lot of cup-of-coffee scrubs.

John Maine (2004-5)

Start         Stuff,Command     QMAX
                ratings         Category
1                  6,5          Hit Hard
2                  2,4          Success Square
3                  3,5          Power Precipice
4                  4,3          Success Square
5                  5,4          --

Maine was a little better at hit prevention than Zimmermann, and a little more wild. He's still pitching, and doing well enough, although he's not an elite starter.

On the whole, I'd say Zimmermann's record as of today is about par; maybe just below par, but nothing to worry about. However, based on the story so far, and the absence of any seriously good pitchers in his comparables, I can't help but wonder if Zimmermann's over-hyped. He's got good stuff, but he's not dominating opposing hitters yet. I'll watch the rest of his season with interest, though. And I'm rooting for him to prove me wrong.

For Real? Royals and Blue Jays

2009-05-17T00:47:00.004+01:00

The big question in my neck of the woods is whether the Blue Jays are for real. But I've noticed the Royals are tied for first with the Tigers in the AL Central, so I thought I'd look at both of these blue teams and their surprising early season records.

Rather than do any micro-analysis, like I've been doing with Nationals' pitchers, I'm going to to a fairly basic macro-analysis by looking at two aspects of the won-lost record. First, how the teams perform against weak and strong teams; second, how they perform depending on how many runs they score.

               <.500 opponents          =>.500 opponents
Royals              10-7                      9-10
Blue Jays           13-5                     11- 9

                  0-2 runs          3-5 runs        6+ runs
                   scored            scored          scored
Royals              4-10             3-6             12-1
Blue Jays           1- 7             9-5             14-2

My answers are:
Royals - probably not
Blue Jays - maybe

Based on the results so far, I don't think the Royals offense is potent enough to sustain them over the season. Fourteen games with 2 runs or less scored is almost a third of their total played, and the fact they have a losing record in the 3-5-runs-scored games suggests that their pitching can't always keep the runs against down enough for their weak bats. However, thirteen games with 6 or more runs scored suggests something of the Little Girl With The Forehead Curl — when they are good they are very good.

The Blue Jays, by contrast, are winning with the offense. I don't think anyone expected that. Everyone focused on how they were going to overcome their pitching injuries. Well, one way is to outscore the opponents. They've scored at least six runs in over a third of their games. And their pitching has been good enough to keep them winning the 3-5-runs-scored games.

They're also winning more than they are losing against .500 or better teams. If they can keep this up (and let's see how a road trip against the BEASTS of the EAST in Boston and New York goes before we start getting too excited), then come September Canada might not be entirely absorbed in the chase for CFL playoff spots.

Adventures in Leverage, NatsTown, 15 May 2009

2009-05-16T13:47:00.008+01:00

Rather than post links for Washington-based stories, I've gone to a Philadelphia paper in order to highlight something important about perspective. Note that the Inquirer's story doesn't mention the three walks given up by Kip Wells. These were far more important than Ibanez' single in the outcome of the game, but nobody likes to win because the other guy screws up, do they?

Anyway, yesterday's brief introduction to Drinen's P turned out to be a useful curtain-raiser to a study of yesterday's Phillies vs Nationals tilt.

Reliever    Inning   P         Situation             Net Value
Mock         5.2   .770        1st&3rd, 2 out, up 2      -.279
Villone      5.2   .665        1st&2nd, 2 out, up 1      +.070
Colome       7     .683        empty, 0 out, up 1        -.446
Beimel       7     .460        1st&3rd, 0 out, up 1      -.742
Tavarez      7     .195        1st&3rd, 2 out, down 2    +.073
Hanrahan     9     .082        empty, 0 out, down 2      +.170
Wells       10     .500        empty, 0 out, tied       -1.000

It's Wells who is the villain of the piece, but Beimel tried hard to beat him. Also, when you add everything up, the Nationals lost more than one game last night. They lost exactly 2.154 games, a quirk of this system that is a product of not awarding value to offensive contributions. Thankfully for them, it only counts as one in the standings.

I feel sorry for Kip, by the way. He pitched his heart out in the 11th, but looked tired in the 12th. Acta's quote, though, is ominous: "[Wells] was starting [at AAA], stretched out to 78-80 pitches down there already. He got Victorino on two pitches. After that, he loaded the bases. No excuses. No explanations. We[!] just basically walked ourselves into death."

Examining Logan Kensing's P

2009-05-15T01:44:00.007+01:00

P is another statistic from the old Big Bad Baseball Annual stable. It was developed by Doug Drinen, and measures the effectiveness of relievers. Calculate the probability of the reliever's team winning when he enters the game (which was P), when he leaves, and what it would be if he was perfect. If you subtract the leaving score from the perfect score, a bad outing will result in a negative performance. If you subtract the leaving score from the entry score, a good outing will result in a plus performance. Thus, it was possible to evaluate not only the usage of relievers, but their contribution to the game.

On 29 April 2009, the Nationals traded a minor league roster-filler pitcher, Kyle Gunderson, 48th-round pick in 2007, to the Florida Marlins for Logan Kensing, a hard-throwing right-handed relief pitcher who had worn out his welcome in Miami through not pitching particularly well after Tommy John surgery. Manny Acta threw Kensing into the fray at his first opportunity on 30 April, and the 26-year-old has made five more appearances, most recently on 11 May.

Date          Inning     P       Situation           Net Value
30 April         7     .615        1st, 1 out, up 1      -.123
 1 May           6     .099        1st, 2 out, down 5    +.014
 6 May           6     .061        load, 1 out, down 3   -.069
 9 May           7     .204        load, 2 out, down 1   +.164
10 May           6     .592        none, 0 out, up 1     -.564
11 May           5     .069        load, 2 out, down 5   -.014

He's responsible for losing over half a game in the short span of about two weeks, as his Value scores add up to -.592 (A value of 1.000 would equate to a game.)

But looking more closely at the data, Kensing is a tolerable mop-up man when behind. The disappointment is that he has absolutely failed to protect a lead. You wonder whether he gets too nervous when it's close. I think he might stick in the Nationals' bullpen, if they've still got players there with options, as the sixth man coming out to fill-in during blowouts.

EDIT: Kensing was designated for assignment the same day that I wrote this. I also corrected some mistakes in my calculations above.

The 500 Club

2009-05-14T16:06:00.003+01:00

Baseball Think Factory published a link to this blog entry about guys who have hit 500 home runs or more. Reading it while sipping my morning coffee, I rather flew off the handle, because it's a good example of how not much thinking and a need to expostulate the first thing that comes into one's head can land one in the Realm of Medioticity. What follows is an edited and expanded version of what I posted at the Think Factory.

The problem with this Rant is that it's a very clear-cut example of selective understanding. Take the 'Lively Ball' era, beginning in 1920. By the time Rosey, the blog entry's author, is 6, 5 players have hit 500 home runs, or one every 9.2 years. So, on that basis, by 2009, we should expect there to be 9 or 10 current members. But that masks a slight problem. In 1920, the total number of home runs hit in the same league as where Ruth hit 54, amounted to 369. In Ruth's last 40-homer season, 1932, the AL hit 707 home runs. Logic alone tells you that if more home runs are going to be hit, more players are likely to reach 500.

The next players to join Rosey's Original Five were Mickey Mantle and Eddie Matthews. Let's use Mantle as an example, since he played in the same league and park as the Babe. Mantle first reached the 40-homer plateau in 1956, when he hit 56. The league as a whole (still eight teams) hit 1075! Homers have gone up across the league. That's going to mean more 500-homer careers are coming.

And they did. By the end of 1971, the 500-club had twelve members. One every 4.25 years. So, by 2009, at that rate, we'd expect twenty members. By the time little Rosey is 11, he can expect the home-run club to double when he's fifty.

But wait — there's a big fall-off in new entrants all of a sudden. Between 1972 and 1996, only three more members enter the club. What's going on? We've gone to one every 4.25 years, to one every 5.7 years. By 2009, we should anticipate fifteen members.

Then, 1997 through 2008 (let's leave our latest member, Gary Sheffield, out of this), NINE players enter the 500 club. Everybody is talking about steroid-inflated numbers.

I was doing a little exploration of the rec.sport.baseball archives, and I found an interesting post by notorious sabermetrician Don Malcolm (of Baseball Sabermetric and Big Bad Baseball Annual fame), in which he tallied up a measure of extra-base hits by league. He was making another point, but for my purposes, Malcolm showed how 1950s baseball and 1990s baseball are very similar in terms of extra-base hits. However, in the 1960s we had the Little Deadball™ era, when they raised the mound and fiddled with the strike zone. Then, of course, although they lowered the mound, there was a wave of ballpark building that brought a generation of bigger, artificial-turf, pitcher's parks, in which it was hard to hit home runs. And we got the 'greatest-ever™' era in baseball, the 1969-86 period. At the end of this, after homerriffic 1987, there was some fiddling with the strike zone again, and homers fell off.

The biggest concentration of the 'Roid Era' sluggers in a five-year period comes in 2003-7: Palmeiro, Sosa, Griffey, Thomas, A-rod. Five names. Why am I interested in a five-year period? Because between 1967-71, seven players entered the hallowed halls of the 500 club: Mantle, Matthews, Aaron, Banks, Robinson, Killebrew, Mays.

So, why aren't we asking questions of them? Because we know that some of that power came from the era they played in. The powerful 1950s inevitably led to a sudden jump in the 500 Club in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Likewise, the invention of Homerball in about 1993 meant that we'd be getting a big boost in 500-Club membership right around the middle of the 2000s. And we did. The class of 2005-9 may be a little bit bigger than we have a right to expect, based on the rate of entry to the 500 Club. Some of that may be down to 'drug cheating'. But, as of yet, we've no idea what variance we might expect would be legitimate, because neither Rosey nor I have done a study.

If you know of one, feel free to post a link.

Martis vs Cabrera

2009-05-14T04:00:00.002+01:00

For the past few days I have posted the Quality Matrix, or QMAX, stats for the Nationals starter on the Game Chatters at Baseball Think Factory. For those of you who've forgotten, QMAX was a somewhat controversial method used by the old Big Bad Baseball Annual to evaluate pitchers. It could lead to some odd results, such as the possible equation of Jose Lima and Randy Johnson as pitchers of similar value c. 1998.

In exactly that vein, I observed that Shairon Martis, not exactly a Young Phenom™ but still a promising pitcher, and Daniel Cabrera were more alike than they might seem. To which an astute Think Factory reader responded to the effect that I should get my head out of my spreadsheet and actually watch some games, you know.

It's a fair point. Martis has much more self-possession on the mound — in other words, The Good Face™. Now, I actually put a lot of value in that kind of mature handling of difficult situations. But, my main point was that in terms of what the Nationals had got so far out of the two pitchers this season, there isn't all that much between them. Let's use the QMAX method to compare the two pitchers' overall effectiveness prior to 13 May's game.

Daniel Cabrera
Power Precipice starts (2) - April 19 & 30.
'Meh' starts (3) April 8 & 13, May 6.
Hit Hard starts (2) April 25, May 11.

Shairon Martis
Elite Square (1) May 2.
Success Square (1) April 16.
'Meh' (1) April 21.
Hit Hard (3) April 10 & 27, May 8.

Today's start added another to the Success Square, so with this he surpassed Daniel Cabrera in terms of contributing valuable starts to the 2009 Nationals. (He's also showing an 'iambic' pattern of good start/bad start.)

But there's another matter here. Daniel Cabrera is about to turn 28, Martis is just 22. When you see young pitchers putting out Power Precipice starts, you think 'wow, there's a good risk for a future'. Daniel Cabrera, however, is a little old to still be flirting at the Power Precipice. It's got that name for a reason—the pitcher might fall off, but might turn into Randy Johnson. Cabrera may be a serviceable fourth or fifth starter on a second-division team, but my Game Chatterer is quite right to express scepticism over any attempt to avoid a harsh judgment that Cabrera, on the basis of his 2009 starts, is anything other than a stopgap, a $2.6 million one-year gamble that at the moment looks like not paying out much more than a dime.

Daniel Cabrera to the QMAX

2009-05-12T03:43:00.004+01:00

Using the old QMAX method of the Big Bad Baseball Annual, we get the following for Daniel Cabrera before tonight's start:

Apr 08 5,3 -- 4.45 ERA
Apr 13 5,4 -- 5.69 ERA
Apr 19 2,5 Power Precipice 2.92 ERA 
Apr 25 6,5 Hit Hard 10.46 ERA
Apr 30 2,5 Power Precipice 2.92 ERA
May 06 5,5 -- 7.42 ERA

Sadly, he's winless in spite of two good outings.

EDIT: Last night (May 11) Cabrera was hit really hard, 6,7 for a 17.78 ERA, his worst outing of the season. I think the Washington Times wants him gone. The Post is down on him, too. I don't know, I think I'd give him a little more rope. I believe he's scheduled to pitch Saturday. (04h02, 13 May, BST)

Opportunity bunts!

2008-07-25T09:17:00.002+01:00

In connection with a Diamond Mind Baseball league I play, I was looking at Jerry Royster's brief major-league managerial career. (He's now big in Korea.) The scuttlebutt had him as an old school manager who valued the bunt and the little things - taken the extra base, moving the runner over, etc

Obviously, the simple way to look at such things is to count up all the sacrifice hits and see who bunted the most. By this measure, Royster stacks up pretty well, being in the top 25 percent of NL managers that season. (The DH-rule means comparisons across leagues don't apply as oftentimes the bunt is the default move when the pitcher is at bat.)

Team         SacHit     SB+CS        OBP
MON           108       182          .334
CIN            95       168          .330
StL            83       128          .338
MIL (Royster)  79       144          .320
CHI            78        84          .321
NY             75       129          .322
SF             68        95          .344
PIT            68       135          .319
ATL            67       115          .331
PHI            67       147          .339
LA             67       133          .320
HOU            64        98          .338
ARI            62       138          .346
FLA            59       250          .337
COL            49       186          .337
SD             45       115          .321

(Royster didn't particularly steal much, so let's put that question to one side for today.) Royster was fourth overall, but there was some bunching so some of that might be down to opportunities.

Exactly! Not only do we need to know how many times Royster bunted, to get an idea whether he has any tendency to bunt, but we also need to know how many opportunities he had to order a bunt. To give you some guide already, I've listed the team OBP above. You can see that the Brewers were near the bottom in that category, so Royster's high bunt total and low OBP probably means we're going to see a further adjustment upwards.

To do this, I subtracted from the number of hits, the number of extra-base hits, stolen bases and caught stealings; then I added walks and hit batsmen. (This is not perfect. One also would like to know how many wild pitches and balks were involved in moving the runner over.) After that, you can divide the number of sacrifice hits by the number we'll call MO1 (Men on 1st). I'll call the resulting number the bunt percentage.

Team        SacHit      MO1      BuntPct
MON           108       1373       .079
CIN            95       1380       .069
MIL (Royster)  79       1343       .059
StL            83       1470       .056
CHI            78       1408       .055
NY             75       1409       .053
PIT            68       1350       .050
LA             67       1342       .050
PHI            67       1443       .046
ATL            67       1456       .046
SF             68       1518       .045
FLA            59       1381       .043
HOU            64       1501       .043
ARI            62       1537       .040
COL            49       1429       .034
SD             45       1447       .031

It changes things a little, although you can see from this that the simple total of sacrifice hits is a pretty good guide to how much a manager calls for the bunt. The main effect is to show how much Dusty Baker (with the Giants), Jimy Williams (with the Astros) and Bob Brenly (with the Diamondbacks) didn't bunt, relative to their opportunities. However, we're still not done with what these statistics can show us.

Using the standard deviation (the average amount that any of the bunt percentages is away from the mean), we can get an idea of whether Royster's .059 was particularly extreme behaviour. The standard deviation for this list is .012. The average is something like .050. Therefore, if the difference between a team's bunt percentage and the league average is more than .012, that's an example of extreme behaviour.

Team      Deviation   Number of StDev
MON            .029            3
CIN            .019            2
SD            -.019            2
COL           -.015            2
MIL (Royster)  .009            1
ARI           -.009            1
StL            .007            1
HOU           -.007            1
FLA           -.007            1
CHI            .006            1
SF            -.005            1
ATL           -.004            1
NY             .003            1
PHI           -.003            1
PIT            .001            1
LA             .000            1

So, Royster didn't really deviate all that much from the average NL manager in 2002. He was headed in that direction, but didn't quite make it. The real extremists when it came to the bunt were Frank Robinson, who bunted an awful lot (into the third standard deviation!), and Bruce Bochy and Bob Boone, at opposite ends of the spectrum.

There's another issue one should bear in mind when reading this sort of stuff. Royster's team wasn't particulary good, finishing with over 100 losses (94 down to Royster's tenure) and having the worst offense in the league, bar one (Pittsburgh). In such circumstances, a manager may call more bunts, steal more and go with the hit and run in order to make something happen, or light a spark under the team. It rarely works, but we tend to fidget more when we're unhappy than when we're happy. Because Royster's major-league career is so short, we'd really like to know more about his minor-league one. Perhaps, one day, when I assemble the statistics, we'll be able to shed some more light on whether, for Jerry Royster, opportunity doesn't knock but bunts.

Defensive Winning Percentage - Rivals

2008-07-18T17:19:00.000+01:00

There are a couple of other well-known defensive metrics that attempt to implement a zone on seasons without a Zone Rating. One is TotalZone, developed by Sean Smith (AROM at Baseball Think Factory), and the other is Dan Agonistes' Simple Fielding Runs.

Both of these estimate a Zone Rating using the Retrosheet play-by-play data, which only goes back as far as 1953. That's fine, but with the current rate at which new seasons are added means we have to wait another thirty years or so to get all Major League history covered. I don't think I can wait that long, as I'll be near 80 by the time we get there. And I don't expect to live to such a ripe age.

In the meantime, we need another system, which is where I think my Defensive Winning Percentage wins out. With a few tweaks, I think I can improve it for the pre-1954 period, when it is hampered by not knowing the number of doubles and triples a pitching staff has given up.

A Defensive Metric 4

2008-07-16T14:55:00.000+01:00

So far, I've identified these flaws with my Defensive Winning Percentage:

1) The statistics will, by their nature, include plays made on balls out of a fielder's zone. This is not necessarily a good thing.

2) The Positional Adjustment, being based on traditional Zone Rating, doesn't accommodate flaw (1). Thus, one ends up with estimated Zone Ratings in excess of 1, which is a logical nonsense. What I should do is adjust the positional factor by the distribution of plays on each team, but that opens up a nightmare world of a lot of work. Another option would be to cap the estimated Zone Rating. Or you could leave it, and bear it in mind when looking at some of the data.

3) There's no adjustment for groundball tendencies of pitchers, nor handedness of batters. This is quite conscious, in part because I don't see the point of doing this for a metric trying to measure what has happened, as opposed to talent level. In other words, I think a player whose pitching staff is pitching to his strengths, deserves credit. I may yet incorporate these factors, but at this stage I get the impression that on the whole the measurements even out.

4) It really is only what I'd call reasonably reliable as far back as detailed statistics from Retrosheet go, including the all-important doubles and triples given up by a team's pitchers. Without those, I'm more likely to believe conventional wisdom where my system challenges it.

I intend to stick with this unsatisfactory metric for the time being. I think it does a good job at giving us an idea of the relative ability of a team's fielders at a given position for an era before modern play-by-play metrics. That's all I ask of it, and that's all I ask you to ask of it.

A Defensive Metric 3

2008-07-15T20:20:00.000+01:00

Having reached a total for Runs Saved Above Average for Washington Senators shortstops in 1970, we can use this to calculate a Defensive Winning Percentage.

Offensive Winning Percentage is a tried and tested sabermetric stat that uses a player's Runs Created to make an estimate of how many games a lineup of nine players with that Runs Created would win. You can find one set of Offensive Winning Percentages at each player's page on baseball-reference.com Ed Brinkman's page, under the Special Batting heading, shows his 1970 OWP was .394. That means a team of Ed Brinkmans would win about 63 games in a 162-game season. Let's look at whether his glove made up for that.

The first step is to calculate how many runs an average team in that league scores. In 1970, 12 teams scored 8109 runs, so that means the average team scored 675.7

Subtract the number of Runs Saved Above Average. That was 24.7 as we saw in the last post. (If it had been negative, as was the case with the Cleveland Indians' shortstops in 1970, we would add it.)

675.7 - 24.7 = 651

Now, with Offensive Winning Percentage, you'd take the runs created for a team of Ed Brinkmans, and divide it by the sum of Ed Brinkmans plus the league average, all raised to the exponent 0.83. That would represent the runs scored divided by the runs scored plus the runs allowed. We do the same thing, but in this case it is the runs allowed that is the variable. Eg,

Average Team's Runs Scored = 675.7
Team with Washington SS Runs Allowed = 651

675.7^0.83/(675.7^0.83 + 651^0.83) = .508

Therefore, the Washington shortstops, backing up a league average offense, would win about 82 games. If you added 82 and 63, and divided by two, you'd get a reasonable estimate that a team of 1970 Washington Senators' shortstops, batting like Ed Brinkman, would win about 72 games. No way is Ed Brinkman going to carry you to the pennant, but he was a better player than his team, which could only manage 70 wins.

However, when you compare the Senators' shortstops to the rest of the league, you can see that, starting from the mean point of DWP's, .501, Washington, with Minnesota, had the best fielding shortstops in the league. The Twins' Leo Cardenas was probably the proper Gold Glove winner that season, as his fielding percentage was slightly better, .978 to Brinkman's .974 .508 is excellent for DWP, but it isn't historically remarkable. You really need to push your DWP past .510 to get into remarkable territory.

Oh, who won the AL Gold Glove that year? It was Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio, then playing for the White Sox. Their shortstops managed a DWP of only .498, so Cardenas and Twins fans have a good case for feeling aggrieved.

I'm going to look next at a couple of problems with DWP, which I think is good, but with a couple flaws that always need to be borne in mind when using it.

EDIT: Edited to correct the omission of the Exponents!

A Defensive Metric 2

2008-07-14T12:04:00.001+01:00

I promised an example of how to work out Defensive Winning Percentage, so let's use Eddie Brinkman, Washington Senators shortstop for 1970, his last season before the Detroit Tigers got him in a trade.

The first part of the process is derived from Charlie Saeger's system of Context-Adjusted Defense. This allocates outs and hits to the infield and the outfield.

The first step is to estimate how many groundball and flyball outs the team allowed for the season.

Groundball Outs = Team Assists - Catcher Assists - 1b DPs - OF Assists.
Flyball Outs = Team Putouts - Team Strikeouts - Team Assists.

For 1970 Washington, we get the following
GB outs = 1942 - 80 - 145 - 28 = 1689
FB outs = 4369 - 823 - 1942 = 1604

Then, you need to estimate the number of hits held against infielders, and then those against the outfielders.

IF Hits = Subtract from the total Team Hits Allowed the total of (home runs + doubles + triples). Take 70 percent of the difference. Divide this by the ratio of GB outs to (outs-strikeouts).
OF Hits = Subtract from the total Team Hits Allowed the number of home runs and the total of IF hits. Take 70 percent of this number.

For 1970 Washington, we get:
IF Hits = ((1375-(139-232-47))*0.7)/(1689/3339) = 344
OF Hits = (1375-139-348)*0.7 = 625

Now you are ready to estimate the Zone Rating.

Subtract from the number of GB outs the number of Team pitcher assists. Add the number IF hits. Take 30 percent of this number (this is a positional adjustment, like the one used in Win Shares) and add it to the number of errors made by Senators' shortstops.Take the result and use it to divide the number of shortstop assists.The result is your estimated Zone Rating for all Washington shortstops in 1970.

((1689-220)+344)*0.3 = 543
543 + 23 = 566
593/566 = 1.05

Multiply the estimated Zone Rating by the average number of plays made at the shortstop position, as calculated by Chris Dial in his Dr Strangeglove piece on Baseball Think Factory, and then by the Run Value he has calculated for plays made at each position.This is the Runs Saved by all Senators' shortstops in 1970.

1.05 * 532 *.753 = 420.63

Following the same procedures, we get a total for the American League in 1970 of 394.39 Runs Saved by all AL shortstops. Subtract the league runs saved from the Washington runs saved.This gives you how much better a Washington shortstop was than an average AL shortstop at saving runs.

420.63-394.39 = 24.7

Brinkman started 157 games at shortstop for Washington in 1970, so at worst we can credit a substantial portion of that quality to him.It's worth noting that in 1968, when Brinkman only appeared in 77 games at short, Washington shortstops managed to save 0.7 runs, so it seems likely that Brinkman is worth even more than 24.7.

You're now ready to calculate the Defensive Winning Percentage.