Individual Poster Page

See copyright notice at the bottom of this page.

List of All Posters

Mark Prior and the Perfect Delivery (September 30, 2003)

Posted 1:04 p.m., September 30, 2003 (#1) - Chuck Oliveros
  Being a particular fan of pitching, I would like to see the kind of study of pitching mechanics that you mention. However, to do it right, I don't think that you can rely on the judgement of a live observer. The would be errors in judgement, depending on the astuteness of the scout. If you really want to know how consistently a pitcher, say Prior, throws with sound mechanics, you would have to videotape him and watch it in slow motion, perhaps even measuring arm angles, etc. I've watched Prior some and, though I'm far from an expert, he seemed to be remarkably consistent. Other pitchers aren't. A particularly egregious example, is Mike Hampton of the Braves. Not only are his overall mechanics questionable but you can tell when he is getting emotionally stressed on the mound because it's apparent in his mechanics. He seems to kind of hop on his follow-through.

One other thing I wonder about though. Do excellent mechanics protect a pitcher from the kind of elbow damage caused by sliders and splitters. John Smoltz has excellent mechanics but he still tore his elbow up.

Gleeman - Jeter - Clutch (October 30, 2003)

Posted 4:45 p.m., October 31, 2003 (#11) - Chuck Oliveros
  I must say that I find reading about clutch hitting to be frustrating. The reason is that, when sabermetricians talk about clutch hitting, they're talking about something different than the general public. The sabermetrician, in effect, defines clutch hitting operationally. For example, a clutch hitter is one who performs better when runners are in scoring position in a close game or some such. However, that is not what is generally meant by clutch hitting. In general, when people speak of clutch performances, they mean rising to the occasion when the pressure's on. That means that the player must perceive the situation as clutch, and we frankly don't have any way of knowing when a player perceives it that way. For example, let's say hitting well with the score close late in the game is used as a measure of clutch hitting. Consider the following two situations. It's the final game of the season and the winner goes to the playoffs. The home team is down by a run. It's the bottom of the ninth and there's a runner on second. This is undoubtedly a clutch situation and the guy coming to the plate will certainly see it as such. However, if you have the same situation and the home team has already locked up a spot in the playoffs and the game means nothing, then I doubt that the player is going to perceive that as a clutch situation.

What I'm getting to is this. We can't really say anything about the existence or non-existence of some personal ability to perform in so-called clutch or pressure situations, and we have a limited ability to say something about performance in situations that may be clutch situations.

HOOPSWORLD.com Review: Pro Basketball Prospectus 2003-04 Edition (November 18, 2003)

Posted 10:54 a.m., November 19, 2003 (#1) - Chuck Oliveros
  I know that attempts have been made to emulate sabermetric analysis in basketball and football, but how valuable are such attempts? Concepts such as RBI are criticized by sabermetricians because they are team dependent. There few individual statistics in football or basketball that are not hugely team dependent. How do you separate out individual contributions?

HOOPSWORLD.com Review: Pro Basketball Prospectus 2003-04 Edition (November 18, 2003)

Posted 3:09 p.m., November 20, 2003 (#5) - Chuck Oliveros
  I took a look at FootballOutsiders.com and their various stats, though interesting, all seem to be team dependent. For example, they have a ranking for running backs but they don't seem to have a methodology for separating out the running backs individual ability from the quality of his offensive line. A superb offensive line can make a mediocre running back look good.

In fact, these stats seem to be oriented toward fantasy football and gambling, which is fine, but what would really interest me are studies of the sort that would be of interest to a GM's, studies that reliably rank players at all positions. It's all well and good to rank offensive and defensive lines, but I would want some metric that measured the value of each and every member of that line. That may not be possible.

HOOPSWORLD.com Review: Pro Basketball Prospectus 2003-04 Edition (November 18, 2003)

Posted 10:57 a.m., November 21, 2003 (#7) - Chuck Oliveros
  Head Football Outsiders,

I didn't mean to be critical of your attempts. I merely wanted to point out what I saw as the difficulty of coming up with metrics for football players. I can see how it might be possible to separate out the contribution of a team's offensive line from a running back's own innate abilities, but how would you, for example, even approach coming up with a metric that measures the ability of an individual offensive lineman?

Again, I'm not being critical of your efforts. I just wonder how much useful statistical analysis is possible in football when it comes to rating individual players.

Sabermetric Reference - CATCHER'S FIELDING (November 27, 2003)

Posted 7:24 a.m., November 28, 2003 (#1) - Chuck Oliveros
  I guess that, given his offense, Gary Carter would then be the best overall catcher in that 20 year time period. I live in Atlanta and have followed the Braves for a long time. I was surprised to see Bruce Benedict rated so high. I remember him as a good catcher, but had no sense of him as one of the best defensive catchers of the 1972-92 era.

Professor who developed one of computer models for BCS speaks (December 11, 2003)

Posted 2:05 p.m., December 11, 2003 (#2) - Chuck Oliveros
  "The computer speaks!"

I hate that kind of remarks, not to mention those like the one made by Tony Kornheiser, "This is a man versus machine issue." It's nothing of the kind. In determining BCS rankings, the computer is little more than a sophisticated calculator. It is computing results based upon algorithms that implement the criteria decided upon by the humans who run the BCS. It makes no more sense to say that the computer itself is doing the ranking, than it would be to say that a sports writer's article is written by the computer upon which his word processor resides.

Baseball America Past Scouting Reports - 2003 Award Winners (December 23, 2003)

Posted 4:39 p.m., December 23, 2003 (#1) - Chuck Oliveros
  I would find these a lot more entertaining if they contrasted them with other players who got equally positive reports but flopped.

Forecasting Pitchers - Adjacent Seasons (January 30, 2004)

Posted 11:56 a.m., January 30, 2004 (#5) - Chuck Oliveros
  I was surprised that SO rates peaked at such an early age. I wonder why that is? I find it hard to believe that a physical decline would begin so early. Could it be that young pitchers learn to pace themselves and take a little something off their fastballs in the interests of pitching more effectively? Is there a study that could be constructed to explain that?

The genius of Paul DePodesta (February 4, 2004)

Posted 10:08 a.m., February 5, 2004 (#8) - Chuck Oliveros
  DePodesta denigrates scouts in his piece and, I suspect, any traditionalists who read this article (if they would indeed read it) are likely to be turned off. Now, as tangotiger and others have pointed out, an efficient organization requires both performance analysis and scouting. The problem in the past, IMO, has been that there haven't been any rational scouting standards. DePodesta talks about the scout raving about the guy who has all the tools that keeps swinging at the slider in the dirt. That struck me. A well-trained scout would think that this aspect of the player's observed performance could be significant and would include it in a report. The problem isn't that the process of scouting is flawed. It's that most organizations apparently don't have a system of scouting in which scouts are trained and according to which they are evaluated. However, such an approach is as likely to meet resistance as have the performance-oriented standards.