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Competitive Balance (July 25, 2003)

Posted 1:18 p.m., July 26, 2003 (#5) - Joel Wertheimer
  There is also the idea of the system that the Japenese have, where you can have as many teams in a market as that market will handle. Free movement, free markets.

UZR, 2000-2003 (December 21, 2003)

Posted 1:45 a.m., December 28, 2003 (#13) - Joel Wertheimer(e-mail)
  MGL and Tango,
I've been reading this section and your fanhome stuff for awhile, and I've been too timid to join conversation until now. Just to start, thanks for the incredible work you guys have done.

I didn't know anywhere else to put this, so:

I was thinking about defensive positioning, and how it eludes the scope of UZR thus far. But couldn't franchises which have time and resources that we do not have do some work on this.

For example, we know that certain managers last year were really lazy about reading scouting reports and seemed to be bad at positioning their fielders (Grady Little). A fairly sure-handed, supposedly slightly-below average second-baseman quickly became known as "The Statue" and if it weren't for some offensive-heroics in the September and the playoffs would have been remembered as such for the Red Sox.

Clearly, we can't regard an ill-positioned Walker's UZR as representative of his true range skill and hand skill. All over the league we'll see players whose talents and deficiencies are enhanced or masked by bad managerial work or lack of preparation.

A team like the Red Sox could hire a scouting staff to look at the positioning of various players pre-pitch, whether on tape or in person. Each player would be assigned a specific position on the field pre-pitch, and then the teams could find what the ideal positioning for that specific batter/pitcher matchup would be. Maybe there would not be enough individual data for each matchup, but the teams could break the batters up by hit charts and the pitchers up by pitcher type.

Next, the team would figure out some positioning-metric, such as mean deviance from ideal pre-pitch position. Teams could find out the correlation between this deviance and UZR, or their preferred metric, giving them some sense of how the bad positioning affected their UZR. Further, this relationship could be non-linear and that extremely bad positioning had an exponential effect on UZR. Maybe for really good fielders, positioning doesn't matter, etc, they make up for it with their range and the balls they don't get to, nobody could.

After applying those adjustments, teams would have a better idea of the TRUE SKILL LEVEL of individual players. Combine that skill level with good preparation by the team and managers (which NFL players are great at, and you never hear of it in baseball outside of Curt Schilling).

UZR, 2000-2003 (December 21, 2003)

Posted 7:57 p.m., December 28, 2003 (#16) - Joel Wertheimer
  The one place where the Red Sox new brass did not have an influence last year was with Grady. Theo was very hands off with the team management. But you are probably right on Walker. I was more just using that as an example.

I also think it is possible, that for Nomar positioning doesn't matter that much, his problem are his hands, not his range. He gets to all kinds of balls, it's errant throws that are his problem. Walker is just terrible.

I wonder if positioning is more important for the corners than the middle of the field. 3rd base and 1st base positioning seems like it would be particularly important for line-outs, but UZR doesn't take that into account, right? Even for hard hit grounders though.

FIP and DER (December 30, 2003)

Posted 10:33 a.m., December 31, 2003 (#5) - Joel Wertheimer
  I emailed Tango about this recently because I found that with Derek Lowe, one can notice that his BB rate is correlated with his balls in play rate.
I wonder if one control's for a subset of pitchers, groundball pitchers for example, the finding might be different. Simply because there is not a high R^2 across all pitchers does not mean that a certain group of pitchers.

Studes, the regression I ran in the Derek Lowe study was BBrate = constant + DERX + DER*krateX + u. If you still have that database, that might be something to play around with.