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Banner Years

November 4, 2002 - Mike Green (e-mail)

What about the effect of contract status? Have studies been done of performance outside of normal variations in the last year of a contract with impending free agency/arbitration? I can think of a number of players who had their banner year as they entered free agency.

DRA Addendum (Excel) (January 16, 2004)

Posted 4:00 p.m., January 20, 2004 (#14) - Mike Green
  Dale Murphy's poor showing, and Glenn Hubbard's excellent one, on the early-mid 80s Braves led to questions about the adequacy of the flyball/groundball staff adjustments in extreme cases. I'm wondering whether the 86 rating for Omar Moreno is available to help see whether Murphy was really as bad as he looks.

Futility Infielder - 2003 DIPS (January 27, 2004)

Posted 12:16 p.m., January 28, 2004 (#27) - Mike Green
  Andrew, Mike Emeigh has presented very persuasive evidence that Glendon Rusch consistently gives up a much higher rate of line drives than the norm. In other words, for Rusch, as well as for the knuckleballers, there is good reason to doubt the significance of DIPS as a projection tool.

Tom Tippett makes a good case that there are significant methodological problems with McCracken's DIPS research, and that indeed there is more to pitching than K, W and HR allowed rates.

Futility Infielder - 2003 DIPS (January 27, 2004)

Posted 12:01 p.m., January 30, 2004 (#35) - Mike Green
  Tango, if you run the projection study with the Monkey, the experts and the Primer readers again this year, it would be fun if you ran Monkey1 for the pitchers being based on age-adjusted ERA and Monkey2 being age-adjusted dERA.

Clutch Pitchers (January 28, 2004)

Posted 10:37 a.m., January 30, 2004 (#13) - Mike Green
  This interesting article covers one type of "clutch pitching"- victory-important pitching. Another type of clutch pitching- run-important pitching, is also interesting because it explains in some situations (over at least a season) disparities between DIPS ERA and actual ERA. Pitchers who in a season have substantially worse performance with runners on than with no one on will end up with a significantly worse actual ERA than DIPS ERA.

This was true of Cory Lidle's 2003 season, and I am guessing that if you studied the 10 pitchers with the highest differential between DIPS and actual ERA, at least three or four of them will have this attribute.

Incidentally, knowing what we know of John Wasdin from this study, if you were a Manager at the All-Star break, and your team had just acquired Wasdin after he had a fine half-season starting at Triple A in 2003, would you put him in to start straight off against the Yankees and Red Sox? Somehow, I suspect Leo Durocher would have had him in mop-up relief until the Devil Rays or better yet the Tigers came to town and given him some strong liquid medicine before the game to settle him down.

Forecasting Pitchers - Adjacent Seasons (January 30, 2004)

Posted 11:54 a.m., January 30, 2004 (#3) - Mike Green
  Yes, this is great stuff. Control improving to the late 30s isn't really that surprising I suppose, and it confirms that the late career success of Ryan and Randy Johnson should not really have shocked us.

Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction? (February 2, 2004)

Posted 10:42 a.m., February 4, 2004 (#42) - Mike Green
  There are very important differences between Tango's and AED's studies. You cannot look at clutch situations and consider OBP only, and get a true result.

Take a particular situation. Two outs, nobody on, the home team is down by a run in 1990 and Dennis Eckersley is trying to close out the save. If Jack Clark is up, there is the realistic possibility of a home run, which is much more valuable in the game context than a walk. Jack's OBP goes down; his slugging percentage stays constant or goes up. If Alfredo Griffin is up, there is no realistic possibility of a home run and his manager will go crazy if he swings as wildly as he often did in less meaningful situations. His OBP will not suffer as Jack's does.

Tango's study, which includes a measurement of power, shows a completely different type of hitter- Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi as clutch hitters, albeit at a lower level. I have no difficulty in accepting this empirically. AED's study, on the other hand, does not persuade me that Jack Clark, who was famous for his game winning home runs, deserves the "choker" label and nor Alfredo Griffin a "clutch hitter" label.

Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction? (February 2, 2004)

Posted 2:08 p.m., February 4, 2004 (#46) - Mike Green
  AED, I'm sorry but it just doesn't make sense. A home run is not of the same significance as a walk, least of all in "clutch" situations. It may assist from a statistical perspective to treat it as the same event for this purpose, but the real life distortion is so large that meaning is lost.

That Jack Clark's OPS is lower in clutch situations does not surprise me; this is true in general. Interestingly, Bill James studied Jack Clark's clutch performance in the 1980s and said back then that Clark was one of the few players who one could actually demonstrate performed well in the clutch. I remember that the evidence back then seemed pretty persuasive. It has been 15 years, so it might not look as good now, but it'll take more evidence than this to persuade me that Jack Clark was a poor clutch hitter.

The genius of Paul DePodesta (February 4, 2004)

Posted 5:50 p.m., February 5, 2004 (#14) - Mike Green
  Surely, the situation is a little more grey than this. There are definite weaknesses in the traditional scouting approach, and any intelligent organization would not accept it holus bolus IMO.

But, I can't agree with the assertion that scouts are as replaceable as grounds crew members. Keith Law has said that we have no fielding stats that generate reliable projections. How is a team to evaluate whether a prospect has the fielding ability to play a particular position without relying to a significant degree on the subjective evaluation of scouts? I don't agree that the judgment required to perform this kind of subjective evaluation is possessed widely. I've been watching and thinking about baseball for many years, and I know that I could not do it well.

But, as for changing the methodology that scouts use, I'm right there. For instance, the regular use of a stopwatch and a zone fielding chart for prospect fielding evaluation would be something on my list. And yes, changing the methodology can involve some disagreement and perhaps a few departures.

ARod and Soriano - Was the Trade Fair? (February 16, 2004)

Posted 4:48 p.m., February 16, 2004 (#1) - Mike Green
  Don't forget about the PTBNL. If it's Dioner Navarro, as has been rumoured, the dynamic changes considerably for Texas. When he arrives (2005?), he is likely to deliver three years of average starting catcher work for a total of just over $1 million. What's an average catcher worth, maybe $5 million/yr? That's a big, big deal.

I've marked Navarro down to be an average starting catcher. He might get injured and not make it, or he might make some progression from his current state and be one of the top five catchers in the majors by 2006.

Blog Entry of the Week (February 20, 2004)

Posted 11:15 a.m., February 20, 2004 (#1) - Mike Green
  Allan Roth. How little I knew? The name was familiar before, but I did not remember from where. As it turns out, he was the statistics guy on the Game of the Week (in the Curt Gowdy/Joe Garagiola era?); that is where I vaguely knew of him.

Now, I learn that he was Branch Rickey's stat guy, and also did the work on the original Strat-a-Matic. And I gather, for good reasons, a SABR hero.

Baseball Prospectus - : Evaluating Defense (March 1, 2004)

Posted 9:03 a.m., March 2, 2004 (#7) - Mike Green
  Ed, Scott Rolen has -1 fielding WinShares. He's mildly positive on UZR and Pinto. It does seem that his fielding has declined noticeably with age.

Starters Distribution (March 3, 2004)

Posted 11:12 a.m., March 4, 2004 (#1) - Mike Green
  Tango, those our nicely laid out graphs. Points well made.

Gleeman (and Sheehan) on the Importance of Height in Forecasting (March 12, 2004)

Posted 3:57 p.m., March 12, 2004 (#2) - Mike Green
  I checked the heights of the greats at some of the positions. The third basemen are clustered between 6' and 6'2". A goodly number of great second basemen are under 6' tall from Evers and Collins to Morgan and Biggio. Great first basemen range from 6' to 6'5". Three of the games greatest catchers, Berra, Campanella and Rodriguez, were 5'8"-5'9", but there are a smattering at 6', up to Carlton Fisk's 6'2" or 6'3" (depending on who does the measuring and when).

You could do this systematically, but that would take away half the fun.