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Bonderman and Age 20 (June 26, 2003)

Posted 9:10 p.m., July 1, 2003 (#5) - OCF (homepage)
  Another name to consider: Vida Blue. Blue appeared briefly in the majors at age 19 and again at age 20. In 1971 at age 21, he was a full 4-man-rotation starter completing most of his games, for 312 IP, and he was great (ERA+ 183). After a down (hurt?) year in 1972, he settled in to a 17-year career, carrying in his prime the load of a 70's-style workhorse. But his 1971 was always his best year.

Caution Is Costly, Scholars Say (July 30, 2003)

Posted 5:04 p.m., July 31, 2003 (#10) - OCF
  I wonder how true this really is. The great fleecings -- Ed Hearn for David Cone, Jeff Bagwell for Larry Anderson, Lou Brock for Ernie whats-his-name, etc -- I wonder if other GMs really hold it against the "winners" in trades like that?

(Or perhaps the best trades are the ones where both players perform well, but the one you traded away gets hit by a bus. Not your fault.)

Look - some trades are just stupid up front, and Bagwell/Anderson is one of the stupidest. But even though I grew up as a Lou Brock fan, I've come to realize that before the fact, trading Brock for Broglio made perfect sense.

Over the previous 4 years or so, Ernie Broglio was one of the 20 best pitchers in the NL - maybe even one of the 10 best. He was the same age as Bob Gibson, and through 1963, his record was indistinguishable from Gibson's, except he didn't have Gibson's extreme K's. Lou Brock was young and fast, but essentially useless to the Cubs. He wasn't a good defensive outfielder, and that meant he couldn't play CF - the Cubs had tried that, and had already decided that it didn't work. He sure as hell wasn't going to take Billy Williams's job in LF. He didn't look like a great hitter. What do you do with a guy like that? He was excess talent that didn't fit the team's needs. Isn't it better to trade off excess talent for real value than letting him rot on the bench?

Well, Broglio didn't get hit by a bus, but he might as well have been. I never heard that he had arm trouble, but go look at his record and you tell me what you think happened. And Brock caught lightning in a bottle, hit way over his head for the rest of 1964, and found a way to mine what talent and work ethic he had and make a (marginal) Hall of Fame career out of it.

There was risk in that trade - there's risk in every "big" trade. (This was a "big" trade because of Broglio's previous record.) The Cubs "lost" the trade becuase Broglio, for whatever reasons, fell on hard times. I don't see why Brock's improbable prosperity in circumstances the Cubs couldn't provide for him should be held against the Cubs.

And it's just that - the incessant crowing about how it was "one of the worst trades ever", even now, nearly 40 years later with unfair references to "Ernie What's-his-name," when it was basically a rational trade - that contributes to risk-aversion.

Caution Is Costly, Scholars Say (July 30, 2003)

Posted 5:14 p.m., July 31, 2003 (#11) - OCF
  How about a nice little 2 by 2 game? Let's set up the situation: it's mid-60's in the Astrodome. (This tells you three things: it's a low-run environment, there's a hard, bouncy carpet in the outfield, and there's a whole lot of room out there in the outfield.) The visiting team has a 1-run lead in the bottom of the 9th. The Astros have a runner on 2nd, 1 out. The runner is average speed or a little faster; the centerfielder is fast but weak-armed. The batter hits a sinking line drive to shallow straightaway center - it looks like a single but is maybe on the far outer edge of what the CF can get to. Assume that trying to catch it involves a risk of missing the ball altogether. There are two things the CF can do - go for the risky catch, or slow down to play the bounce. There are two things the runner can do - take off for the plate so he can score on the single, or hold up near 2B.

Analyze.

John Jarvis SABR presentation on the IBB (August 1, 2003)

Posted 1:45 p.m., August 1, 2003 (#1) - OCF
  This looks at first glance to be excellent work.

There is one element I'd like to see added to the analysis. Everything here seems to be geared to analyzing runs scored in the inning in which the IBB was (or wasn't) issued. What I would like to see is an extension of the analysis to the following inning as well. In every case, the IBB "rolls the lineup forward" and thus potentially creates more plate appearances for good hitters. But there's one case that makes the need to look at the next inning acute, and that's the IBB to the #8 hitter in the NL. One of the charts in this study says that this is an extremely common IBB situation, and in particular is a large fraction of the lowest-SLG batters being walked. Since pitchers are, on average, very poor hitters, this has a high probability of "working" as far as preventing runs in the inning of the walk. But there has to be a large difference in run expectation for an inning with the pitcher leading off and an inning with the leadoff hitter leading off.

Game-Calling Revisited - Chris Dial (August 16, 2003)

Posted 6:47 p.m., August 19, 2003 (#4) - OCF
  Does anyone know of any examples of players who did little catching at in the minors and then converted to that position in the majors? There were plenty of examples in the other direction. I can also think of examples of big hitters with little speed who were pushed into the lineup at catcher as some place to put them. Cliff Johnson comes to mind - but was Johnson mostly a catcher on the way up? What I'm fishing for is some way to detect hints of what bunnygrunt is suggesting by looking for extreme players.

Aaron's Baseball Blog - Andruw Jones (September 9, 2003)

Posted 5:43 p.m., September 10, 2003 (#6) - OCF
  When I saw SalviaStud's post, two names immediately popped into my head. The first name was Cesar Cedeņo. Cedeņo burst into the majors at midseason at the age of 19 and was very good right away. He had the two best years of his career at the age of 21 and 22. He was far better in those two years than Jones has ever been. In fantasyland, one could invent a reasonable contiuation for him after age 22 that would put him in the Hall of Fame by acclamation. In the real world, that didn't happen - and that may very well be a case of what SalviaStud was talking about.

The other name was Robin Yount. As a teenager, Yount was good enough to justify his major league job, but he was a long way short of being an All-Star. He did improve. He kept right on growing until he peaked at age 27 - and a very impressive peak it was.

Who's a kid with a job now? Maybe Jose Reyes. Is he Cedeņo or is he Yount? I have no idea, and I wouldn't know how to guess.

RBIs (September 15, 2003)

Posted 2:28 p.m., September 16, 2003 (#5) - OCF
  But we've had a 165 RBI year in recent memory, and it could have been more. A run at Wilson's record could happen in real life.

The team was the 1999 Cleveland Indians, and the lineup was quite well-constructed to build RBI's for one big bopper.

Leadoff was Kenny Lofton, with a .405 OBP.
Batting second was Omar Vizquel, with a .397 OBP.
Batting third was Roberto Alomar, with a .422 OBP.

Lofton, Vizquel, and Alomar hit 7, 5, and 24 HR, so they weren't particularly cleaning off the bases themselves. However, they hit quite a few doubles among them and all three were good, high-percentage base stealers.

That sets up a big opportunity for a cleanup hitter, and the Indians had a cleanup hitter - Manny Ramirez, .333/.442/.663, XBH line of 34-3-44. Ramirez was adequately "protected" (not that I believe in that) by Jim Thome at .277/.476/.540. There was good productivity in the back of the order as well, so it was a big scoring team and the lineup kept rolling around for more opportunities.

Ramirez recorded 165 RBI.

Even so, it wasn't everything it could have been.

Lofton only played 120 games. It looks like most of his playing time was taken by Dave Roberts, who was bad that year (OBP < .300). It's not clear who batted leadoff, but there wasn't another Lofton available.

Ramirez himself only played 147 games. At the rate he was going, another 12-13 games would have pushed his RBI to 180.

You can't really find any fault with Ramirez - but Sammy Sosa hitting 60+ HR in the same lineup spot would have had more RBI than Manny did.

RBIs (September 15, 2003)

Posted 5:32 p.m., September 16, 2003 (#7) - OCF
  I put that post up without reading the attached article, and now I'm sorry, because I didn't really add anything to what the author of the article had already said.

Factors that affect the chances of scoring (September 24, 2003)

Posted 3:41 p.m., September 24, 2003 (#1) - OCF
  One of the results of that is that you get a .02 runs / time on base advantage for the leadoff hitter, but almost a .04 runs / time on base for the #2 hitter. (Sidenote: the #2 hitter should usually be your BEST overall hitter. This is probably Bonds' best spot in the order.)

I always liked the batting order of the 1982 Brewers. Well, maybe not Simmons cleanup, but that's a triviality. Molitor, batting leadoff and on the good side of all 5 of the points above, scored 136 runs. Yount, the best hitter on the team, batted second and scored 129 and drove in 114.

When you correct for the different eras, Yount's 1982 is extremely similar to Alex Rodriguez's 1996, also batting second, but without a Molitor in front of him.

Diamond Mind Baseball - Sending the runner on a 3-2 count (October 28, 2003)

Posted 8:23 p.m., October 28, 2003 (#3) - OCF
  Because in the times the ball is a hit you'd rather the runner be going so he can advance further.

I don't have any data, but I don't believe this is all that large or valuable an effect. I have seen runners who were going on the pitch stop at 2nd on singles, including ground singles to left. On a ball in the air - a looper, a Texas leaguer, a liner to the shallow outfield - the runner often needs to hesitate to decide whether the ball is likely to be caught. Once that happens, he's in nearly the same place as a runner who wasn't going. Against the occasional gain of a base on a ball in play, you must balance the expensive risk of the line-drive double play.

My gut instinct is the call that Bill James made a while back - that the risks and benefits are very similar to those for sending the runner on any other count, just with a greater likelyhood of irrelevance. In other words, I wouldn't do it with a bad baserunner. I certainly wouldn't do it with anyone likely to get tagged out standing up 5 feet short of the base.

Value of keeping pitch count low (October 30, 2003)

Posted 5:14 p.m., October 30, 2003 (#1) - OCF(e-mail)
  I don't buy it. It takes the power pitcher more pitches to face the same number of batters as the crafty pitcher, but isn't it possible that the power pitcher will be left in to throw more pitches? That the extra strengh (or better mechanics) that makes him a power pitcher in the first place may mean he can throw 10 or 15 more effective pitches per game than the crafty pitcher?

That would be the test: if you could find samples of pitchers, some of whom are power pitchers and some of whom are (low pitch per batter) finesse pitchers, and if you could either match them in quality or appropriately correct for quality, which group would (1) throw more pitches per game, or (2) face more batters per game?

Sure, there's an advantage to being a Robin Roberts-Ferguson Jenkins style strike thrower, but I don't think that's the point.

Value of keeping pitch count low (October 30, 2003)

Posted 12:51 p.m., November 3, 2003 (#12) - OCF
  First, a word of caution. By this definition, the 2001 version of Tim Wakefield qualified as a power pitcher

Don't act so shocked. To get batters out, a pitcher needs both "stuff" and placement (which includes timing). All pitchers need both, but some pitchers rely a little more heavily on "stuff" and we call them power pitchers. Other pitchers rely a little less on "stuff" and a little more on placement and timing, and we call them finesse pitchers or some other such name. Knuckleball pitchers rely on "stuff", even if that stuff is thrown at 70 mph. Their statistics usually aren't that comfortable a fit on either end of this spectrum, but are often closer to the "power" side of things.

Of course, some knuckleball pitchers have been used as rubber-armed inning-eaters. The number of pitches per batter is not that much of a liability for a pitcher capable of throwing a very large number of pitches.

UZR 2003 Previews (December 18, 2003)

Posted 6:27 p.m., December 18, 2003 (#10) - OCF
  There's a very good reason why you couldn't move Erstad to SS - check out which hand he wears his glove on. There is talk in Anaheim, reported in the papers, about moving Erstad to 1B. That may not set any records for missing the point, but does cause the jaw to drop a notch or two.

Peak Age by Year of Birth (February 11, 2004)

Posted 6:35 p.m., February 12, 2004 (#5) - OCF
  This could be of some interest to Hall of Merit voters.

If I understand Bob correctly, he used a basic offensive estimator (XR) without correcting it for league offensive context. Not correcting for league context shouldn't matter much over the long run, but it can matter quite a bit over the short run, since the context has on a number of occasions changed quite rapidly.

A downward "V" in the graph can be taken as pointing toward a year or two in which it was very likely for players to reach their peaks.

The very sharp downward spike at 1868 seems to point toward 1890 - the Player's League year, when there were three leagues and 24 teams. Two factors would influence the climb out of that: the contraction to 12 teams by 1892 would have truncated the careers of many young players, but those who survived would have then had their face-value offensive peaks in the big offensive years after 1893, when they weren't so young any more.

The AL expansion of 1901 doesn't leave a clear mark on the record because it was balanced against the effects of the decline of offense between the 1890's and the 1900's.

The "V" that bottoms out around 1889 may point toward the lively-ball bubble years of 1911-1912. For that particular time period it might be worth seing how different a context-adjusted version of this graph would be.

Blog Entry of the Week (February 20, 2004)

Posted 12:43 p.m., February 23, 2004 (#12) - OCF
  The Times did publish a letter to the editor about the Plashke article from Eric Enders. Nice letter, Eric.