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Bruce, Lee, and the Goose
December 18, 2002 - Tom N
How much many high leverage plate appearances do relievers cause for themselves? If a relief pitcher comes in with the bases empty, none out and proceeds to load the bases and then work his way out of the jam, then he's turned a moderately leveraged situation into an extremely high leverage situation. Wouldn't his Li be higher for that appearance even though he's endandered the teams chances of winning? You may have addressed this some place or another, if so, I'd be interested in seeing a link.
SABR 301 - Talent Distributions (June 5, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 8:35 p.m.,
June 5, 2003
(#15) -
Tom N
As far as I can surmise:
The talent distribution within baseball is the far right of the curve, with, in terms of talent, very few truly great players, a few very good ones, etc. There is, however, an absolute number of plate appearances/pitches required in order to play a proper game. The number of PAs or pitches that can be performed by players at the right of distribution is limited by their scarcity. Similarly, far less playing time goes to the players at the left because of their crappiness. Thus when one considers opportunities, major league talent distribution is normal.
I hope the above does not misrepresent what the graphs convey. If so, please correct me. But isn't it the case that almost all players to the left of the batting distribution have something to recommend them: defensive skill, the ability to pitch, looks good in a uniform, minor league lifer getting September call-up? Unless your point is that given the scarcity of players on the right, it's necessary that the last batter or two on the bench or perhaps all the Detroit Tigers be pretty crummy. Or perhaps the point is that no matter how large or small the red box is drawn, this distribution, when playing time is taken into account, will remain relatively stable? I'm not sure, since it seems that the plateau on the right of chart 5 will just extend further to the left, and the drop-off will remain just as steep. Feel free to disabuse me of any wrong-headed notions in the above post.
Marcel, The Monkey, Forecasting System (December 1, 2003)
Posted 9:26 a.m.,
December 2, 2003
(#19) -
Tom N
David Smth's post is a nice insight that articulates some of my own incomplete thinking on forecasting and sabremetrics. Marcel the monkey works well not because forecasting is inherently simple, but because a simple approach addresses the manageable cases without really worrying about the difficult cases.
Pecota seems designed specifically to spot breakout and collapse candidates. One of the important assumptions that underlies PECOTA is that adding in non-performance factors like height and weight is going to suddenly reveal something not evident in the performance record so as to be able to spot a breakout by Milton Bradley. Given the inputs though it seems silly to put much faith in Pecota telling us anything other than that pitchers get injured and that good hitters tend to be good and bad hitters bad.
Imagining that there will some great statistical means by which one can identify out of the blue breakout candidates is fun, but it's highly improbable. Especially since the breakout themselves are highly improbable given the previous performance. Meanwhile, mild breakouts pegged by Pecota, like Kerry Wood in 2003, actually were fairly likely anyhow, since a pitcher that strikes out as many people as Wood and is young is a good possibility of breaking out.