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Felipe Alou: Is He Afraid of the Walk?

November 14, 2002 - Vinay Kumar

MGL, Alou didn't manage this year, he was fired during the 2001 season. In 2001, the Expos (including pitchers) had 64 sac bunts, and 78 in 2000.

Forecasting 2003

February 20, 2003 - Vinay Kumar

Greg Spira and Harold Brooks did something similar in '98. See http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/19990201brooks.html

I wanted to participate, but got frustrated trying to project Edgardo Alfonzo, and never finished my projection list.

The 2003 Projections

May 6, 2003 - Vinay Kumar

The part I find most interesting is Tangotiger looking at the Primer readers' forecasts, and reverse-engineering our yearly weightings and regression coefficients. I didn't think about that sort of thing when making my projections; they were more seat-of-the-pants than that, and I assume that they were for most people. It's interesting to see what weights and coefficients correspond to our seat-of-the-pants knowledge.

Bruce, Lee, and the Goose

December 17, 2002 - Vinay Kumar

Wow, I was just hoping to see something just like this. Great work, Tangotiger, it's very interesting work. And, at first glance, it seems to prove me wrong (I guessed that Goose's innings were higher leverage than Smith's). A couple questions and thoughts, though:

What is the LI of a typical starting pitcher? Tangotiger multiplied each reliever's stats by his LI and then found comparable pitchers; but that assumes that those other pitchers have an LI of 1. If those starters have LIs around .9, then the relievers are beind underrated by 10%.

I think the adjustment really needs to be applied on a year-to-year basis. As you point out, Goose pitched more innings as a starter, but that lowered his LI. But those starting innings are still multiplied by his career LI. This is especially painful for Goose, as his year as a starter was much worse than the rest of his career. This is what you're getting at when you talk about timeliness of performance, although it seems that you're talking more about clutch performance, while I'm referring to a pitcher's role and performance both changing over the course of a career.

Bruce, Lee, and the Goose

December 17, 2002 - Vinay Kumar

I was curious how big a difference adjusting for LI year-by-year would make (as opposed to doing it for the career totals, like Tangotiger did). I assumed that the LI for a start is .9 (that's a guess, it could certainly be closer to 1), and worked backwards to see that the LI for a Gossage relief appearance was 1.73 (interestingly, this is exactly Smith's career LI). Then I estimated his LI for each season, prorated his stats by that LI, and summed his career: 2940 IP, 960 ER, 2.94 ERA and 129 ERA+. That's nice, a difference of about 3 wins over his career, but not really enough to alter a HOF vote.

Of course, if we took it one step further and adjusted each season by the actual LI (as opposed to my estimate), that would change things a tad bit more, too.

Bruce, Lee, and the Goose

December 17, 2002 - Vinay Kumar

Yes, Tango, that's essentially what I did. The final ERA+ figures that we came up with differ a bit, and that's because the numbers I estimated were slightly different than yours. Oh, and when you averaged ERA+s, you used (LI-adjusted) IP as the weight, when you have to use (LI-adjusted) ER as the weight.

I'd say the 1.9 for Sutter is interesting, because that is about what Bill James guessed a typical closer's value was, in his relief study in the NHBA. Maybe we're getting consensus on that at least?

Joe, that's very close to what what Doug Drinen's data suggested as well. Although in any given year, that value could be much higher or lower for an individual closer (for instance, win probabilities said that Trevor Hoffman was much more valuable than any starting pitcher in the NL in '98, and it would take a multiplier >2.0 to reach that conclusion; of course, Hoffman went 53/54 on saves that year, so that helps).

OPS: Begone!

May 20, 2003 - Vinay Kumar

SLOB, which is OBP*SLG, works well at the team level (better than anything OPS-like). Note that RC=OBP*TB=OBP*SLG*AB=SLOB*AB.

It works well because it captures the interaction between OBP and SLG. However, for this reason, it doesn't work as well on players, because their OBP and SLG don't interact with each other (extreme example: when Barry Bonds is walked, he doesn't get a chance to drive himself in). This is what Tango was measuring in his second example, when adding different players to a team of 8 typical players; each player's OBP and SLG interact with those of his teammates.

How are Runs Really Created

August 12, 2002 - Vinay Kumar

Great article Tangotiger (though I expected to see Base Runs or something in there; is there going to be a part 2?).

Let me see if I can answer Devin's second question, in a slightly different manner than TT's response. In any given situation, a walk and an HBP are worth the same thing. However, because walks and HBPs are distributed differently, the average walk is not exactly the same as the average HBP. And Tango's example of the intentional walk is a great way to demonstrate this.

SABR 301 - Talent Distributions (June 5, 2003)

Posted 3:28 p.m., June 5, 2003 (#11) - Vinay Kumar
  Why is the mid-point of Playing Time chart (Chart 6) not identical to the MLB average (1.00) in Chart 4?

PhillyBooster, I don't think MLB average is defined as 1.00. Tango says in #9 that 1.00 "might be roughly equivalent to ... an avg MLB hitter or pitcher." In the scale for talent, the numbers are useful only relative to each other; the absolute numbers don't mean anything (well, apparently they do, but we don't know what yet).

If you think the mean in Chart 6 is 4.50 or even 4.55, that mean's the average talent level is about 1.05, so it's not that big a difference.

But this does have me curious now what these numbers do mean; what is 1.00, and why is it that?

After Sabre-School Special (June 19, 2003)

Posted 8:56 p.m., June 19, 2003 (#9) - Vinay Kumar
  I agree with David that it makes sense to look at the random team, while also agreeing with Tango and Patriot that it probably doesn't make a noticeable difference.

However, Wolverton's Pennants Added is very different. When it comes to winning a pennant, the random team is very different from the average team, because a pennant is an extreme performance, so the distribution matters more. I'm pretty sure you guys understand that, but I just want to clarify that that's an important distinction.

What value firemen? (July 6, 2003)

Posted 5:04 p.m., July 7, 2003 (#8) - Vinay Kumar
  Another reason that a relief ace would be more valuable to a contending team is that he can pitch proportionally more innings during the post-season. For instance, Rivera averages about 70 innnings/season in the regular season, but he has pitched 80 innings in the Yankees' 87 post-season games over his career.

I don't know what the marginal $ is for post-season wins (whether you measure by games won or series won), though. That would be interesting.

Retrosheet Game Logs - Most Wanted (July 9, 2003)

Posted 3:05 p.m., July 10, 2003 (#2) - Vinay Kumar
  The last few years are available through Ray Kerby's ASS program (http://www.astrosdaily.com/). But data covering most of that period is not available for free (you can buy it from STATS for lots of $$$).

SABR 201 - Should we non-sac bunt more? (July 10, 2003)

Posted 1:57 p.m., July 17, 2003 (#8) - Vinay Kumar
  A few weeks ago, Klesko and Palmeiro both had bunt singles on the same day. Klesko probably could have legged his into a double if there hadn't been a man on 1B (the defense wouldn't have had a play on Klesko at 2B, but they would've gotten the lead runner at 3B). I haven't been looking for it, but I haven't really noticed defenses playing Klesko any differently since then.

So, does that BE pt include both the effects of the bunts themselves, plus the benefit (presumed) to his non-bunt events from the defense having to play more "honestly"?

No, it doesn't include that. So if a defense is better off putting an extreme shift on Bonds or Klesko or whoever, and the occasional bunt forces them to move back to a conventional alignment, then the bunt is even more valuable.

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

Posted 12:55 a.m., August 1, 2003 (#13) - Vinay Kumar
  long term, such [lopsided] trades diminish your ability to make other trades.

I don't agree with this as much as I agree with its correlary: making mutually beneficial trades helps foster trading relationships, that make it easier to make beneficial trades in the future. I think any longtime roto or fantasy league player would agree with that. Just look at all the complex trades we've seen the last few years involving the same clique of GMs.

That said, I don't know how much credit to assign any single trade in such a trading relationship.

Baseball Prospectus - Small sample size (July 30, 2003)

Posted 12:44 a.m., August 1, 2003 (#1) - Vinay Kumar
  Excellent point, Tango. Here's another way to look at it: by those numbers, the Sox opponents raise their BA on balls in play by fifty or so points going from Damian Jackson to Millar or Giambi. Is that reasonable? Could swapping a LF be the difference between teams hitting .260 and .310? Of course not! That's a huge difference. That's the difference between the best pitching+fielding in the league and the worst.

Over the long haul, what kind of difference might we see between good and bad LFers? Even 10 points seems like a lot, but let's just go with that. That means that the BP rankings are way off; the noise is so much greater than the signal that we can't read anything into it.

What would we think about a batting stat based on the team's scoring while that player was in the lineup?

The more I think about it, the more disappointed I am that BP ran those numbers; they're just so far from being statistically significant, that it's like a listing of averages in particular batter-pitcher matchups.

Injury-prone players (October 14, 2003)

Posted 5:01 p.m., October 14, 2003 (#11) - Vinay Kumar (homepage)
  Here's the link for the original thread. It's not worth bothering with the archives on this site when Google is available (actually, that's true for just about every site these days; Google does a better job archiving web sites than most sites do themselves).

Injury-prone players (October 14, 2003)

Posted 5:06 p.m., October 14, 2003 (#12) - Vinay Kumar
  Oops, I somehow missed post #2. Sorry.

Evaluating Catchers (October 22, 2003)

Posted 7:30 p.m., October 23, 2003 (#10) - Vinay Kumar
  Excellent stuff, Tango.