Basement Dwellers

@BTB: Power Rankings Updated

2009-07-08T21:19:00.004-04:00

We need a hero! Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I've updated the power rankings at Beyond the Boxscore this evening. The Reds don't gain or lose any spots (thank goodness Washington sucks too!), though I gave special mention to that loss the other night in the commentary with respect to the Phillies:

The Phillies surged up the rankings this week, largely on the back of their record-breaking ass-kick of my Reds on July 6. Meanwhile, their principle threat for much of the year--the Mets--are in a freefall, losing 9 of their last 11 and falling to 22nd on our list. But wait--the Braves surged this week through the 0.500 teams, picking up seven spots and are now just 3 spots behind the Phillies. The NL East seems as though it's becoming a battle between the Phillies' offense and the Braves' pitching...at least on paper. In reality, the Marlins are in the mix as well, but our rankings don't think that team has played quite as well as their record indicates: they've scored 20 more runs then their wRC would predict.

At least Homer had a nice outing tonight! The K/BB (6/0) is particularly encouraging! Maybe Homer can save us...

What's wrong with Bronson Arroyo?

2009-07-01T22:15:00.002-04:00

Somebody needs to FIX IT! Image by Brent and MariLynn via Flickr

Arroyo hasn't been good this year. He's 8-7, but has a 5.69 ERA, a 6.03 FIP, a 5.15 xFIP, a 6.79 tRA, and a 5.59 tRA*. None of those is encouraging.

Last night, he said this:

“That’s the way it goes, man,” Arroyo said. “There’s nothing to say as far as why I’m giving up so many homers. I’ve always given up a decent amount. Physically, I feel good. I feel strong. I’m able to throw 90 if I need it.

“I’m in one of those ruts where I can’t get over the hump, get on the plus side, winning 3-0, 4-1. I’ve been chasing it the last couple times. All you can do is take the ball every fifth day and try to dig yourself out of it.”

The following all comes from his fangraphs page.

His home run rate is up a fair bit this season:

Predictably, his HR/FB rate is as well, and that's usually thought to fluctuate randomly. Even better, his ground ball rate is actually up this year. This is why his xFIP is so much better than his FIP. So that's good news.

What's bothering me about Arroyo is his strikeout rate. In particular, look at this graph:
What I'm seeing here is a steady decline in his k/9 rates from mid-last season until now. His k/9 rate this year is its lowest since 2005 when with the Red Sox, and to me is looking pretty scary. I've long believed that Bronson's bellweather stat is his strikeout rate, so color me concerned.

I'm no scout, so I can't give you a precise cause. But let's play a bit: his fastball run value has taken a huge hit this year, and appears to be where the problem lies among his major pitches from the pitch value data. But his fastball velocity, as he said, is essentially unchanged vs last year. And his fastball pitchf/x movement looks similar (maybe a slight drop in vertical movement, but not as large as 2007 vs 2008). Run values on his curve ball and change are actually improved this year, and are mostly unchanged on his slider, so those pitches look fine.

His walk rate is up this year. So, here's a hypothesis: Arroyo's not spotting his fastball this season, and so he can't use it to properly set up his breaking slop as he usually does. And he's behind in the count more than usual, causing him to give better pitches to hit. I can't do my own pitchf/x at this point, but would someone like to test this who can assess strike zones? Maybe compare balls vs strikes on all 3-1 and 3-2 counts in 2009 vs. 2008 in which he threw a fastball? I've gone as far as I can go.

@BtB: Power Rankings Updated

2009-07-01T21:21:00.004-04:00

The Reds need Eddie to come back strong. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I've updated the power rankings at BtB.

Not a good week for the Reds. Well, sort of. Their expected winning percentage improved from 0.409 to 0.414. So there's that. But other teams near their spot improved even more, causing the Reds to fall to ...28th in the rankings. Out of 30 teams.

This gives me no pleasure. But this Reds team just hasn't been very good. The fielding's great, and that's nice to see. But the hitting has been horrid, and the pitching is "only" average. I know they're only 4 games out....but unfortunately, unless some pitchers get back on track, and Encarnacion + Votto can carry the offense, I don't know if there's enough here to catch a team like the Brewers.

Do the Rockies have the best pitching in baseball?

2009-06-25T22:02:00.003-04:00

Ubaldo Jimenez is the best pitcher I can't remember. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The BtB Power Rankings seem to show it, and Sky gives it another look.

He's right that they aren't the best in MLB. I still think they might be the best in the NL. Here's my (rather disjointed response):

A few things:

1. The Rockies get more of a hand than any other team in with tRA, because we’re using David Gassko’s batted ball park factors (linked here: http://www.statcorner.com/tRAabout.html). Their k-rate, for example, is boosted by a mlb-low park factor of 0.89. Home run per outfield fly correction is similarly high (second-highest in MLB) at 1.22. Virtually everything except walk rates are adjusted in the Rockies’ favor. Coors’ is the best hitters’ park in baseball, though, so you’d expect them to get the most help.

2. If you take their 4.10 FIP and correct for park, where does that put you? I haven’t done it myself, but I’m guessing pretty close to the league lead. You can use 0.89 as a park factor for K’s, 1.00 for BB’s, 0.97 for HBP (all from Gassko), and 1.08 for HR’s (from patriot). … ok, let’s do it:
Raw FIP = (13*67 + 3*(223+20-10) – 2*468)/633 + 3.14 = 4.10
Cor FIP = (13*61 + 3*(223+21-10) – 2*526)/633 + 3.14 = 3.81

That’d tie them for third with SF in FIP (without doing park corrections for those teams). As you said, not the best by this measure, but extremely good.

3. It’s worth mentioning that in addition to the DH issue, I’m not correcting the pitching stats in the power rankings for league difficulty. That gets tacked on at the end (which lets people ignore it if they want to). So yeah, the Rockies aren’t the best in MLB. But they are at least among the top 3-5 staffs in the NL this season.
-j

@BtB: Power Rankings Updated

2009-06-25T09:20:00.002-04:00

I updated the power rankings at BtB last night. The Reds held steady at #25....but there's a big gap between the #24 Athletics and the Reds, bigger even than the gap between the Reds and the last place Padres. A strong week from the Reds would help, and getting away from AL East teams will help...

Also, Sky did a nice comparison between different power ranking systems here.

On Joey Votto

2009-06-23T20:57:00.008-04:00

Votto is back, hopefully to stay. Image by team doster via Flickr

This is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen from a professional athlete:

“As some of you know, my father passed away last August. The first day back I kind of put that all on the back burner and just played baseball all the way to the end of September. I don’t want to use the word suppress because he was in my thoughts and I was dealing with it on a daily basis. But, as powerful a moment that is to lose your father so young, in a way I did suppress it. From August to the beginning of spring training, I was pretty severely depressed. I was dealing with the anxiety of grief and sadness and fear. Every emotion you can imagine that everyone goes through.

“I had a really difficult time with it. I was by myself down in Florida. I just was really looking forward to baseball. When baseball started up in February, I kind of did the same thing I did last August and threw it all on the side, threw all my emotions on the back burner and played baseball.

“I got sick in May. I had the upper respiratory thing and the ear infection. It was taking the time away from baseball and recovering from being sick when for the first time all emotions that had been pushing to the side that I had been dealing with and struggling with in the winter hit me. They hit me a hundred times more than I had been dealing with.

“I was taken out of three separate games. The first game it was a combination of me being ill. But I could tell there was something going on. I couldn’t recover. I had this feeling of anxiety. I had this feeling in my chest. The second time I came out in San Diego, it was similar. But I was healthy and I felt like I could’ve played.

“The third time was in Milwaukee, and I was totally overwhelmed.

“I spoke to some doctors. They came to the conclusion I was dealing with obviously being depressed and anxiety and panic attacks. They were overwhelming to the point where I had to go to the hospital on two separate occasions. Once in San Diego and once – nobody had been told about – but I went to the hospital once in Cincinnati when the team was on the road.

“It was a very, very scary and crazy night. I had to call 911 at 3 or 4 in the morning. It was probably the scariest moment I ever dealt with in my life. I went to the hospital that night.

“The days I was taken off the field were little, miniature versions of what I was dealing with by myself. Ever since I’ve been on the DL and even the little bit before the DL, I’ve been really struggling with this in my private life. I’d go on the field and try to do my best and play well. I had my spurts when I’d play well. But going out on the field . . . I couldn’t do it anymore because I was so overwhelmed physically by the stuff I was dealing with off the field.

“It finally seeped its way into the game. I just had to put an end to it. I really couldn’t be out there. It’s difficult to explain what I was going through. I couldn’t do it. I physically couldn’t do my job. That’s what I’ve gone through.

“I’ve been talking and seeing some doctors. They’ve been a great help. And speaking to people in general – I spoke to my team last week – and letting people know what I’ve been dealing with and how difficult this grieving process has been. My father was young, and I’m a young man. I really wish I hadn’t lost my father so young. I’m the oldest brother. I feel like I’m responsible for my family. Maybe I have a proclivity for depression or whatever it is.

“But I was dealing with some pretty abnormal circumstances – the combination of being a major league ballplayer, a young ballplayer and also dealing with my father and my family.”

This is the kind of thing that makes me, at least, reflect a bit on my own life. It's a totally different situation, but I've had my share of stress over the past year. I (frantically) finished my dissertation, found a job, relocated across country, made it through my first (brutal, at times) year as full time faculty, and just over a month ago had my second child. I've been extremely lucky to have it all go as well as it has. I'm proud of what I've accomplished, and I love my job and my family.

But it's been 100 mph all the time, and do or die far more than is comfortable. I've seen friends who didn't make it. The best man at my wedding came just months from finishing his own degree program before depression and other issues pushed him down a path that has, as far as I know, ended his academic career. I've been so obsessed with my own problems that I have completely lost touch with him. Another friend's anxiety issues kept him from ever really getting started in our lab, despite ample talent. And I'm no psychologist, but I've seen capable students this year drop out because of what seemed to me to be similar anxiety issues. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened--and where I'd be--if things hadn't gone as well. While I know there are lots of people out there dealing with far more difficult things than I have had to cope with, I also know that I've felt close to breaking far too many times this past year.

So good for Votto for speaking up today. My feeling is that it probably did him a lot of good. And I have to think that it will be an enormous help to a lot of people struggling with problems of depression and anxiety to read his words.

WAR Q&A

2009-06-21T12:18:00.006-04:00

Rob Dibble's career looks better with WAR than with win shares. Image via Wikipedia

I've been exchanging emails with a friend about Rally's WAR data (and competing systems) and it turned into a nice Q&A that I though I'd post here. Quotes are my friend, the rest is me.

1) Is it safe to say that WAR has a much higher bar than WS? (any bad regular can accumulate WS in a season, but with WAR a bad regular will be around +/- 1.0 WAR)

Yes, WS uses too low of a baseline. If a replacement player (e.g. Willie Bloomquist) plays enough, they will have positive win shares but a zero WAR. This is why Bill James has finally started developing "loss shares," which is a (clunky, in my view) way of dealing with this problem. Of course, James isn't publishing loss shares yet, so it's hard to know what to make of them (if anything). Rally's stuff also uses a better fielding metric than James's stuff does, so at this point I think it's safe to say that WS is vastly inferior to what Rally's selling (which I have purchased, fwiw--it's exactly what I was hoping for, although you do have to mesh it with a database...I stuck it in Lahman's database...to get the retroID's to match up with names. No biggie, as I'm trying to learn to use a database as it is).

2) WAR includes everything in some form - defense, baserunning, position adjustments, ballpark/league adjustments (which is not that different from WS except I don't think it had baserunning). Am I missing anything?

I'm not sure about league adjustments, though I wouldn't be surprised. It does include range, arms, dp turning (all w/ TotalZone), baserunning (beyond just sb's, also advancing 1st to third and stuff like that), park adjustments, etc. Rally's pretty awesome. :)

3) For the purposes of explaining WAR, what would you say the scale is? I'm guessing at something like:

2.0 - Useful Player
5.0 - Good Regular/All Star Candidate
7.0 - MVP Candidate
10.0 - MVP in a normal season

2.0 = MLB average player playing roughly a full year. I think good regular is ~3 WAR, but yeah 5 WAR = allstar. 10 WAR = Pujols, 12 WAR = Bonds. :)

Does that sound right? Is it different for pitchers?

Yeah, I think pitchers tend to score a tad lower, at least at the high end. Clemons had a few 10 WAR seasons, but Sabathia last year was ~7 WAR (across leagues) for example, as was Halladay. I still think of an average starter as ~2 war, though.

4) Are there differences between WAR on the various sites (or for that matter, BP's revised WARP figures). I know you favor WAR, just want to understand in a nutshell the differences.

Rally's WAR is calculated almost exactly as Tango does it, which is also how FanGraphs does it (though Rally has more baserunning info than fangraphs, plus reached-on-errors). Hitting=lwts, pitching=BsR + pythagopat, fielding=best available system. Everyone doing WAR is using the same baseline, which is ~2 wins below average per season (currently they're using 2.5 in the AL because it's so much better, but that only goes a few years back).

WARP, the new version at least (as of ~february), is much closer to WAR in its baseline (the old version assumed replacement players are atrocious fielders, which has zero empirical support). But it suffers from a few remaining flaws, like the use of offense-based position adjustments instead of fielding-based ones (there are some years when CF's hit better than LF's, and as a result WARP gives LF's a bonus over CF's...which is beyond absurd given the differences in fielding difficulty between those two positions). WARP also, I don't think, does not use a different baseline for relivers and starters (starting is harder than relieving, the same pitcher will put up better numbers as a reliever than a starter), and doesn't recognize leverage for closers like Rally's stuff does. WARP isn't terrible anymore, and I like it better than WS now. But WAR is a bit more current in its research underpinings, mostly because it's based on a collaborative effort of lots of extremely smart people (Tango, MGL, Rally, Patriot, and all the other people over there) instead of just one extremely smart guy (Clay Davenport).

If James's name wasn't attached to win shares -- or to runs created, for that matter -- it would have disappeared by now. But he's deservedly a giant, even if one who is sort of being left behind these days, and so his stuff remains in use even after it's obsolete.

5) Does WAR "favor" peak value vs. career value? To give an extreme example of two players Reds players - Ron Oester totaled 9.3 WAR as a Red vs. Ron Dibble's 9.4. In WS, Oester has 112, vs 63 for Dibble. Thoughts?

WAR is pure career value. You can look at peak value by pulling those years out and doing something to them, but career WAR is just career value.

The reason that Oester tops Dibble in WS but not WAR is because of the problem of win shares' baseline. You can be a crappy player for a long time and accumulate a lot of win shares, while you might not get any WAR. WAR requires a higher level of play to get "credit." It's not an exceptionally high bar, but it's higher than win shares' baseline. I'm sort of guessing here, but if a AAAA player is the baseline for WAR (which is about right), then a AA/AAA player might be the baseline for WS. That means that in WS, a AAAA player playing 20 years in the MLB would get a lot of WS but no WAR to speak of.

If and when James ever publishes his loss shares (probably in some new book or something), what we'll find is that Oester accumulated far more loss shares than Dibble. And as a result, his career contributions (win shares - loss shares) are roughly the same as Dibble's. In other words, when we eventually get the data we need from James, we'll finally get to the point that we're already at with Rally's WAR.

FWIW, I do tend to think that peak has to be taken into account, and not just accumulated career value, when you're talking the Hall of Fame. For that reason, I'd definitely rank Dibble over Oester. Dibble was pure badass dominance for a short number of years, which included that 1990 team. Oester was a decent player for a while, and had one genuinely good year in '85 (if totalzone is to believed, his fielding was better that year...probably in part random error though), but Oester was never ever ever dominant.

...

And then in another email a bit later...

For the hitters:

I assume Bat is batting runs, BSrun is base running runs (turns out Pete was a pretty good baserunner - I was always curious if he was "too aggressive" but apparently not). DP is a debit/credit for hitting into DP's.

On the defense...

Total Zone - is that runs above average? I hope so, or I'm going to have rethink Concepcion as a fielder.

IF DP - runs over/below average given opportunities?

OF Arm - same as above for OF

Catcher - is this some sort of fielding total for catchers based on CS, PB, WP?

Could all of these be totaled to create a total defensive runs saved?

YES to all above. That is what is done when calculating WAR.

The Total looks like the sum of all the runs, but then there is a Position adjustment. What does that represent?

It's an era-specific adjustment for the position a player plays. So, SS has the best fielders, and thus the highest level of competition. So, if you're an average fielding shortstop, you're an above-average fielder, so you get a bonus to account for that. Rally also made these adjustments specific over history, as the differences in quality among positions hasn't been constant.

Also, this is the only place that position comes into play. Offensive batted runs numbers are straight-up offense, without consideration for position. This is because the offensive-based adjustments you see in WARP or VORP, for example, assume all positions have equal talent levels. And that's not true. Second basemen and third basement are roughly equal fielders in modern baseball, but third basemen are better hitters. That makes 3B's a more talented position than 2B's. If you just do position adjustments by offense, you miss that and overrate 2B's relative to 3B's.

The "rep" column - is that replacement run level given the playing time for the season?

It's the difference between an average player and a replacement player, pro-rated for playing time. Since everything else is given vs. average,

And what is the RAR column before the WAR? I'm assuming it is a calculation of some form, but I can't figure it out.

So:
"Total" is offense (bat + BSrun)
RAR is everything (offense + all fielding + position adjustment + replacement)
WAR is RAR converted to wins (runs divided by league average runs per mlb game, ~9.4 r/g or so)

On the pitching side...

The runs must be how many the pitcher gave up, and the Rep runs is what a replacement pitcher would have given up given the innings.=Def is the defense behind the pitcher.

So pitchers get credit for pitching behind a bad defense correct? (The Big Red Machine pitchers get hurt if that is the case, since they all had a good defense behind them). How does that adjustment work?

Right. From Rally's site:

Def - Estimated runs saved by this pitcher's defense, using TotalZone range, DPs, OF arms, and catchers, prorated by the number of balls in play allowed by the pitcher

Awesome. This gets away from having to use something like FIP or xFIP or tRA to extract pitcher performances from fielding performances.

Likewise for the Leverage Index - do pitchers get "extra credit" for a high Leverage Index?

Relievers get partial credit for leverage index. I think they get bonus for any leverage above 1.5 or so. I don't know exactly how Rally does it, but Tango talks about how he does it here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/how_to_calculate_war/

I'm doing the same thing now with my Reds stuff, though I do it for all relievers and Tango only does it for closers. I like my way, because special relievers like Marmol get extra credit, which I think is appropriate.

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Thanks for the great conversation!