Just so y'all know, the reason that our wOBA is different to Fangraphs's is because we include reached base on error as part of the formula and they don't.
Link to Vote
Dave Cameron is up for a $10,000 scholarship for his blogging work. Cameron blogs mainly at U.S.S. Mariner and FanGraphs. He has also contributed to The Hardball Times and numerous other blogs and publications. As a partial reward for all of that, you can help him out by taking literally ten seconds and following that link and voting for him.
Dave Cameron is up for a $10,000 scholarship for his blogging work. Cameron blogs mainly at U.S.S. Mariner and FanGraphs. He has also contributed to The Hardball Times and numerous other blogs and publications. As a partial reward for all of that, you can help him out by taking literally ten seconds and following that link and voting for him.
In the surprise move of the young offseason, the Oakland Athletics have traded closer Huston Street, outfielder Carlos Gonzalez (acquired as the centrepiece of the Haren deal), and left-handed pitcher Greg Smith to the Colorado Rockies for star outfielder Matt Holliday.
Billy Beane's made a habit of surprising people for a long time now, so it won't come as a huge shock to many of you that this trade doesn't seem to make much sense from the A's perspective. Holliday is an outstanding player, contributing with both bat and glove, but he's only going to be in Oakland for a year, whereupon he'll likely bolt forgreener less-green pastures, leaving two draft picks in his wake - draft picks the A's would have picked up for Street a year later anyway. Seeing as the A's are currently a bad team, one wonders how the addition of a bona-fide star player is that useful to them. Is Beane going to make an attempt to re-sign him? Is he going to be flipped for prospects at the deadline? Is he making a crazy push for contention? Who knows.
As for the return package, Street is a (criminally underrated) top-tier closer who'll replace Fuentes in Colorado without too much ado, but Smith is a well-below average finesse pitcher, and Carlos Gonzalez packs a lot of tools but not much in the way of performance. Still, for one year of Holliday, Colorado seem to have done reasonably well. Of course, Billy Beane is smarter than me, so who knows.
So, to summarise:
To Oakland: Holliday
To Colorado: Street, Gonzalez, Smith.
Edge: Right now, I'd have to say the Rockies, but Beane may well make me look foolish here.
The other big trade today was outfielder Willingham and pitcher Scott Olsen making their way north to the Nationals in return for second baseman Emilio Bonifacio and prospects Jake Smolinski and PJ Dean. These are all players with severe question marks - Willingham can hit but can't play outfield, Olsen has (had?) a lot of potential but has been abysmal for the past couple of seasons. Bonaficio is a decent fielding bleh hitting second basemen, and I wouldn't be able to recognise Smolinski or Dean if they tapdanced naked on my computer. The majority of Florida's return won't see the majors for a few years yet.
It looks like Washington's trying to upgrade both its pitching staff and offence here. They have succeded with the latter but may find that they've shot themselves in the foot on the pitching. Willingham's not going to make the outfield any more agile (although there are rumours he may get shunted to first), and Scott Olsen, for all the hype, is terrible.
For Florida, they're saving money and improving the infield defence while picking up some presumably interesting prospects. Is this the precursor to an Uggla move?
To Florida: Bonifacio, Smolinski, Dean
To Washington: Willingham, Olsen.
Edge: I have trouble believing that any team which adds Scott Olsen to their roster has actually got better. So Marlins it is.
Billy Beane's made a habit of surprising people for a long time now, so it won't come as a huge shock to many of you that this trade doesn't seem to make much sense from the A's perspective. Holliday is an outstanding player, contributing with both bat and glove, but he's only going to be in Oakland for a year, whereupon he'll likely bolt for
As for the return package, Street is a (criminally underrated) top-tier closer who'll replace Fuentes in Colorado without too much ado, but Smith is a well-below average finesse pitcher, and Carlos Gonzalez packs a lot of tools but not much in the way of performance. Still, for one year of Holliday, Colorado seem to have done reasonably well. Of course, Billy Beane is smarter than me, so who knows.
So, to summarise:
To Oakland: Holliday
To Colorado: Street, Gonzalez, Smith.
Edge: Right now, I'd have to say the Rockies, but Beane may well make me look foolish here.
The other big trade today was outfielder Willingham and pitcher Scott Olsen making their way north to the Nationals in return for second baseman Emilio Bonifacio and prospects Jake Smolinski and PJ Dean. These are all players with severe question marks - Willingham can hit but can't play outfield, Olsen has (had?) a lot of potential but has been abysmal for the past couple of seasons. Bonaficio is a decent fielding bleh hitting second basemen, and I wouldn't be able to recognise Smolinski or Dean if they tapdanced naked on my computer. The majority of Florida's return won't see the majors for a few years yet.
It looks like Washington's trying to upgrade both its pitching staff and offence here. They have succeded with the latter but may find that they've shot themselves in the foot on the pitching. Willingham's not going to make the outfield any more agile (although there are rumours he may get shunted to first), and Scott Olsen, for all the hype, is terrible.
For Florida, they're saving money and improving the infield defence while picking up some presumably interesting prospects. Is this the precursor to an Uggla move?
To Florida: Bonifacio, Smolinski, Dean
To Washington: Willingham, Olsen.
Edge: I have trouble believing that any team which adds Scott Olsen to their roster has actually got better. So Marlins it is.
We had an issue before where the leaderboard selectors (league, year, etc) would reset to their default position no matter what you were looking at. We recognize that was annoying and for now, we have a solution in place. It's not the most elegant and it's not going to be a long-term solution, but hey, it works.
We get a fair amount of questions about tRA via email, and chances are if one person's asking about something, the question's going to come up in the future. So in the interests of less work for me, I'm opening up a tRA questions/answers thread here. If you've got a question, just leave it as a comment, and Matthew or I will answer*.
In the interests of keeping things tidy, please don't answer other people's questions. The thread might get overly messy if we have things jumping back and forth.
Cheers,
-G
*Probably me.
In the interests of keeping things tidy, please don't answer other people's questions. The thread might get overly messy if we have things jumping back and forth.
Cheers,
-G
*Probably me.
In the spirit of more transparency, I have added a little widget to show you how we come up with the regressed values to calculate tRA*. If you click on the tRA* value now, you'll open up the widget which presents you with four lines of data. The first is that pitcher's straight values. Under that is his values after being adjusted for the park. This second line constitutes the values that make up tRA. The third line shows the values after being regressed and the final line shows the league values.
How are the regressed values calculated? As a recap, we take all the components that go into tRA and regress them toward league average based on how much control (determined by year to year correlation studies) a pitcher has over that stat.
How are the regressed values calculated? As a recap, we take all the components that go into tRA and regress them toward league average based on how much control (determined by year to year correlation studies) a pitcher has over that stat.
So for instance, groundball rates (.84) are incredibly stable and carry over year to year very well so they will not move much. LD (.56) and IF (.53) rates are actually decently stable as well, though nowhere near groundball/flyball. So because of their lower correlation factor, they will have about half the difference between the pitcher and league rates chopped off.
Or to use concrete numbers as an example, if a pitcher had a 30% LD
rate and the league average was 20%, tRA* will say, 56% of the pitcher's
LD rate is attributable to the pitcher himself and 44% of it is the result of random chance (I'm simplifying here) so to get the pitcher's regressed LD rate^, you
take 20% (the league average) x 44% (the % that the pitcher doesn't have control over) + 30% (the pitcher's rate) x 56% (the % the pitcher does have control over) and you get a regressed LD rate of 25.6%.
^ This example assumes the pitcher has a large enough sample size. SP with less than 400 batters faced and RP with less than 175 batters faced will see their values regressed more heavily.
I've been working on some slow moving stuff over the past few days so haven't been able to make any daily updates for awhile so in the meantime, I figured this would be a useful piece to have posted here as well. I originally wrote this for Lookout Landing. The article link is here.
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What is a number 2 starter? What is a number 5? These terms get bandied about a ton, but really what is the expected performance for these roles? I'm not talking theoretically, but the hard reality of a 162 game season and as it turns out, it's far worse than most people will intuitively guess.
THIS IS INTENDED TO REFLECT THE REALITY OF WHAT HAPPENS DURING A SEASON.
Fact is, pitchers get hurt. A lot. And because of that, teams end up giving a lot of starts to woefully inadequate pitchers. So any measurement that attempts to quantify the performance of starting pitchers into buckets of a rotation needs to take this into proper consideration.
For the methodology of this exercise, I turned to a pair of articles for inspiration. Chris Jaffe published an article attempting to figure this out back in the winter of 2006. His method was to assign slots for each team based on their rotation coming into the season and hold those as fixed as pitchers were swapped in and out. A single day before Jaffe's article was published, Jeff Sackmann had the first of his series of article published on The Hardball Times about rotations. His method was to take all the starts for a team and just group the best 32 as #1, the next best 32 as #2 and so on.
Those are both decent methods, but what stuck out to me was the fixture of doing the rotation slots team by team. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to have, for example, the Nationals' best 32 starts this year grouped in with the Blue Jays' best 32 starts as those made by #1 pitchers. I want a measurement whereby if you have a #1 pitcher, you can say that pitcher is among the top pitchers in the league regardless of team.
Continue reading Rotation Slots by tRA+.
As the title implies, minor leagues are now selectable from the leaderboard drop downs. In addition to that I have added the ability to input a custom cutoff for the plate appearance (PA) or expected outs (xOuts) as well. Meanwhile, the default sort for the tRA page has been switched from tRA in ascending order to tRA* in ascending order.
What a thrilling series that turned out to be. Good on you Tampa, Fox may be cursing your win, but everyone outside of Boston should be cheering. This is a great day for baseball.
David Price getting the final four outs is just incredible, how much more of an in-your-face do you need to the idea the experience matters?
David Price getting the final four outs is just incredible, how much more of an in-your-face do you need to the idea the experience matters?
A big problem that I had with housing "latest news" in such a prominent place was that if you didn't update it regularly, that it would become stale and make the site look dated. To erase that problem, I whipped up some code to link to this here blog instead.
I'm still not sure if housing news is the permanent solution as I'm thinking it's a good place for some additional information. I just don't know what kind of information would be best there and so for now, this is a better alternative. If you have suggestions, don't hesitate to leave them.
I'm still not sure if housing news is the permanent solution as I'm thinking it's a good place for some additional information. I just don't know what kind of information would be best there and so for now, this is a better alternative. If you have suggestions, don't hesitate to leave them.
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