Archive for Meta Analysis

A couple of weeks ago, I investigated Justin Verlander’s resurgence. I found reasons to validate his hot streak but turned up additional question marks along the way.

One of them was his zone contact rate (Z-Contact%). At 79.7 percent, it would have been the second-lowest of his career by several percentage points (despite not performing “at peak”). However, I realize now, unfortunately, that I must have encountered a glitch in the leaderboards — his Z-Contact% as of August 21 (because the post, despite running the same day as his Aug. 26 start, was published prior to it) was 85.7 percent.

Regardless, it got me thinking what affects a pitcher’s zone contact rate because it correlates very strongly with strikeout rate (R-squared = .594). User DoubleJ speculated about the metric via comment on one of last week’s posts:

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FanGraphs’ leaderboards are like iron ore mines. They abound with potentially valuable commodities, but sometimes it takes effort to unlock the potential and extract the value.

There’s only so much you can write about a certain subsection of players (National League outfielders) without beating a dead horse. Alas, I’ve tried to find peculiar reasons to write about particularly interesting hitters. And, ah, FanGraphs’ leaderboards, they’re helpful in this regard, especially when broken down by splits.

Baseball Info Solutions’ (BIS) opposite-field batted ball data are no exception, as exemplified by this table of opposite-field hard-hit rate (Hard%) leaders among NL outfielders:

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It is no secret that the Red Sox defense has been brutal at turning balls in play into outs this year. As a team, the pitching staff has allowed a .307 BABIP, second highest in the American League and fifth in baseball. But things are bound to improve as we have recently learned that Hanley Ramirez, currently sidelined with a sore shoulder, will never again (hopefully) play left field. Instead, he will take over first base duties when he’s healthy enough to return. While we have no idea how he will perform defensively at first, he can’t possibly cost the team as many runs there as he had done in the outfield!

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Yesterday, I discussed rookie Byron Buxton and his struggles making contact with pitches outside the zone. Every hitter (I assume) makes less contact on such pitches versus those inside the zone, of course. But today I wanted to check in on those who have made the most contact with the pitches they should be making contact with — those in the zone. And to add to the fun, I’ll just check in on the leaderboard over the last 30 days, highlighting the interesting names.

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Last week, we began our quixotic attempt to design the Universal Baseball Association—the ideal full-season Roto-style Fantasy league. This quest was interrupted by a vacation, or, more accurately, “vacation.” The chief benefit of doing something you don’t especially want to do in someplace you don’t especially want to do it in is that circumstances induce you to imagine you’re doing something you’d prefer to be doing in a place in which you’d prefer to be doing it. So there we were, being nibbled upon by sea lice in the saltiest water this side of the Dead Sea. Suddenly and magically, the similarly-immersed children who’d foolishly been placed in our care seemed to vanish—don’t worry; they reappeared all too soon–and we were transported, in the kingdom of our minds, to our desks and computers, free to brood further about the categories and rules of the UBA.

Herewith the results. First, though, a quick summary of the criteria by which we judge our success; if you want more of the same, check last week’s post. The categories in an ideal league should, we think, be as few as possible; be susceptible of appreciation by both the average baseball fan and the stat geek; be “primary,” in that they reflect the building blocks of baseball performance, rather than being “derivative” stats that massage these primary categories to and beyond the vanishing point; focus on a player’s individual achievement rather than the team-based context in which that achievement occurs and can be distorted; yet produce stats that, in the aggregate, look roughly like the stats that a Reality Baseball team would produce over a full season.

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To distract ourselves from the relentless midpackness of our NFBC Main Event Team, we have been ruminating about loftier matters. What, we wonder, should be the stat categories and rules of the ideal full-season roto-style Fantasy Baseball League, which let’s call the Universal Baseball Association? We invite you to play along at home, or, as is more likely the case, at work.

First, let’s consider categories. There are five criteria by which we judge our choices of categories. These are:

Fidelity. We’ve often said that, in Fantasy Baseball, you’re not drafting “players” or “teams,” but rather proper names that represent collections of stats. That’s too facile, though. What you’re drafting (or claiming or FAABing) is a bunch of stat collections that, in the aggregate, are supposed to look something like a Reality Baseball team’s aggregate stats do. For one thing, you want your league to reward player performance that corresponds to performance that succeeds on the field. For another, you don’t want your teams to lack the balance that successful Reality Baseball teams have. You don’t want to leave out anything important, except to the extent that Reality teams do, and you don’t want to overemphasize any stats. For example, you don’t want categories that encourage you to do without relief pitchers, or (important point) relief pitchers who happen not to be closers, or players who can run.

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Rookie hitters are performing better this year than they ever have in the free agency era. Right now, rookie non-pitchers have a 93 weighted runs created plus, one better than in the second-best year for rookie hitters (2006). That’s also impressive because there are only four years in which rookies have managed a wRC+ over 90.

We spend so much time drooling over rookies that this might be a sobering result. The best rookie class of all time is still 7% worse than league average with the stick. You *could* use this to argue that rookies are a bad scene in redraft leagues.

Of course, that number is an overall number. If you focus on the rookies that have done well, they were almost all well-regarded, right?

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If you’re a H2H league owner, September could be a frustrating time. It’s when veterans sometimes take a seat as their out of contention teams choose to give young hitters a look and young pitchers reach their innings limits and get shut down. The worst part of it is that these may have been the players that helped you achieve the best record in your league, yet come playoff time, you can’t even count on them to contribute to your championship run. So let’s discuss some of the pitchers who are definitely or possibly on an innings limit. Whether their teams decide to skip a start here and there to keep the innings down or just shut him down with two weeks or so to go, I don’t know. But either way, an innings limit would take a bite out of the pitcher’s value the rest of the way.

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This is an updated version of an article posted in 2013.

As we get closer to our league trade deadlines and the effect any individual player will have on our place in the standings gradually diminishes, this time of year represents a final chance to improve our teams. It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but it’s important to reiterate for those still clinging to preseason values. At this point, you need to essentially throw player values out the window and trade for needs based on your position in the various statistical categories. Don’t worry about overpaying if you still expect the trade to net you positive points. Obviously, you want to make a trade that brings back the greatest value in return and gain you the most standings points. But if the best return available to you is a so-called $15 player for your $25 player, it’s still easily worth accepting if you expect that it gains you points.

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As we head into the trade deadline, this time of year marks the unofficial fantasy league deadline for when trades might still have some effect on the standings. So let’s use the batted ball distance leaderboard to identify those batters with strong distance marks, but HR/FB rates that don’t quite measure up. These seven hitters all seemingly have some upside over the final two months, assuming they sustain their distances.

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