Archive for Meta Analysis

With draft season over and duly reported upon, we have been brooding about what new worlds to conquer. Our long-promised sabermetric investigations are forthcoming, but they take time, and we’ll no doubt be staggering down many blind alleys and culs-de-sac before we get someplace worth bringing you to. We’ll keep providing progress reports—well, status reports, anyway—on Team Birchwood in the NFBC Main Event, but those won’t take long, even if our bargain-basement starting pitchers stop igniting upon exposure to oxygen and we move up in the standings.

Meanwhile, having been irritated during draft season by so-called experts touting so-called sleepers who were already well-known in places like Kazakhstan, we find ourselves even more irked by these same experts, now that the season’s started, touting waiver wire pickups that are probably making casual fans on Pluto sneer. Let’s quickly do a Google search and see what we come up with. “Week 3 Waiver Wire.…” Hmmm… pre-injury Jake Lamb. Odubel Herrera. Drew Pomeranz. Wade Davis, for God’s sake. We’ll accept arguendo that there are dilletantish Plutonian 10-team mixed leagues in which some of these guys might be available. But if you’re far gone enough to be reading not just Rotographs but this particular blog, you or somebody else in your league already owns them. So what exactly do you do when, say—this is of course completely fanciful–Brett Lawrie disables your left fielder with a slightly-misdirected hard slide and it’s time to go replacement shopping? Read the rest of this entry »

The second of last week’s challenges asked you to prove that a low BABIP means that the pitcher induced weak contact. I’m tired of reading that Pitcher X has a .220 BABIP and so that means he has “kept hitters off-balance”, “induced weak contact” or that “hitters have a difficult time squaring him up”. The opposite is equally as annoying, reading that Pitcher Y, sporting a .330 BABIP, is “hittable”. With no evidence ever presented to support such a conclusion aside from the BABIP itself (and perhaps, if we’re lucky, a mention of the batted ball distribution allowed), the claims are meaningless.

All of those descriptions may very well be true, but we still have no real proof of it for any specific pitcher, so it’s all just conjecture. That has no place in fantasy analysis when these statements are made as if they were facts. It’s misleading to the reader and a real disservice.

I’ll climb down from my high horse now and get to discussing the comments.

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Last week, I issued a challenge. If you’re the type to call a pitcher who sports an inflated HR/FB rate “homer-prone”, I asked you to prove that this was not merely bad luck, but skill-related (or a lack of skill). I have been writing about fantasy baseball for 7+ years now and nothing bothers me more than when a definitive claim is made with no supporting evidence. There is a difference between “Pitcher X is homer-prone” and “Pitcher X has been homer-prone”. The former suggests an inherent lack of skill in keeping fly balls in the park, while the latter makes no such commentary on the pitcher’s home run avoidance skills, but merely describes what has happened.

Since it’s clear that we really don’t know for sure what leads to home run suppression skills or a lack thereof, at this point, only the aforementioned latter description seems appropriate in my mind. So Brandon McCarthy’s early struggles with gopheritis, which has carried over from last year’s issues, was what motivated me to challenge you, as I figured the homer-prone label would start popping up everywhere.

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Weekly update:

• First release of 2015 data.
• I combined some of the categories and found some stabilization points with the details in this article.

Pitchers’ Approach Attacking Hitters

Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has shown pitchers will change their approach depending on the hitter’s talent level. Here is a complete list of the number of fastballs (including sinkers) thrown to each hitter of the past two years divided into half seasons. Also the number of pitches in the strike by half season is included along with the fastball percentage in the strike zone.

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Mike Podhozer put out the following question the other day asking if is luck or skill that Brandon McCarthy has such a high HR/FB%.

Prove that Brandon McCarthy‘s HR/FB Rate is Not Just Bad Luck

I started looking at the question several ways and came up with a final conclusion that HR/FB is probably not the perfect stat to use when trying to determine if a pitcher has been lucky or unlucky giving up home runs.

Let me start by going off on a tangent. I am of the camp that players with a huge upswing are the reason groundball pitchers, like McCarthy, have a higher than expected home per fly ball rates. All but the most upward swings will get on top of a sinking ball and drive the ball downward into the ground. The hitter with an upswing will be the ones hitting this sinking pitch. In my opinion, each pitcher will have a subset of players who swing in line with his pitch plain and crush those pitches for home runs.

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Yesterday, I issued my first challenge. Sparked by Brandon McCarthy’s bizarre outing on Monday, I asked you to prove that his HR/FB rate was not bad luck. The challenge led to some great discussion, which is exactly what I had hoped it would do.

Now it’s time to move on to the second, and likely final, challenge. It’s a topic that I am more interested in and has been debated ad nauseam. Of course, I’m talking about pitcher BABIP. We have been taught that pitchers will tend to regress toward the league average, which has sat around .295 in recent years, as hitters actually possess the majority of control over how often balls in play falls for hits. So early on, we eventually came to accept this.

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Return with us now to the distant evening of April 2, 2015, when we were young, life was simple, and Jennrys Mejia was the Mets’ closer. Our task: conducting the NFBC Main Event draft (15 teams, 30 rounds) without embarrassing ourselves. The setting: the “Rhinelander Gallery” of a Manhattan hotel, and it is depressing indeed to think that we are so ancient that we remember not only when the Cincinnati Reds were officially nicknamed “Redlegs,” but also when they were widely known by the unofficial nickname “Rhinelanders,” a nod to the ethnic group that once dominated that city, and at some point during its hegemony concluded that chili is best served over spaghetti. The immediate situation: the approximate midpoint of the draft. For an outline of our overall approach to the draft and an account of the first half, see our previous post. Read the rest of this entry »

In two starts spanning 12 innings, Brandon McCarthy has allowed six home runs. Out of 12 fly balls. For a 50% HR/FB rate. After witnessing the last of those homers in Monday’s game, I Tweeted about it. Because that’s what all the cool kids do nowadays, Tweet, right? After a couple of back and forths, I then Tweeted the following:

@RotoLance Anyone who claims to have evidence for why McCarthy, or any pitcher, has allowed an inflated HR/FB rate is lying or just wrong.

— Mike Podhorzer (@MikePodhorzer) April 14, 2015

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Recently, I made an initial push to get a deeper look at hitters. I felt people have enough information on pitchers, especially with the Pitchf/x data available. I finally had some time to dig into the information a little more and have come up with a couple updates.

Nine batted ball categories is too many

Inside Edge makes avaialble nine non-bunt categories for batted balls. Here are the original nine with the xBABIP and wOBAcon:

Batted Ball Type: xBABIP, wOBAcon, % of batted balls
Groundball – Weak: .151, .112, 31.4%
Groundball – Medium: .461, .416, 9.5%
Groundball – Well-Hit: .647, .610, 3.8%
Line Drive – Weak: .622, .579, 2.3%
Line Drive – Medium: .650, .638, 7.3%
Line Drive – Well-Hit: .719, .815, 11.1%
Flyball – Weak: .078, .074, 18.5%
Flyball – Medium: .069, .081, 8.2%
Flyball – Well-Hit: .641, 1.168, 7.8%

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Yesterday I analyzed the ultra small sample size of one outing when discussing four starting pitchers. But that’s kinda okay because fastball velocity stabilizes quickly and instantly provides useful information. Since I don’t know what else one writes about a week and a half into the season, let’s talk about a couple of more names with regards to fastball velocity.

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