Archive for Meta Analysis

During the all-star break, I decided to undergo a little experiment. I took two groups of 10 starting pitchers comprised of those whose ERAs outperformed and underperformed their SIERA marks by the largest margins. There were 437 of you who answered the question “Which Group Posts a Lower ERA RoS?” and 61.1% of you voted for Group A, the SIERA outperformers. Despite this group actually posting a higher SIERA than Group B, you felt that the magic would continue. Let’s find out the results and if the majority was correct.

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Back in mid-February, I was invited into the inaugural Tout Wars mixed draft league, which was a real honor as it is one of the two most prestigious “expert” leagues the members of the industry participate in. A month later, I drafted my team. My full results and analysis can be found here.

As a quick reminder, it’s a 15-team, 5×5 rotisserie league with standard 23-man active rosters and a 4 player bench. The one quirk is that it uses OBP instead of AVG. I led the league the majority of the season and heading into the Rangers-Rays tiebreaker game, I was winning by 5.5 points. Unfortunately, the current second place team, Tom Kessenich, mathematically still had a chance to overtake me. It was highly unlikely, but there was a non-zero possibility. Luckily, I held on for the win, despite my lead narrowing to five points. If you’re interested, you can check out the full final standings here.

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Last night, Jacoby Ellsbury had three plate appearances in his return back from a fractured foot. He had a hit and a walk after missing just 20 days. I decided to go back and look at players who fractured their foot and how they performed after returning.

With a sample size of one game under his belt, Ellsbury looks great and he feels pretty good (source)

“Yeah it was a nice game back,” Ellsbury said. “I’m definitely excited about it. I felt pretty good out there.”

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In recent months, Eno Sarris has talked a lot about going to the opposite field and how a hitter who sprays the ball to all fields may have a higher BABIP than those who primarily pull the ball. Furthermore, last summer Jeff Zimmerman updated an older BABIP formula and shared with us an xBABIP spreadsheet. Simply copy and paste a couple of lines of numbers from a player’s page and the calculator spits out an expected BABIP. The formula incorporates a hitter’s power, speed and batted ball distribution and does a darn good job of it. But with Joey Votto crediting his ability to go to all fields as a major factor behind his always near league-leading BABIP marks, I felt that it was time to start doing the research to determine if he was indeed on to something.

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It has been quite the Major League debut for Astros starting pitcher Jarred Cosart. Through 8 starts, he has allowed just 9 earned runs over 51 innings for a minuscule 1.59 ERA. The 23-year-old rookie is no doubt making waves as one of the better young pitchers in the game. And while that may well be true, it certainly isn’t because of how he has performed thus far.

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Yesterday I discussed the five hitters whose isolated slugging percentage (ISO) has declined the most compared with last year. So today, of course, I’ll check in on the hitters who have enjoyed a surge. Unfortunately, it comes without a super clever title. But, I promise you the analysis remains top notch :-). And yes, that may have been the first smiley ever inserted into a FanGraphs article. I try to start trends, what can I say. I limited my comparisons to those hitters who are “qualified” this year and also accumulated 400 plate appearances last year.

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With just over a month to go, time is running out for offensive disappointments to get back on track and start showing the type of power projected of them before the season began. When a hitter goes through a power drought, there could be a number of explanations, such as an injury, aging effects or good ole’ random variation (read: bad luck/fluke). These five hitters have seen their ISO rates plummet the most compared to last season. Let’s try to figure out what went wrong.

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Adam Dunn’s batting average has never been considered great, but it has taken a nose dive over the past few seasons. More and more teams have been using a extreme shift on the left-handed hitter. Dunn has now decided to implement his own shift beating swing adjustment. The change has his batting average up, but at the cost of some home run power.

The 33-year-old has hit at or below the league average AVG over his career.

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We can now say, with confidence and the backing of legal proceedings and pronouncements, that Ryan Braun did steroids. Those in yearly leagues have all said their curses dropped him — a good percentage of them won’t dip back into that well again, choosing to hold a grudge, or to just avoid the insecurity. But in keeper and dynasty leagues, the opportunity for arbitrage is here. Ryan Braun is available, and in a particularly desperate way in some of those leagues. But what will he look like without the juice?

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Last Tuesday, I compared the average home run and fly ball distances for qualified hitters with last season. Of the 10 hitters who enjoyed the largest distance surges, 8 of them had also experienced an increased HR/FB rate. Today, I check in on the other side of the coin — those hitters whose distance has declined the most. Whether an injury is to blame or some other explanation is behind the drop, it’s a bad sign for a hitter’s power and HR/FB rate.

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