WHIP sucks.

What's wrong with it? Let me give you a list.

1) Assumes hits given up are entirely under the pitcher's control.

Did you know that defence isn't entirely static? Funny that. Hits don't occur at the same rate in front of different fielders and in different ballparks, and the variation in defence/park effect far outstrips any variation in hit prevention skill amongst ML calbire pitching.

2) Assumes innings pitched are entirely under the pitcher's control.

Sort of the same as point one but so crucial I decided to mention it twice. Outs are determined by pitcher skill, defence, and park effects. Pretending that the latter two don't exist when trying to measure pitcher effectiveness is a bad idea.

3) Improper mapping of different types of hits to different run values.

WHIP values a single the same as as a home run. At least ERA doesn't have this problem.

The problem with throwing together a set of numbers that look vaguely similar and calling them statistics is that generally the result means, in layman's terms, sweet bugger all. For all intents and purposes, WHIP is ERA except worse. At least ERA tries to measure runs, while all WHIP does is... measure walks and hits per inning pitched.

It's crap like this that gives real analysis a bad name. Fantasy baseball has a lot to answer for.

So I've been thinking about this post for about a year now, but I've never got around to writing it properly. Well, I have 45 minutes to kill, so it's as good a time as any. I realise that I'm probably preaching to the choir here but whatever.

"Stats vs. scouts" is one of the central arguments in baseball circles, leading to mildly horrifying levels of vitriol leveled at members of either side. It's one of Moneyball's lasting legacies, as anything that portrays the old guard as curmudgeonly incompetents doomed to fall under the armies of cleverness is going to provoke a reaction from said curmudgeonly incompetents (NB: I am not calling the old guard curmudgeonly incompetents), and rightly so.

The problem is of course that statistical analysis and scouting are by no means natural enemies - in fact, they're closely allied. Advanced statistics are proxies for good scouting. Sometimes they pick up things that scouts miss, and sometimes scouting will tell you things that stats will not, but they are complementary. A team's front office doesn't have to be one or the other - the point is that both methods are tools to evaluate players.

Interestingly, the argument doesn't even seem to be about player evaluation, and the dogmatic camps generally make absolutely no sense at all. Those in the "scouts" camp spout off about RBI and batting average (which are statistics last time I looked), and people trying to be "statsy" will misuse numbers they don't understand to come to stupid conclusions. Does anyone* seriously think that 'gritty' would be the main point in a real scouting report? Or that analysts throw random numbers at the wall until the come up with their stats?

No, this isn't about statistics against scouting. Not at all. It's about people believing that they're already experts on baseball player evaluation. Imagine if people took the same attitude towards, say, engineering as they did baseball. You'd see people looking at construction sites with total disdain:

"I've walked through a lot of buildings and I can say for sure that using an eccentric braced frame for the lateral force resisting system is completely stupid. SCBFs are much better in the clutch."

Watching a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. Playing a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. Watching a lot of baseball while listening to the opinions of people who've played a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. But it's amazing how many people seem to think it does.

It's not stats against scouts, and it never has been. It's acknowledging one's own ignorance against the belief that one already knows everything.

Because if you already know everything, why would you ever need to think about it?

Continue reading this post »

Cross-posted from LL/DRB

The traditional way of evaluating pitcher effectiveness is ERA. There are a number of glaring flaws with this statistic, the primary one being that you can describe it as follows. 'How many earned runs (unearned vs. earned determined by the subjective home scorekeeper) a team concedes per nine innings when a certain pitcher is on the mound.' If you can't spot a couple of major issues here, stop reading now.

The primary problem, of course, that ERA is much closer to a team run prevention metric than a pitching one. Even at the major league level, defensive ability varies considerably. An adjustment is made for errors, but that's in the hands of a scorekeeper, and you can't make an error if you don't get anywhere near the baseball*. This seems a rather unfair thing to penalize a pitcher for. You see the defense issue popping up all the time - the early 00s Mariners, for example, had one of the best outfields in the history of the game, and their pitchers got all the credit for it. When Mike Cameron was removed from the equation, their ERAs rather predictably collapsed.

A couple of tertiary problems follow:

1. Different stadiums have different effects on pitchers and hitters. A pitcher in Arlington suffers immensely compared to a pitcher in Petco Park, even if they are roughly equivalent in talent.
2. We shouldn't really care about the unearned vs. earned run distinction, because giving up an unearned run is no different to an earned one in terms of wins and losses.
3. ERA tends to fluctuate wildly year to year, which implies that it is divorced from a pitcher's true abilities.

Essentially, we need to look at what a pitcher can actually control to evaluate how good he is at pitching. Seems obvious, right? How?

What we can measure about a pitcher which the defense has no control over:

• Strikeouts swinging
• Strikeouts looking
• Walks
• Hit by pitch
• Ground balls
• Line drives
• Popups
• Fly balls
• Home runs

By only looking at these numbers, defence is more or less entirely eliminated. There are a few robbed home runs every year, but that's neither here nor there. What do we do next? We have to figure out how many runs and outs each of these are worth. This is a long, complicated process, and I'm not going to go into the details here. Suffice to say that every line drive, strikeout, etc over an entire year is examined to see how many runs/outs result, with the average taken after the all of these events have been calculated. And then you can figure out how many runs and outs a pitcher should have given up, without considering his defence, over the course of a year. Much like ERA, tRA is calculated by Runs/Outs*27. Parks are also adjusted for (when measuring the bulleted list above). It's actually a pretty simple concept, and unlike ERA is defence independent, park independent, and much more stable year-to-year (meaning that it's a closer measure of talent - regressing tRA gets you even closer).

There are problems with it, of course - some pitchers' ground balls are hit harder than others', etc, but these issues pale in comparison to the challenges with using ERA to evaluating pitching. Just because ERA is more traditional and fits into the old-school definition of baseball stats better doesn't mean it's right. tRA, as well as other advanced statistics, can be found on StatCorner.

*The Raul Ibanez school of defence.

I know there are a few people who think tRA is too complicated to understand, what with all those scary numbers in it. Hopefully the following is an easier read than the 'official' primer. For many (most?) of you, well, you know this already.

The traditional way of evaluating pitcher effectiveness is ERA. There are a number of glaring flaws with this statistic, the primary one being that you can describe it as follows. 'How many earned runs (unearned vs. earned determined by the subjective home scorekeeper) a team concedes per nine innings when a certain pitcher is on the mound.' If you can't spot a couple of major issues here, stop reading now.

The primary problem, of course, that ERA is much closer to a team run prevention metric than a pitching one. Even at the major league level, defensive ability varies considerably. An adjustment is made for errors, but that's in the hands of a scorekeeper, and you can't make an error if you don't get anywhere near the baseball*. This seems a rather unfair thing to penalize a pitcher for. You see the defense issue popping up all the time - the early 00s Mariners, for example, had one of the best outfields in the history of the game, and their pitchers got all the credit for it. When Mike Cameron was removed from the equation, their ERAs rather predictably collapsed.

A couple of tertiary problems follow:

1. Different stadiums have different effects on pitchers and hitters. A pitcher in Arlington suffers immensely compared to a pitcher in Petco Park, even if they are roughly equivalent in talent.
2. We shouldn't really care about the unearned vs. earned run distinction, because giving up an unearned run is no different to an earned one in terms of wins and losses.
3. ERA tends to fluctuate wildly year to year, which implies that it is divorced from a pitcher's true abilities.

Essentially, we need to look at what a pitcher can actually control to evaluate how good he is at pitching. Seems obvious, right? How?

What we can measure about a pitcher which the defense has no control over:

• Strikeouts swinging
• Strikeouts looking
• Walks
• Hit by pitch
• Ground balls
• Line drives
• Popups
• Fly balls
• Home runs

By only looking at these numbers, defence is more or less entirely eliminated. There are a few robbed home runs every year, but that's neither here nor there. What do we do next? We have to figure out how many runs and outs each of these are worth. This is a long, complicated process, and I'm not going to go into the details here. Suffice to say that every line drive, strikeout, etc over an entire year is examined to see how many runs/outs result, with the average taken after the all of these events have been calculated. And then you can figure out how many runs and outs a pitcher should have given up, without considering his defence, over the course of a year. Much like ERA, tRA is calculated by Runs/Outs*27. Parks are also adjusted for (when measuring the bulleted list above). It's actually a pretty simple concept, and unlike ERA is defence independent, park independent, and much more stable year-to-year (meaning that it's a closer measure of talent - regressing tRA gets you even closer).

There are problems with it, of course - some pitchers' ground balls are hit harder than others', etc, but these issues pale in comparison to the challenges with using ERA to evaluating pitching. Just because ERA is more traditional and fits into the old-school definition of baseball stats better doesn't mean it's right. tRA, as well as other advanced statistics, can be found on StatCorner.

*The Raul Ibanez school of defence.

I know there are a few people who think tRA is too complicated to understand, what with all those scary numbers in it. Hopefully the following is an easier read than the 'official' primer.

The traditional way of evaluating pitcher effectiveness is ERA. There are a number of glaring flaws with this statistic, the primary one being that you can describe it as follows. 'How many earned runs (unearned vs. earned determined by the subjective home scorekeeper) a team concedes per nine innings when a certain pitcher is on the mound.' If you can't spot a couple of major issues here, stop reading now.

The primary problem, of course, that ERA is much closer to a team run prevention metric than a pitching one. Even at the major league level, defensive ability varies considerably. An adjustment is made for errors, but that's in the hands of a scorekeeper, and you can't make an error if you don't get anywhere near the baseball*. This seems a rather unfair thing to penalize a pitcher for. You see the defense issue popping up all the time - the early 00s Mariners, for example, had one of the best outfields in the history of the game, and their pitchers got all the credit for it. When Mike Cameron was removed from the equation, their ERAs rather predictably collapsed.

A couple of tertiary problems follow:

1. Different stadiums have different effects on pitchers and hitters. A pitcher in Arlington suffers immensely compared to a pitcher in Petco Park, even if they are roughly equivalent in talent.
2. We shouldn't really care about the unearned vs. earned run distinction, because giving up an unearned run is no different to an earned one in terms of wins and losses.
3. ERA tends to fluctuate wildly year to year, which implies that it is divorced from a pitcher's true abilities.

Essentially, we need to look at what a pitcher can actually control to evaluate how good he is at pitching. Seems obvious, right? How?

What we can measure about a pitcher which the defense has no control over:

• Strikeouts swinging
• Strikeouts looking
• Walks
• Hit by pitch
• Ground balls
• Line drives
• Popups
• Fly balls
• Home runs

By only looking at these numbers, defence is more or less entirely eliminated. There are a few robbed home runs every year, but that's neither here nor there. What do we do next? We have to figure out how many runs and outs each of these are worth. This is a long, complicated process, and I'm not going to go into the details here. Suffice to say that every line drive, strikeout, etc over an entire year is examined to see how many runs/outs result, with the average taken after the all of these events have been calculated. And then you can figure out how many runs and outs a pitcher should have given up, without considering his defence, over the course of a year. Much like ERA, tRA is calculated by Runs/Outs*27. Parks are also adjusted for (when measuring the bulleted list above). It's actually a pretty simple concept, and unlike ERA is defence independent, park independent, and much more stable year-to-year (meaning that it's a closer measure of talent - regressing tRA gets you even closer).

There are problems with it, of course - some pitchers' ground balls are hit harder than others', etc, but these issues pale in comparison to the challenges with using ERA to evaluating pitching. Just because ERA is more traditional and fits into the old-school definition of baseball stats better doesn't mean it's right. tRA, as well as other advanced statistics, can be found on StatCorner.

*The Raul Ibanez school of defence.

61-101, and we didn't even secure the #1 overall pick next June. Good bloody riddance, 2008.

Remember when, according to some, Carlos Silva was the best free agent pitcher available this winter?

Remember when, upon missing out on Hiroki Kuroda, the Mariners panicked about their starting rotation, signing said Silva to a $48M, 4 year contract?

Remember certain parties (e.g. me) saying that they hated the contract, but Silva was reasonably valuable and likely to improve the team, provided there was a reasonable defence behind him?

Remember how I didn't have tRA for any year before 2007 at that point?

Because holy crap was I wrong.

Continue reading this post »

After applying a positional adjustment for bRAA, their best hitter is a guy OPS'ing .729.

As a team, their bRAA stands at an amazing -98.8; 2 wins worse than what our sorry lineup has accomplished. And their pitching hasn't helped them that much either, what with it being worth +25 runs, 15 of those attributed to Rich Harden.

Who doesn't play for them anymore.

When Billy Beane wants to rebuild, my goodness he goes for it.

From Hickey via USSM: Erik Bedard has a torn labrum.

We knew what it was after the MRI — it’s a tear in the labrum and a cyst,” Bedard said. “Surgery was always an option, but you want it to be the last option. You’re never 100 percent sure what will happen in surgery.

I'd have some commentary but I honestly feel too queasy to point out anything except:

Anyway this labrum’s great – it belongs to Erik Bedard

-Scrappy, 3 days ago.

FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING DOG.

----------

Jeff's note: I'm not at home, but I just heard the news. Figures. For the Mariners, this has for all intents and purposes pretty much been sealed as the worst trade in team history. For us, it probably means no more Erik Bedard ever again, and shattered hopes for a competitive team in 2009. For everyone who thought it appropriate to call Bedard a pussy (or insinuate as such), I cordially invite you all to go fuck yourselves. In Riggleman's own words, Bedard gave this team everything he could - and probably more - and in the end it's not the pitcher you should hate, but the ex-general manager who thought the pitcher worth crippling the farm. You can't help getting hurt. You can help taking an obvious bad gamble. God dammit, Bavasi. God dammit. This organization has now been set back even further than I feared, and it's all thanks to you. Tomorrow morning I hope someone farts in your coffee.

It's fun when a worst-case scenario comes to fruition. Really keeps you grounded.