One of the tasks I’ve been meaning to complete recently is expanding the list of links in the sidebar.
My objective for the links section is to include sites that will specifically interest a British baseball fan, both for established fans and for newcomers. There are countless places where you can find long lists of links to baseball sites, so I want to be a bit selective here. The four main MLB news sites are already listed and I will be adding in a few more general baseball sites, but from there the idea is to focus on British (and European/International) sites. We already have a decent selection of sites listed relating to the British scene and I’m also interested in linking to any sites about MLB by other British fans. So if you have any suggestions of sites that fit this criteria, please add a comment to this post below.
This outstanding task was brought to mind when reading a blog post by Jeff on Lookout Landing (an excellent Mariners blog) in which he provides a summary of some of the sites he visits most frequently for statistics. It’s a good introduction to some of the best resources baseball fans can access and I’ll be adding a few to my own list. Indeed, my slight neglect of the links section is epitomized by the absence of a link to one of the sites Jeff mentions.
Fangraphs
Fangraphs is one of my favourite sites because, as the name suggests, it compliments the normal stats pages with a wide variety of illuminating graphs. I guess some could see graphs as a sort of ‘dumbing down’ exercise; something to attract the sort of person who skims through a book to look at the pictures. However, that would be snobbish nonsense. Whether it’s baseball stats or complicated financial information, in the right circumstances graphs can be the best communication tool.
I’ve posted about Fangraphs’s Win Probability Added graphs in the past, which are a great way to chart the ebb and flow of games, but a new non-graph feature has been added to the site in the last ten days or so that I really love. David Appelman has added pitch type and velocity stats to the pitcher profiles for the past three seasons (the 2008 data will be added as it is created this coming season). The information is collated and disseminated by Baseball information Solutions and is absolutely fascinating.
As an introduction, here’s what I found out while going on a quick tour around the data.
The obvious place to start was with the two Cy Young winners from 2007.
Fangraphs tells us at the bottom of the ‘Season stats’ page that C.C. Sabathia looked to his fastball to get the job done around 61% of the time last year, with an average speed of 92.9MPH. The average speed of his fastball has actually decreased a little each year: 93.7MPH in 2006 and 94.7MPH in 2005. You would need more information to draw any conclusions as to whether that drop is significant or not, but it’s interesting to note nonetheless. Comparing his 2007 to the previous two years, Sabathia used his changeup more frequently in ’07 and completely cut out his curveball that he had used sparingly in years past.
The National League’s top pitcher, Jake Peavy, used his slider considerably more often in ’07 compared to the two previous years. We can also see that Peavy is using his changeup less often, reducing the percentage from 15.3% in 2005 to 7.4% in 2007. However, it’s worth noting that 4.8% of the pitches he threw in ’05 were unidentified by BIS so it’s possible that the 15.3% figure is a little on the high side.
Fangraphs also provides us with lots more data and graphs, including one graph that charts the percentage of balls put in play that were groundballs, flyballs or line drives. The 2006 NL Cy Young winner, Brandon Webb, is well known for being a sinkerball pitcher and the GB/FB/LD chart shows this quite dramatically. In each of the last three years, over 60% of balls put in play off Webb rolled along the ground waiting to be scooped up by Arizona infielders. Compare this to Eric Milton’s chart and you can see why he was so ill-suited to the cosy confines of the Great American Ballpark. Since 2002, he has consistently been around the 50% mark in terms of balls in play being flyballs. It’s no surprise when you click over to the HR/9 chart to see him consistently well above the league average in terms of giving up homers.
Back to sinkerballers, Chien-Ming Wang has a similar GB/FB/LD chart to Webb’s and both throw their sinking fastball approximately three times out of every four pitches. As for Wang’s Yankee team mate Andy Pettitte, he has noticeably reduced his use of a slider in the last two years. Back during his great 2005 season with the Astros, Pettite threw his slider nearly 15% of the time, compared to just 6.8% in ’06 and 4.8% in ’07. The slider is known for being a pitch that puts extra stress on the elbow and considering this has been a constant source of pain for Pettitte, perhaps he has consciously moved away from the pitch to extend his Big League career? Certainly a better idea than using HGH.
Joba Chamberlain meanwhile went to his slider 34.4% of the time in ’07, throwing it at an average speed of 86.4MPH. Some guys would be more than happy to hit that mark with their fastball! He certainly provides a different challenge to that posed by Tim Wakefield. One of the pitch type headings is ‘KN’ for knuckleball, so naturally I searched for Wakes’s profile. In 2007, around 83 per cent of his pitches were knuckleballs. 13.6% were ‘fastballs’ (at an average of 74.2MPH) and he also lobbed in the occasional curve (about 4%). Wakefield’s knuckleball averaged out at 66.8MPH, but this is a good example of where the average speed tells you a limited amount. For someone like Wakefield, the key is that his bread and butter pitch provides a certain amount of variation all on its own. Some will be 70MPH, some 62MPH.
That’s just a very brief look at what is there for you to explore. It should come with a warning though: this is very addictive. You look at one pitcher’s profile and it immediately sets your mind off on another trail. This is not the sort of site to visit if you are just looking to kill ten minutes before setting off to meet someone!
In an ideal world, you would like to place the pitch type/velocity data into a little more context. For example, knowing Wakefield threw a fastball 13.6% of the time is interesting but it would be even more interesting to know if there was a pattern to when he went to that pitch (did he use it more often on a certain pitch count or against a certain type of hitter etc?). BIS could clearly provide that extra level of data, but they would also charge more to supply it (and rightfully so). In fact, some of this extra data is on Bill James’s new subscription website. What Fangraphs is supplying for free is still a treasure trove for baseball fans.
An example of this extra level of data can be found at another blog linked to on the Lookout Landing list. Josh Kalk’s blog, uses the PITCHf/x data from the MLB.com Enhanced Gameday service to produce player cards containing lots of useful info. Kalk is one of a number of people (others include Dan Fox from Baseball Prospectus and Joe P. Sheehan until latterly of Baseball Analysts but now doing an internship with an MLB team) to use this data as the basis for some brilliant research. The process is in its relative infancy though and you have to take Kalk’s player cards with a pinch of salt.
For example, the page on Danny Haren gives you lots of data about the way he uses his fastball, curve, change and cutter (including usage on each pitch count), but this information shows that the system cannot identify Haren’s split-finger fastball. The BIS data on Fangraphs shows that he went to the splitter 23% of the time in 2007, whereas no such pitches are recognised by Kalk. We can solve this mystery partly by noting that Kalk’s data has Haren throwing a change 21% of the time, whereas the BIS data shows it at just 1.5%. So Kalk’s system is clearly recognising the splitter as a change. Such discrepancies are to be expected: BIS is a major stat-collecting company and is therefore going to be much more accurate. Kalk’s system shows a lot of promise though and is worth checking out.
This quick little post about my links section and Fangraphs has somehow turned into a fully-blown article! That’s testament to how exciting and infectious this data is. Find a bit of spare time (a couple of hours should do!) and explore it yourself.