Tag Archives: Stats

The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011

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The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011 produced by Dave Studenmund (Acta Sports, 2010) 320 pages

HBT2011The Hardball Times Baseball Annual is one of the titles on my ‘baseball books to buy’ list every year. 

It typically offers an unrivalled combination of copious stats alongside a varied mix of insightful and thought-provoking articles.  The 2011 edition, published at the end of 2010 and referring back to last year’s MLB season, is no exception to the trend.

The Annual has two main regular features.  The first, and the opening salvo in the book, is a look back at the regular season just gone by analysing each division in turn. 

Details of the playoffs and World Series are not included in the book, but this is by design and allows the Hardball Times team to get their offering out onto the shelves and in the online stores as soon as possible.  The book contains a weblink and password that allows readers to access the October articles, alongside downloadable versions of the stats that make up the final 120 odd pages of the book. 

The stats are the second regular feature.  They are a welcome combination of all the traditional favourites alongside some less well-known varieties (Base Runs, Pitching Runs Created, Gross Production Added) and the Batted Ball stats that have become a recent trademark of the Hardball Times.  There is also a good selection of different fielding stats, a topic that inspires a selection of articles in the first half of the book.

Fielding stats have long been a sticking point in the world of sabremetrics, principally because no method of evaluating defence has really taken hold as the standard bearer that all (or at least most of us) can rely on.  Continue reading →

2010 GB baseball archive update

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Team GBI have recently updated the GB archive for 2010 for both the Seniors and Juniors, and the additions – alas – tell the tale of a season of huge disappointment. The GB Seniors slipped back to the European Championship Qualifying Pool for the first time since they won the B-Pool event on home soil in 1996. The Qualifying Pool is where the GB Juniors still find themselves, after a mixed showing at their European Championship event. One positive to come from the season is the possibility of Britain hosting a major international tournament for the first time since that B-Pool triumph with 6 wins and no losses 14 years ago. Continue reading →

Book Review: Baseball Prospectus 2010

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Baseball Prospectus 2010 edited by Steven Goldman and Christina Kahrl (Wiley, 2010), 652 pages

bp-2010Buying the Baseball Prospectus annual has been a pre-season ritual for me since 2005; however last year’s disappointing effort left me questioning whether to spend my money on another title. I decided to give BP another chance and I’m glad that I did as the 2010 is another good book from the team, albeit one with a few imperfections along the way.

The annual is primarily designed to be an aid for fantasy owners, with the central part of the book being BP’s own patented PECOTA projections of how each player is likely to perform in the season ahead.  Every team is covered in turn, beginning with an in-depth essay on the organization in question before hitters, pitchers, notable minor leaguers and the manager are looked at under a statistical eye.  This is followed by Kevin Goldstein’s always enlightening section on the 101 best prospects in baseball, but there are no research articles to round off the book as there has been previously. That’s not a big blow for me because the articles in the 2009 edition were uninspiring and the Hardball Times Annual is the book to buy if you are looking for that sort of content in any case. 

The other main difference between the 2010 and 2009 annuals is that this year’s effort includes an index (and, yes, this was the first thing I checked when I opened up the book).  The unintended omission of this essential finding tool last year was inexcusable and perhaps it was a factor in the move to a new publisher for this edition?  Continue reading →

Web pick of the week: Jon Sciambi on Baseball Prospectus

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Web-PickOur web pick this week is an interesting guest article by Jon Sciambi published at Baseball Prospectus on Tuesday.  Sciambi, known as ‘Boog’ to many, is a commentator for ESPN and he previously did the play-by-play for the Atlanta Braves.  He was one of my favourite ‘local’ commentators that we get to enjoy via MLB.TV so it’s a bit of a shame that he will not be covering Chipper and co this season, but I can hardly begrudge him his well-deserved new job (he previously worked ESPN games part-time).

Anyway, Jon is known for being open to new ideas and in particular for bringing some advanced statistical thoughts to the masses.  Will Carroll, one of the Baseball Prospectus staff writers, posted a blog recently about getting the advance-stat message out to more people (the blog post and resulting comments are worth reading as well) and Sciambi’s article provides a professional broadcaster’s response to some of the issues, ideas and preconceptions raised.

I’m a lot like Jon in the sense that while I do take a keen interest in stats and how they can help you to understand more about the game, I’m not really a ‘maths’ person. When stat-based articles go too far down the route of explaining regression methods and suchlike, they go over my head because it’s not the sort of thing I know much about and more importantly it’s not the sort of thing I’m greatly interested in learning either.  There are lots of things in this world that do pique my inquisitive nature, but grappling with long equations and calculations is not one of them.

However, taking an interest in advanced stats does not mean you have to get neck-deep into spreadsheets and databases.  Some people do, of course, but the majority of us can sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labour.  What we need are people who can interpret the numbers and relay genuinely insightful information about the game in a simple and enjoyable way.

Sciambi provides some interesting thoughts on how TV broadcasts can be part of this, whilst also recognising that a lot of people simply want to sit down and while away an afternoon or evening by enjoying a ballgame.  Bringing more advanced stats into baseball coverage is a good idea, but those involved need to understand that it’s not what everyone is after.  That’s not because they are dumb or have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity of RBI’s and batting average, it’s because they just want to enjoy the game with their friends and aren’t fussed either way about which stats are cited. 

Educating people is always a worthy goal, so explaining the limitations of some of the traditional stats and introducing new ideas is an endeavour that should be encouraged.  However it needs to be done in an enjoyable way. In other words, not in a ‘I’m telling you this to show that you are dumb and I am smart’ kind of way, which some of the advanced stat stuff (like any advanced or academic movement) is prone to suffer from at times.

Web Pick of the week: Various on defensive stats

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Web-PickI’m cheating a bit this week as I’m not so much offering a Web Pick, but a collection of them on the same topic. Most baseball fans are well aware that the established stats used to evaluate defence, fielding percentage and errors, don’t tell you very much about how good (or bad) someone really is.  You can hazard a guess that a player who amasses lots of errors is probably not too slick with the leather, but that’s about it. 

Offering much more than broad generalizations with fielding stats does seem to be a tricky task.  There are so many variables on any given play that, as a fan rather than a statistical analyst, my preconception is that creating reliable statistics is always going to be a major challenge.  Even something as simple as a second baseman fielding a grounder depends on lots of factors.  For example: how hard was the ball hit, was the ball’s bounce affected by spin or a bad hop, how much was the player’s ability to field the ball affected by his initial positioning (good or bad) and who was responsible for that (e.g. was the play made easier because the second baseman’s manager had instructed him to stand a few yards to the right of where he would normally)? 

It’s a major challenge, but clearly it’s one well worth taking on because getting a better idea of a fielder’s ability is crucial to General Managers and very interesting to most of us fans.  MLB.com helpfully provided an article about the latest defensive stats earlier this month and included a separate page containing “a quick primer on four of the newest defensive statistics”.  They’re a good starting point for anyone interested in the topic. 

The MLB.com article specifically refers to the importance that the Red Sox and Mariners are giving to defence and Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times posted a fascinating blog about the M’s and defensive stats just before 2009 became 2010.  I particularly liked the bit about Jason Bay’s defence in left, noting that “while baseball insiders will pretty much agree that Bay is no Endy Chavez as a left fielder, there is little agreement on how bad he actually is”.  No single statistic, or even a group of statistics, is going to conclusively answer that question, but that can be said of most things.  Let’s face it, if different surgeons can look at MRI scans of Bay’s knees and shoulder and come to different conclusions on his physical condition, working out precisely how the Green Monster affected his defence is going to be just as open to different interpretations.

Those different interpretations, and different stats, are exactly what makes these discussions/arguments so much fun for us fans, although General Managers that have to make decisions about the spending of millions of dollars might welcome a bit more certainty.

Book Review: The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010

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The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 produced by Dave Studenmund (Acta Sports, 2009), 368 pages

The lack of actual games can make the baseball offseason seem a depressing period, but in some ways it makes for a nice breather after a long season.  Away from the unrelenting schedule, there’s more time to sit back and think about the sport, to ponder how the season played out, delve into the sport’s history and be fascinated by new research.  What’s more, the folks at the Hardball Times website conjure up an annual that allows you to do all of these things from the starting point of a single book.

Most baseball annuals seem to be largely focused on the fantasy baseball crowd these days.  That’s a big market to aim at, of course, but it doesn’t make for books that you are likely to come back to in future years.  The Hardball Times deals with this by issuing two books: a season preview for the fantasy crowd and an annual ‘review’ that has a longer-lasting appeal.  The annual follows a standard format every year: a review of every division, a commentary section based on the season just gone and other topics of interest, a history section, an analysis section full of research articles and a lengthy statistics section to round everything off.  Continue reading →

Roundshaw Hop: Avoiding infamy – an update

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Roundshaw-Hop-(128x128)Back in June I wrote a post about Croydon’s woeful season, and in particular whether they would break any single-season records of the wrong kind. Since I was checking this anyway, it wasn’t a great deal of extra effort to put together a table of best and worst single-season team records. I’ve done this here on the GBBSA archive for domestic top-tier stats. The Pirates of ’09 might be relieved to have made only one category each for offence and pitching.

2009 update: batting dominance, pitching dominance, league health, and league quality

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Earlier this year I published a series of articles offering between-season comparisons of batters, pitchers, league quality, and league health in the British top tier. With the National Baseball League’s regular season now completed, it is possible to see where 2009 fits in. Continue reading →

Roundshaw Hop: Cain nears 500 Ks

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Roundshaw-Hop-(128x128)With four games left to play for Richmond, Cody Cain has a good opportunity of registering his 500th regular-season strike-out in top-tier British baseball. It’s a milestone that will be accompanied by an asterisk, as 127 of the 489 nothced up to date were recorded in the renegade National League Baseball (UK) in Cain’s first two seasons in Britain, 1993 and 1994. Bitterness about the unsanctioned league reamins to this day, but few would dispute that the league was of a quality similar to or better than that of the official top flight. It is for this reason that I believe strongly that the 127 strike-outs should contribute to Cain’s total.

Aside from this approaching milestone, there are several other statistical things to keep an eye on in the closing weeks of the season, as several of the races for category leaders are yet to be decided. Some of the races are looked at below.

Continue reading →