{"id":9443,"date":"2010-10-23T21:40:55","date_gmt":"2010-10-23T20:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9443"},"modified":"2010-10-23T21:49:11","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T20:49:11","slug":"2010-update-batting-dominance-pitching-dominance-league-health-and-league-quality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=9443","title":{"rendered":"2010 update: batting dominance, pitching dominance, league health, and league quality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Statistics\"In early 2009 I published a series of articles offering between-season comparisons of batters, pitchers, league quality, and league health\u00c2\u00a0in the British top tier. Later on last year I updated this for the 2009 season<\/a>, and here I do the same for the season just gone. The big question is how Daniel Williams’s season compares against other top performances in recent years. He did, after all, break the modern records<\/a> for batting average and on-base average. It is also interesting to find out what impact the expansion of the National Baseball League from five teams to eight teams had on the quality of play and the health of the circuit.<\/p>\n

Batting dominance
\n<\/strong>To see\u00c2\u00a0results for 2001-2008 and the methods read the <\/em>full article<\/em><\/a>.
\n<\/em>Daniel Williams had a gross production average of .541 in 2010 (this is calculated as 0.45*on-base average plus 0.25*slugging average to weight these figures according to their contribution to run production and place them on a scale that can be interpreted like batting average). This gives him a z-score (which quantifies how dominant he was relative to all other hitters in the league) of 2.069. He becomes only the third player since 2001 to top the 2.000 mark, the others being Simon Pole (2.444) and Roddi Liebeneberg (2.146), both back in 2005. Also deserving a mention is Grant Delzoppo, who had a gross production average in 2010 of .464. This equates to a dominance score of 1.508, which is 11th on the 21st Century list.<\/p>\n

Pitching dominance
\n<\/strong>To see\u00c2\u00a0results for 2001-2008 and the methods read the <\/em>full article<\/em><\/a>.
\n<\/em>Despite Jason Roberts’s 15 wins, the 2010 season was unremarkable for rate statistics, and there were no serious challengers to the top-ten list that ranges from Simon Pole’s 2.308 to Adam Lemke’s 1.553. The player closest\u00c2\u00a0to displacing Lemke from the list was Henry Collins, who was one of two players with a superior pitching performance to Roberts when assessed using the reduced defence-independent pitching statistic applied in the article linked to above. The other was Matt Gilbert of Essex (despite his earned run average of 9.59 being nearly 7 runs higher than Roberts’s). Both Collins and Gilbert have nurtured their talent in the British league over many years and are proof that it is possible to develop a mastery of the sport in our domestic system.<\/p>\n

League quality
\n<\/strong>To see\u00c2\u00a0the methods, as well as a comparison between European leagues,\u00c2\u00a0read the <\/em>full article<\/em><\/a>.
\n<\/em>It’s worth dipping into the article linked to immediately above to see how league quality is calculated, and what factors contribute to it. In short, it gives a score between 20 and 100 for the standard of baseball on the whole in the top tier each year. Since the seasons are compared on a relative scale, the addition of\u00c2\u00a0stats for 2010 requires a full update of the results.\u00c2\u00a0Data from 2006 and 2007 are not included since the stats for those seasons include a\u00c2\u00a0large chunk of games between top-tier and second-tier teams. The updated quality scores out of 100 are ranked as follows: 2003<\/strong> – 98.3; 2004<\/strong> – 77.9; 2008<\/strong> – 71.5; 2005<\/strong> – 44.2; 2010<\/strong> – 38.2; 2009<\/strong> – 26.7. So despite the expansion from five teams in 2009 to eight teams in 2010, the quality still improved, and was not far off the level in 2005.<\/p>\n

League health
\n<\/strong>To see\u00c2\u00a0results for 2003-2008 and the methods read the <\/em>full article<\/em><\/a>.
\n<\/em>League health is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where forfeits, blowouts, and generally high run differences in games all subtract from the maximum possible score. These factors are all things likely to put players off staying in the league, and to detract from the interest of any spectators the sport might attract in Britain. Despite several forfeits during the year, 2010 still weighed in slightly above the forfeit-free but blowout-rich season of 2008, the respective scores being 72.8 and 72.6. This season’s score is below the 73.6 of 2009, but the hit taken from a three-team expansion might have been expected to be much worse. The scores for the last three years are all well below the high-water mark of 90.3 set in 2003. Figures for years before 2003 have not been calculated as the necessary data are not readily available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early 2009 I published a series of articles offering between-season comparisons of batters, pitchers, league quality, and league health\u00c2\u00a0in the British top tier. Later on last year I updated this for the 2009 season, and here I do the same for the season just gone. The big question is how Daniel Williams’s season compares […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-baseball-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9443"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9472,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9443\/revisions\/9472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}