THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, December 27, 2012

How much money would you spend on season tickets?

Let’s say you have three options:

A. - Buy a full-season package of 27 home games (games are only played on Saturdays), with first right to the full slate of playoffs, for 25$ a ticket.  (Implies a 54-game season, with 27 games at home)
B. - Buy a half-season package of 27 home games (games are played on Saturday+Sunday), with right to buy half of playoff games, for 25$ a ticket. (Implies a 108-game season, with 54 games at home)
C. - Buy a full-season package of 54 home games (games played Sat+Sun), with right to buy all playoff games, for 25$ a ticket.  (Implies a 108-game season, with 54 games at home)

Which would you prefer?

Crowdsourcing… height and weight?

Yes, why not!  Jeff does that very thing, among other things.

It doesn’t matter how accurate necessarily the results match to what we can measure.  What the survey does is measure PERCEPTIONS.  And that, in and of itself, is a worthy effort.  If those perceptions also happen to match reality, then all the better. 

I would have included a racial and/or skin-color component to the survey as well.  It would be a fair thing to do, because it will allow us to then research how race and/or skin-color and/or culture (i.e., the PERCEPTION of the player) plays a role in things like hit batters.

Integrity of a season

Tyler asks about the Bettman’s claim of the “integrity” of an NHL season.

In my view, the “integrity” issue is a non-issue.  We have no problem with the Canada Cup and World Cup in hockey or World Cup in soccer. 

Tyler however makes the point that in the old days with fewer teams, everyone played everyone else a large number of games, so a 44-game season had plenty of coverage in terms of head-to-head matchups.  And Bettman is implying as much with a 48-game season (meaning 2 to 4 games against each intra-conference game and zero inter-conference).  But, Tyler asks why not just 2 games against intra-conference opponents, so that even at 28 games, the season has “integrity” (as Bettman could define it).

Then we have the example of the NFL, which of course only plays 16 games, in a 32-team league.

It goes back to how much spread in talent there is.  And a long time ago, I showed the equivalency of a regular season length for the 4 sports.

If we treat the NFL’s 16-game season as the minimum number of games to have a season with “integrity”, the equivalency in the other sports is:
19 games NBA
48 games NHL
92 games MLB

So, Bettman is right, using the NFL standard (1 NFL game = 3 NHL games, in terms of what we learn about each team’s talent).  But I imagine a 14-game NFL season would also be acceptable, and so that brings us down to 42 games for an NHL season.  Furthermore, the NHL not only allows more teams in the playoffs, but they play more games in the playoffs.  Whereas an NFL team needs to play 3, maybe 4, games in the playoffs, an NHL team will play 16 to 28 games in a 4-round series. 

In NFL, the eventual winner will have played some 17 games in a regular 14-game season.  The equivalent in NHL would be 51 games including playoffs.  Strip out an average of 23 games for the Cup champion (or whatever it actually is), and it only needs 28 games of regular season play.

And in a 15-team conference, playing home-and-home against each team gives us 28 games.  That I think is the integrity point, if 14-game NFL regular season is your standard.

Situational walks

I’m surprised I’ve never seen anyone do this (or at least I can’t remember anyone doing it), so it’s good to see.  We see that Greg Maddux limits his walks to when they do the least damage.

You could of course extend this to any kind of event.  Strikeouts especially, since they have an ENORMOUS impact with runners on 3B and less than two outs.  So, are the high K pitchers especially able to get a K when they most need it?  And does a HITTER strikeout more when it’s less useful (does Adam Dunn for example increase his K rate relative to the rest of the league in this manner)?

You can try for HR and singles, etc.

Finally, also try for batted ball outs (though this might be more useful for batters, to see if batters generate “productive outs”).  Though of course, one man’s productive out is another man’s unproductive non-hit. 

Door is wide open, so I’d love to see what James can deliver for us.

Passwords: most and least common

Cool information.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

How do you bid on ebay?

In an otherwise fun column about baseball card collecting, Poz dropped this innocuous note:

OK. Back. I just put an eBay bid on a 1976 Topps baseball card set. Wish me luck.

There is exactly one and only one way that I bid on ebay: I wait until there is one to ten seconds left in the auction.  I don’t buy enough stuff on ebay to decide what is the optimal point with my internet connection.  And I have lost items where someone else bids with two seconds to go. Now, I HAVE lost out on items because I forgot to eventually put in a bid.  So, I am not a serious enough ebay-er to put in reminders, and make sure I login five minutes before the end.  To me, it’s optimizing the price.
 
If ever I were to put in a bid like Poz did, minutes, hours or days in advance, I would put in my max bid, and not watch it, which I presume is what Poz did.  That’s optimizing the time.

I don’t get the bidding wars at all.  If you are that kind of ebay-er, I’d like to know why/how you get yourself into that position.  If you are that into it, why not just wait until the very end (Tango method)?  And if you are not that into it, why not just bid once and wait for the end (Poz method)?  The bidding war I don’t get, other than optimizing the thrill for the sake of getting a thrill.  Tell me.

Control groups

Glenn looks at what happens to a team’s W/L record after it adds substantial amount to their payroll.  What he does NOT do is look at similarly positioned teams that do NOT add to their payroll.

Specifically, in one test, he finds a bunch of playoff teams that adds alot of money, and he still finds that a good portions wins fewer games.  But, even if they did not add alot of money, they would STILL win fewer games.  That’s regression toward the mean at work.  If you take a group of teams that win 88+ games, you will find, on average, that they will win less in the next season.  This is because teams that win 88+ games are teams that have both more good players than bad players and more good luck than bad luck.  The next season, the luck will cancel out, so, all other things equal, are expected to win fewer games.

If you don’t want to regress the observed win totals, at the very least, create a control group, teams that are similar in all respects except one (the one thing you are interested in).  The default expectation CANNOT be that how many games they won in year T is what it will be in year T+1.

Memento - a decade later

I just saw it for the first time yesterday.  If you haven’t seen it, then don’t bother reading, as it will contain major spoilers.

Read More

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Why Curt Schilling but not Kevin Brown?

They’ve pitched virtually the same number of innings.  Their runs allowed rate are extremely close (nearly identical per batter faced).  Their FIP are in the same ballpark.  Schilling earned about 115MM$ in salary to 130MM$ for Brown.  Even their W/L record is similar (216-146, 211-144).  Is Schilling’s post-season record the differentiator that puts Schilling above the borderline, and he will be on the Hall of Fame ballot year after year, building his case, while Brown was a one-and-done pitcher? Brown deserves to remain in the conversation.

Bias in ERA

ERA is a terrible idea.  It takes something factual, the number of runs scored, and then decides which of those to attribute to one pitcher or another (in case of multiple pitchers in the same inning), and of those attributed, decide which of those are “earned” and “unearned”.

When you take something factual, and decide to split it up in some systematic fashion, you have to worry about systematic biases.  And the larger the sample, the more the systematic bias will shine through.

Of the 1318 runs allocated to Curt Schilling, 1253 are declared as “earned” (a rate of 95%). He faced 13284 batters (in 3261 innings).  That’s a shade under .1 runs per batter faced.

Of the 1357 runs allocated to Kevin Brown, 1185 are declared as “earned” (a rate of 87%). He faced 13542 batters (in 3256 innings).  That’s an even smaller shade over .1 runs per batter faced.

Why do we have a bias?  Curt Schilling was a flyball pitcher while Kevin Brown was a groundball pitcher.  And errors are assigned to infielders far more than they are assigned to outfielders.  The very fact that Kevin Brown allows a ball to hit the ground will likely lead to him getting less “earned” credit for anything bad that happens, that that “bad stuff” gets transferred to his fielders.  But, Kevin Brown had zero expectation of “perfect” fielders.  That Brown allows a groundball comes with it the reality that it’ll get muffed more than Schilling allowing a flyball.

By allowing the scorer to decide that a pitcher gets absolved of blame in this biased manner, we perpetuate the systematic bias in the metric.  And we end up with Curt’s ERA at 3.46, and Brown at 3.28.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever”, might be your reaction.  After all, I picked the two most extreme pitchers of the current generation (true).  And their RA9 is 3.75 for Brown and 3.64 for Schilling.  ERA’s biased measure of +0.18 for Schilling becomes the unbiased -0.11 for Schilling.  So we’re talking about a +/-0.15 gap at the extreme.  True enough.  If you don’t care, you don’t care.  At least be aware of the issue, so you know enough to discard it as being mostly irrelevant.

The other issue is the mid-inning pitching change, where runs are allocated only if the following pitchers lets those runners score.  So, the run gets counted entirely to the initial pitcher only if the following pitcher allows those runs to score.  The reality is that we have a SHARED responsibility, but baseball record-keeping is so transfixed to give entire credit to one player or another, be it runs allowed or games “won”.  To reflect the reality of shared responsibility, we give the pitcher who leaves the game with runners on base a portion of those runners counting as runs scored, whether they scored or not.  And we give the relieving pitcher the remaining positive amount of the run if the runner scored, and a NEGATIVE run amount of the runner was left on base (so that at the team level, it all adds up for that inning). 

Be aware of the issues, and then decide if it’s relevant enough for you.

Monday, December 24, 2012

FIP is… as FIP does

I used to be involved in a great many Primer semantical arguments years ago.  One I just came across:

I never said FIP was magic or comprehensive or any of the things some of you seem to think that I wrote. I said that FIP is what the pitcher actually did. True statement.

No. It’s some of the stuff the pitcher actually did.

For example, throwing an 86 MPH meatball over the middle of the plate, that gets ripped in the gap for a triple is omitted.

Two people who are talking to each other, but don’t want to listen to each other.  It’s clear what each side is trying to say.

FIP is only concerned with those things that don’t involve his fielders (though Mike Trout stealing or not stealing HR are on the edge there).  It is AGNOSTIC on every other event.

This is no different than OBP only being concerned with whether a batter reached base, and not interested in how far he reached base.  So, a walk = HR for purposes of OBP.  It is AGNOSTIC as to how far the batter got.

So, why do we have a problem?  Well, there is a big gap between a player’s OBP and his overall offensive production.  Namely, his HR and extra bases and his baserunning.  It’s an obvious gap, so obvious, that we don’t even need to point it out.  No one is going to say that “OBP is almost the same as a hitter’s overall offense”.

With pitchers, the gap between a pitcher FIP and his overall defensive production is fairly “small” (with small being defined however one wishes to define it).  So, we end up with one side thinking “small” means “non-existant”, and the other side thinking “small” means “still notable”. 

FIP is impressive because it only needs 20-35% of a pitcher’s batters faced in order to explain a large portion of his talent. 

***

I should also point out if we actually compiled 86mph fastballs over the heart of the plate, we would include that in a metric.

Steubenville High

No words to describe this story.  It’ll take you at least 10 minutes to read through.  The story covers pretty much every aspect of the case. 

Prospects 2006

Poz goes through Baseball America’s compiled list from 2006 and concludes that there are as many hits as misses among each team’s #1 prospect.

When Russia claims to better treat its business and workers, you know you are in bad shape

President of the second-best hockey league in the world offers his opinion on the NHL and NHLPA.

While we might have arguments with the players unions, we always think about the hockey first of all, and about everything else later.

Slow-death of ERA?

Dave makes the argument that teams seem to be eschewing ERA in light of peripherals.  He brings up the case of Liriano, who has had an ERA above 5.00 in three of the last four seasons, and he asks:

For whatever reason, Liriano has been consistently terrible at stranding runners, and while it’s easy to write that off as a fluke over a year or even two, it gets a bit tougher to believe that this is all just random variance in sequencing when he’s at 840 innings pitched and has a career LOB% under 70%.

kwERA Awareness

Another article wishing to raise awareness to kwERA.

By the way, I’ve never been particularly fond of the name, and I just made it up out of convenience.  I used to also call it szERA (strike zone ERA), but then I realized that really that would be better for something based on called balls and called strikes or something.  So, I reverted to kwERA (k for strikeouts and w for walks).

Anyway, feel free to call it something else, and if you can sound it it, like FIP (fip) or wOBA (wuh-bah), all the better.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Youngest Historian and Future Saberist?

Welcome to 13-yr old Matt Nadel.

Catchers in the Hall of Fame

The #1 guy of all time is Johnny Bench in rWAR with 72 wins, which is just barely above the “automatic” line for HOF.  There are 40 players above Bench on career rWAR.

I don’t have any problem with that, because that’s what it is.  We don’t need any further adjustment, since a career is a collection of seasons.  However, does that necessarily mean we want to judge a career by a collection of seasons?

As I’ve stated many times in the past, my preference is to look at Wins Above Average, but only the positive seasons.  Frank Thomas is some 13 WAR ahead of Mike Piazza, but he’s 1 WAA ahead of him (if we look at positive seasons with WAA).  I think that’s a better way to appreciate their career accomplishments.

I know others do alot of mathematicaly gyrations trying to combine individual seasons to come up with a single number, but, I prefer the nice simplicity, which is why I advocate for adding up seasonal WAA of positive seasons.

Friday, December 21, 2012

The Book is again available at Amazon

For those who want to purchase via Amazon, here you go.  It’s currently 25% off at $16.46 (free shipping if you order 25$ worth). 

You get a better deal by using our discount code directly at our distributor (promo code BOOK50, and reduced price of 50% visible when you checkout; with 3.49$ shipping, it’s under 14.50$).  So, lower overall price, and better shipping speed.

And a friendly reminder that ANY purchases you make at Amazon (via the above link) gives us 4% referral fee, at no cost to you (comes out of Amazon’s profits).  So, if you need to buy some video game, or some pet supplies, use our link, and you’ll help us out.

Bettors and sports

About twenty years ago, Loto Quebec (the provincial government agency that regulates lotteries and gambling) introduced Mise-O-Jeu (Faceoff) that allowed betting on the NHL.  They basically gave odds for wins, and you multiplied all three odds to determine your payoff.  The NHL of course fought them, but, naturally, they lost.

It seems that this is the standard protocol, that the leagues keep fighting the government, they keep using the same arguments, the courts keep siding against the leagues not buying into their arguments.  Now, it’s MLB’s turn.  Here are some relevant articles, one with Selig’s deposition, and legal experts wondering why testimony is being redacted of the plaintiffs themselves.