Transaction Analysis: ... (09/18)
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September 18, 2015 Everything You Could Have Learned This WeekSeptember 14-18, 2015
I've been trying to type better lately, and I've learned that correcting habits I've followed very regularly for a very long time is very hard! Like, my pinkie finger is almost totally useless. It should be in charge of punctuation marks, like putting a colon there or a semicolon there or quotation marks there, but mostly it just flails randomly when pushed into action. It eventually gets the right key, but only after three or four tries. Also, for some reason I've had the habit of reaching across to press "Y" with my left index finger. That should be my right index finger's job, and I constantly find myself correcting that error.
Man, I should've taken keyboarding in middle school.
Monday
Umpires put far more stock into a whether a pitch goes through the front of the strike zone than one that goes through the back: Analyzing the Strike Zone as a Three-Dimensional Volume, by Eric Lang, The Hardball Times
Technically, these should all be called strikes. However, I found that roughly 68 percent were called balls. Not a great success rate. So we can see that umpires’ calls are more than likely influenced by the location of the ball at the front edge of home plate.
Tuesday We can indeed trust the veracity of September stats, even with the perceived threats of tanking, taking it easy, etc.: Seven Months Has Gone So Fast, by Russell Carleton, Baseball Prospectus
There were zero cases in which any of the "meaningful games" variables made a difference. There weren't even any borderline significance calls. Whether teams were in or out of the playoff chase, their regular players did pretty much what would otherwise be expected of them. Even the guys who are out of the race still seem to play as hard as they usually do. (In the aggregate, of course; there probably are some individual cases where guys dog it.) I don't think that this should shock anyone. There's professional pride to think of. There's individual stat-padding. There are guys who may have been up for a good portion of the year but still need to think of their job security. There are guys who want to set a good example for the young kids. If nothing else, there's not wanting to have the reputation as the guy who quits when the going gets tough.
Clutch is indeed a thing. Meaningful differences in clutch between the first and second half, however, are not: Why We Feel How We Feel About Clutch, by Jeff Sullivan, FanGraphs
An r-squared of literally 0.00. No observed relationship. No observed hint of a relationship. The only relationship here is the one between Clutch and total randomness, and that’s not a relationship for anyone to rely upon. It would be one thing if there were no relationship between Clutch in Year 1 and Year 2 (and there isn’t). But this is looking at the same teams, within seasons. Even clutch teams are only temporarily clutch. Sometimes they remain clutch, but no less often do they do the opposite.
Wednesday
Could the new video board at Wrigley Field block the wind and affect the flight of fly balls? Yes, if we're being very theoretical in our assumptions: The Physics of Wind at the Remodeled Wrigley Field, by DavidKagan, The Hardball Times
In summary, the winds within Wrigley are far too fickle to address the question of changes in wind pattern due to the remodel. We can get an estimate of the effect of the left field video board from our knowledge of the aerodynamics of the flight of a baseball making the unrealistic assumption that the new board completely blocks the wind. Catchers watch batters for clues on the plate approach, but sometimes batters are bluffing, and sometimes catchers aren't really watching anything at all: The Catcher is Watching You, by Eno Sarris, FanGraphs
Brandon Moss thought the most likely thing was that the catcher is looking for a change in approach, particularly due to count. “I’d never tell anyone my two-strike approach,” he told me when I asked him what he did to make more contact. “We all know when we have to make a small adjustment to get a pitcher off a spot. I think the catcher can see it. They watch the hitter get in the box with their feet. They’re seeing what you’re doing, they always watch.” Fewer baserunners hasn't led to more stolen bases as compensation, because you don't need to compensate for a three-run bomb: Why haven't stolen bases returned?, by Dave Cameron, Just a Bit Outside
Well, it might actually have something to do with those strikeout and home run trends we've mentioned. While it's still happening somewhat under the radar -- since overall offensive levels are still down -- home runs have come roaring back in baseball this year, to the point where the rate of home runs on contacted balls is the same now as it was a decade ago. We're not seeing guys hit 50 or 60 home runs anymore, but that's mostly because guys don't hit the ball as often as they used to, not because it isn't going as far when they do hit it. Thursday
TINSTAAPP is overly simplistic, as aphorisms based on absolutes tend to be: There is No Such Thing as TINSTAAPP, by Jeff Long and Jeff Quinton, Baseball Prospectus
All of this is to say that pitching prospects are, unsurprisingly, riskier than hitting prospects. Teams, strategies, and analyses all run into trouble with pitching prospects because of base-rate neglect, the tendency of our minds to ignore base-rate information (Prospect X is a pitcher), while focusing on player-specific info (Prospect X is athletic, always been healthy, good build, etc.). TINSTAAP is an attempt to correct this base-rate neglect, but it appears to be an over-correction, at least as it is being applied today. While we should be mindful of both the base-rate information and player-specific information, TINSTAAP places all the emphasis on the former, while also overstating its risk. As seen in our charts above, there clearly is such a thing as a pitching prospect and ignoring that would probably be as costly as overrating pitching prospects as a result of base-rate neglect. Weird pitches are all about lucking into something that works for some reason: What the Baltimore Bullpen Can Teach Us About Arm Action, by Eno Sarris, Fangraphs
Here’s another unique pitch — there might be another pitcher that throws a submarine riseball, but we couldn’t find one — and it’s not all about arm angle. There are other submariners, in other words, but no other PITCHf/x-era submarine rising fastballs.
Friday
Pitchers who can outperform their FIP seem so have the skill throughout their career, though it gets more apparent as they age: Age and FIP-ERA differential, by John Choiniere, Beyond The Box Score
To look at this, I first identified all the pitchers in the age 31-35 cohort between 2011-2015. I then used Fangraphs to determine their IP, FIP, and ERA at every age available, and binned that data using the same age ranges as the Play Index. Sam hypothesized that the reason for the FIP-ERA split was an increase in craftiness and/or wisdom and/or some other experiential factor; for the sake of having a competing idea, I guessed that FIP over-performace was always a characteristic of these pitchers, and said characteristic was selected for over the course of their careers (hence them still being around at ages 31-35 while the under-performers no longer are). If Sam's right, I should see an age pattern that mimics that of the entire sample; if I'm right, I'll see a consistent FIP-ERA across all the age bins. The answer is somewhere in the middle. At each age range this cohort of pitchers out-performs their FIP; however, in no other age range do they do so as dramatically as they do during their age 31-35 seasons. I also don't trust the number for the 36+ group, which is 0.004 runs better than FIP, due to an extremely small sample size.
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Free Agent Watch: Week 25