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September 24, 2004
by Nate Silver
While not as prolific a hitter as Barry Bonds is, Ichiro Suzuki is productive, exciting, and as big an outlier in his own way. Nate Silver explains.
September 16, 2004
by Nate Silver
David Wright exceeded expectations, while James Loney was a disappointment. All the hitters in our Top 50 Prospects list are put under the microscope in today's Lies, Damned Lies.
September 9, 2004
by Nate Silver
Stepping back from graphs and charts, Nate Silver looks at how far along sabermetrics has come, and what challenges are ahead in the short term.
September 1, 2004
by Nate Silver
You might think that the National League, which is dominating the performance lists, is the stronger circuit this year. Nate Silver has done the research and come to a different conclusion.
August 25, 2004
by Nate Silver
Taking a whack at the concept of success cycles, the Tiger Plan has proven an effective strategy in Motown. Nate Silver takes a closer look.
August 11, 2004
by Nate Silver
How did Theo Epstein get to a place where he believed that trading Nomar Garciaparra was the solution? Nate Silver examines some of the non-baseball reasons why general managers do the things they do. Warning: some football content.
August 4, 2004
by Nate Silver
The PECOTA projection that has garnered the most attention this year is the one for the Reds' Wily Mo Pena. Nate Silver breaks down how PECOTA arrived at such an optimistic--and accurate--prediction.
June 30, 2004
by Nate Silver
The Padres reacted harshly to news of No. 1 draft pick Matt Bush's arrest on underage drinking and assault charges last week, suspending him indefinitely and threatening to void his signing bonus (Bush's assault charges have subsequently been dropped). I don't want to minimize the stupidity of Bush's behavior, nor to suggest that the Padres would have been better served by adopting a boys-will-be-boys approach--if Ryan Wilkins were caught, say, dropping his pants in front of a police officer while sipping from a Jagermeister and OxyContin Slurpee, we'd probably take a similar course of action.
But let's get a few things straight...
June 17, 2004
by Nate Silver
As much as it annoyed me, being a Pistons fan, to see that coverage of the NBA Finals was focused far more on the Lakers' demise (MEDVEDENKO TO TEST FREE AGENT WATERS!) as it was on Detroit's ascent (blue team wins championship in five games), there's a lot to be said for the presence of a villain. The Lakers have been so good for so long--so annoyingly, purple-and-goldenly good--for so long, that it was one hell of a story to see them go down to defeat, even if it came at the hands of a largely unfamiliar and anonymous team whose low-scoring style made them the basketball equivalent of the 1906 Cubs.
Lest you accuse me of some sort of Midwestern provincialism, it's worth noting that the rest of the country agreed--the Finals were the highest-rated in years. David Stern agreed too, and it was refreshing to hear him confess, during a halftime interview, that the presence of a franchise like the Lakers was good for his league, drawing lots of eyeballs and putting lots of butts in the seats.
Now that baseball has the sports stage more or less to itself--the NHL finals concluded two weeks ago, with the Dayton (OH) Green Hornets defeating the Saskatoon Moosecatchers in a thrilling seven-game series--it's worth considering whether a similar phenomenon manifests itself in our preferred sport.
June 10, 2004
by Nate Silver
One of the entertaining elements to following the Cubs this year is witnessing just how the city's reactions have changed in light of the lofty expectations foisted on the team prior to the start of the season. Ordinarily, a 30-28 record during the first 90-degree week of the summer would be cause for celebration. This time around, it has triggered grave concern, as the red-on-blue Cub flag flies feebly beneath those of the Reds, Cards and Astros atop the center field scoreboard at Wrigley. One of the problems, it seems, is not that the Cubs aren't scoring enough runs, but that they aren't scoring them at the right times.
May 27, 2004
by Nate Silver
Two months ago, the Oakland Athletics signed Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million contract extension that will keep him with the club through 2010. Despite some head-scratching from the public, there are good reasons behind why Billy Beane campaigned to do for Chavez what he hadn't done for former MVP shortstop Miguel Tejada. Unlike Tejada, Chavez is a player whose skills, like his fine defense and his ever-improving plate discipline, are likely to be undervalued by the market. On top of which, Chavez has continued to demonstrate growth season after season, and PECOTA thinks that he's a very safe bet going forward.
It is no secret, however, that Chavez has a tragic flaw: he can't hit left-handed pitching. From 2001-2003, Chavez managed a stellar line of .306/.375/.579 against right-handers, but a Mathenian .229/.278/.395 against southpaws. The A's, recognizing his defensive value and perhaps hoping that repetition would breed improvement, continued to start him anyway, in spite of a rotating array of viable platoon alternatives.
This year, indeed, has brought about a turnaround--Chavez is crushing lefties so far on the season (.288/.373/.561), while performing well below his career averages against righties (.214/.358/.398). Whether there's any rationale for the change other than sample size, I'm not certain (I don't get to see the West Coast teams play as often as I'd like to). What is clear, however, is that if such a change becomes permanent--if Chavez learns how to hit left-handed pitching at the age of 26--it would be a relatively unprecedented development. In most cases, a platoon split for a left-handed hitter is something like a finger print or a dental record: it remains a readily identifiable and more or less unchanging part of his profile throughout the different stages of his playing life. A left-handed hitter with a big platoon split early in his career is, in all likelihood, going to have a big platoon split later in his career.
May 19, 2004
by Nate Silver
Some pitchers' most readily-identifiable characteristic is their ability to induce groundballs. Indeed, for pitchers like Lowe, Zambrano, and Brandon Webb, inducing groundballs is an essential part of their game plan. Zambrano, for instance, can get away with maintaining a relatively high walk rate because he induces a lot of double plays, and avoids giving up home runs, which are especially costly with runners on base.
May 5, 2004
by Nate Silver
The Rangers are off to a torrid start this year, thanks in part to the contributions of Alfonso Soriano (.321/.357/.472 after Monday night's victory over Tampa Bay).
Soriano has undergone a couple of changes since his last incarnation as the undisciplined Yankee second baseman whose terrible second-half and postseason campaigns were enough to trigger Bronx Jeers at his every at-bat. The switch from the neo-classical, interlocking N-Y to the tacky, scarlet T on his uniform breast is the most obvious, but Soriano has also changed batting order positions (Buck Showalter has him hitting third, instead of first, a role that he is considerably better suited for). He's also switched birthdays--or at least, birthyears. Turns out that A-Sore was born on the 7th of January, 1976, and not the same date in 1978, as he was previously listed.
John Hart and the Rangers knew full well about the change in birthdate before agreeing to acquire Soriano for Alex Rodriguez. Indeed, baseball teams--and baseball fans--have grown pretty well used to these sorts of surprises; before Soriano, there were only a few hundred other players whose reported birthdates were revealed to be incorrect. With a few exceptions like Bartolo Colon, however, most of those guys were marginal prospects in the lower minors, and not an established star like Soriano, for whom any change in expected performance could potentially cost his club the equivalent of millions of dollars in value.
April 28, 2004
by Nate Silver
There isn't a whole hell of a lot to do in Lansing, Michigan. There aren't any mountains, and there isn't any seacoast. The nearest amusement park is 400 miles away. There's a minor league ball team there now, but there wasn't when I grew up. There's a college there--a big, state university--with lots of college parties, and lots of college girls, and a lot of kids from Lansing start behaving like college students long before they really should. But even those with precocious synapses manage to sneak in a few years of relative innocence before learning what sororities and beer bongs are, and my synapses were late to the party. There's a big city not too far away, but to paraphrase W.C. Fields, the prevailing sense that one has when one is in Detroit is that, all things considered, one would rather be in Lansing.
So what you do a lot is drive. You drive past the cow farms and the meadows and rolling hills or whatever the hell they're called in the TripTik and the dilapidated country town with the antique store that your mother likes so much. You drive with your dad in an American-made sedan and you listen to Ernie Harwell and the Tigers. You drive at 62 m.p.h. past a shuttered-up farmhouse with peeling gray paint and a half-working windmill, and Steve Balboni stands there like a house by the side of the road and watches Frank Tanana's fastball go by, or that's what Ernie tells you. You drive and you listen and you daydream and you talk about baseball.
April 3, 2004
by Nate Silver
If you've taken some time to explore the depth charts that are part of our new Fantasy product, you may have noticed the team-by-team projections for run scored, runs allowed, and W-L record. There's a lot of hard work that went into generating these numbers. Runs scored are projected through what I believe to be very accurate lineup simulator program, combining the individual hitter PECOTAs and accounting for playing time at each position and in each batting order slot. Runs allowed are estimated in a similar fashion, and a W-L record is generated by combining these two figures by using the Pythagenport formula. These are good projections. I pretty much limit my gambling activities to poker and an NCAA Tournament pool or two (Go Yellow Jackets!), but if you happen to be in Vegas or something, you could make some good money by betting on these.
One thing the original version of the projections didn't account for is strength of schedule. That never used to be much of a concern in baseball, but given both the imbalanced divisional schedule, and imbalanced interleague matchups, it can make a palpable bit of difference, especially in the case of a team like the Blue Jays that will play nearly a quarter of its schedule against the AL East Nuclear Superpowers.
With that in mind, let's run through the divisions and evaluate each team in these departments...
March 11, 2004
by Nate Silver
My name is Nate, and I am a forecaster. I forecast how baseball players are going to perform. And I pretty much get the worst of it. Tell somebody that their childhood hero is going to hit .220 next year, or that the dude they just traded away from their fantasy team is due for a breakout, and you're liable to get called all kinds of names. A bad prediction will inevitably be thrown in your face, (see also: Pena, Wily Mo) while a good one will be taken as self-evident, or worse still, lucky. The truth is, though, that those of us who make it our business to forecast the performance of baseball players have it pretty easy. For one thing, we've got an awesome set of data to work with; baseball statistics are almost as old as the game itself, and the records, for the most part, are remarkably accurate and complete. For another, it's easy to test our predictions against real, tangible results. If we tell you that Adam Dunn is going to have a huge season, and instead he's been demoted to Chattanooga after starting the year 2-for-53, the prediction is right there for everyone to see in all its manifest idiocy. Not so in many other fields, where the outcomes themselves are more subject to interpretation.
January 16, 2004
by Nate Silver
Last year at this time, when we were first unveiling PECOTA, I was besieged with questions about the system's accuracy. From the very start, the system has always had its believers and its skeptics; all of them wanted to know whether the damn thing worked. My evasive answers to these questions must surely have seemed like a transparent bit of spin doctoring. One of my readers suggested to me, quite seriously, that I had a future in PR or politics. But I was convinced--and remain convinced--that a forecasting system should not be judged by its results alone. The method, too, is important, and PECOTA's methodology is sound. It presents information in a way that other systems don't, explicitly providing an error range for each of its forecasts--which, importantly, can differ for different types of players (rookies, for example, have a larger forecast range than veterans). Its mechanism of using comparable players to generate its predictions is, I think, a highly intuitive way to go about forecasting. Besides, all of the BP guys seemed to appreciate the system, and getting the bunch of us to agree on much of anything is an accomplishment in and of itself. Now that it has a season under its belt, however, we can do the good and proper thing and compare PECOTA against its competition.
October 8, 2003
by Nate Silver
When the season begins each spring, the ivy on the outfield wall at Wrigley Field is not a lush green, but a vine-bare patch of brick and brown. Botany is not among my hobbies, and I do not know whether this condition results from some half-intentional negligence, or the natural distaste of Parthenocissus tricuspidata for the cool Midwestern spring. But in either event, the effect is unsettling: that feeling you get in a dream when you see a place familiar but vaguely and profoundly incomplete. That was the feeling I had on Friday night when I walked through Gate F at Clark and Addison Streets and into the nation's most beloved ballpark. Though the architecture of Wrigley Field is the same as always--an array of ascending ramps, chain-linked fences, city vistas, and dank inner concourses pierced by streaks of evening sunlight--the atmosphere is palpably different. Gone are the rowdies, the drunks, the tourists; present instead is the eerie timbre of quiet before battle. It is the playoffs, the third game of the first series against the Atlanta Braves, and whether owning to the somber, rainy weather, the melancholy brought on by raised expectations, or, more likely, the Trans-Atlantic airline fares that have passed as market rates for scalped tickets, these fans were here to win.
by Gary Huckabay and Nate Silver
The Yanks took far more balls per plate appearance than any other playoff team, but relatively few strikes. That's a sign of a mature, disciplined team. Taking bad pitches could be especially beneficial against the Red Sox: Boston's two best starters, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe, are not known for their stamina, and the bullpen is in tatters between Byung-Hyun Kim's breakdown and their heavy use in the Oakland series. Knocking Pedro out an inning earlier because of higher pitch counts could well be a game-winning strategy. Despite their refined approach at the plate, the Yankees don't have a better offense than the Red Sox, who outscored them by nearly 100 runs during the regular season. The Sox remain the best offense in baseball, with a lineup that has absolutely no weaknesses in it. Both of these teams have the capability to knock a starter out early and put up crooked numbers in multiple innings. Even if you don't want to get into the numbers, think only about the two main criticisms of these offenses over the course of the year: Yankees: "Alfonso Soriano isn't suited to hit leadoff." Red Sox: "Walker, Ortiz, and Nixon can't hit lefties." Think about that. The problem for the Yankees is that the leadoff guy has too many extra-base hits, and too few walks. The Red Sox somehow have to work around the issue that their three worst hitters, who average about a .950 OPS against righties, don't hit lefties particularly well. Think the Tiger front office would like those problems?
September 30, 2003
by Nate Silver
Even as we enter October, it's strange to think of the Braves as a club that's led by their offense. Then again, I'm one of those people that was still writing "2002" on his checks until just a couple of weeks ago.
But there's little doubt that Atlanta is a deep, superior offensive club. All eight Braves regulars have EqAs better than the league average (Fick and Castilla making it just under the wire). Nitpick away if you like: Lopez, as horribly as PECOTA mangled his projection, was almost certainly playing over his head a little bit. Fick had a an awful second half and has been flipped with Lopez in the batting order. Vinny Castilla is still Vinny Castilla. It doesn't matter: the Braves simply mash the ball (235 home runs), a skill that holds up perfectly well in high- and low-scoring games, against soft-tossers and power arms. Hell, even their pitchers can hit a little bit.
What could matter more is that the Braves are overwhelmingly right-handed, and will be facing an overwhelmingly right-handed pitching staff. Too much can be made of the platoon advantage; Sheffield, for example, has never had a huge split; and Giles actually hit righties better this year. But as a team, the Braves were about 25 points worth of OPS better against lefties this year, and we're at the stage where those little things can make a difference.
The Cubs' offense, to borrow the old line, runs a lot like CTA buses: nothing at all for a long time, and then a bunch all at once. Well, that's not quite right; the Cubs didn't exhibit any particularly unusual patterns in their run scoring. But theirs is an offense that has its holes, especially in the bottom four slots in the order.
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