In this time of Darkness:

Brian Wilson has struck out 29 in 18 IP. That's a fairly rediculous 14.5 K/9. He's also only walked 8 yeilding a respectable 3.38 K9. His impressive 2.46 ERA is overshadowed by his even more impressive 1.34 FIP. Beleive it or not, he's actually been massively unlucky so far this year w/ a .400 BABIP against.

Dude's good. Really freaking good.

I'll make this short and sweet, but take a look:

Last year, Molina swung at an impressive 44% of pitches out of the strike zone. In 2008, it was 40%. Predictably, in 2009, that was most in the majors.

However, this year, after 76 PA's, Bengie is swinging at a somewhat stingy 28%. Studies Show that swing % stabilizes much earlier than other stats, in this case after approximately 50 PA's (Thanks Fangraphs). It's also worth mentioning that Bengie is also swinging at a much lower 60.7% of strikes, too. That's compared to 77% in 2009.

No matter what way you look at it, he's swinging at a lot fewer pitches. What's the result? We'll, first off his first strike % has dropped from 64% last year down to 50% this year. Pitches haven't compensated yet, either - as they are throwing him the same 50% pitches in zone as they have in the past. No surprise that he is walking at more than 3x the rate he did last year.

Is this for real? The information suggests that it is. Bengie is demonstratably more patient this year than he has been in the recent past. Let's hope he keeps it up.

Also worth of note: John Bowker is essentially tied with Torres and Renteria for the lowest OOZ % @ 22%. Shierholtz is a changed man too, only swinging at 25% of bad pitches (34% career).

Pablo is being himself with an impressive 39%, but that is basically what he did last year too.

Rowand is out of whack, swinging at a rediculous 50% of pitches out of the zone. Close your eyes and throw a pitch, flip a coin to see if Rowand swung at it. His career rate is 28% and his rate last year was 32%, so something is wrong with his approach right now.Don't let the empty .300 fool you.

Without making this too much longer, Bowker is swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone and more pitches in the zone than he has in the past. His contact rate is also higher than it was last year. His BB% is the highest of his short pro career while his LD % is dramatically up - and those LD's came at the expense of FB's, not GB's.

So why is he sucking?  the .250 BABIP might have something to do with it. Bowker needs more at bats. His component stats all suggest he is doing just fine. The sample sizes are so small that a few more liners drop for doubles and he would look fine. 

Hello All, it's been a while since I've posted a lengthy fanshot... life and stuff. - Anyways

Signing Aubrey Huff makes me sad deep down inside, but not for obvious reasons.

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Since we all know that the normal All Star teams are the equivilent of student body elections - but what would the teams have looked like had they been based soley on players performance in the first half of this year ?

I took the WAR leaders at each position in each lead. I carried one backup player at each position, 6 starters, 6 releivers, and 6 generic OF's.

Here's what I got. Interesting how it deviates from who was actually selected. Players within groups are in order

NL:

Starters: Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren, Javier Vasquez, Josh Johnson, Ubaldo Jiminez, Joel Pineiro

Releivers: Johnothan Broxton, Rafael Soriano, Heath Bell, Brian Wilson, Chad Qualls, Todd Coffey

Catcher: Brian McCann, Yadier Molina

1B: Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder

2B: Chase Utley, Freddy Sanchez

SS: Hanley Ramierez, Ryan Theriot

3B: Ryan Zimmerman, Pablo Sandoval

OF: Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, Raul Ibanez, Colby Rasmus, Ryan Braun, Jason Werth

AL:

Starters: Zach Greinke, Justin Verlander, Roy Halladay, Felix Hernandez, Josh Beckett, Cliff Lee

Releivers: Andrew Bailey, Joe Nathan, David Aradsma, Mike Wuertz, J.P. Howell, Mariano Rivera

C: Joe Mauer, Victor Martinez

1B: Kevin Youkalis, Justin Morneau

2B: Ben Zorbrist, Ian Kinsler

SS: Marco Scutaro, Derek Jeter

3B: Evan Longoria, Brandon Inge

OF: Ichiro Suzuki, Franklin Gutierrez, Carl Crawford, Torii Hunter, Juan Rivera, Nelson Cruz

It has been observed casually that Zito may pitch better w/o Molina behind the dish. I decided to take a look at this and see if there was any merit.

I looked at the last 2.5 years of Zito's career (time/ Giants) and I compared component stats for Molina and Not Molina. I'm not really sure how to post a table unfortuntely... See if this works...

First: Some explaining. Because this data from BBR is by PA, or batters faced - not IP, I had to make an adjustment to get FIP and HR/9. To do so, I divded PA by 4.3 - which is approximately the league average # of batters faced per inning for qualified starters this year. While this probably shouldn't be used to compare these #'s to other IP based #'s, it's perfectly acceptable for comparing to each other - and I think fairly representative of the #'s in general.

What you see is that while the difference in BB% and K% between Bengie and Not Bengie is small,  the difference in HR/9 is profound. This leads to a significant deviation in FIP.

Now, there certainly may be other factors at play - and it's entirely possible that this is all just an illusion - but its also possible that Bengie's pitch calling or some other element of his game is causing Zito to give up more home runs.

This has been observed by the casual fan and is somewhat supported by the statistical evidence. I think there is also a plausible cause for this in that Bengie does have control over pitch type and location.

Thoughts?

EDIT: New Table. Zito, Cain, LIncecum, Sanchez.

Not as bad as it looked.

7 ER in 3.2 innings for a wonderful ERA of 17.18. That looks pretty bad. However, watching the game last night I thought he was generally pitching pretty well - so I decided to look a little deeper.

3 K's, 0 BB, and 2 HR's. FIP of 8.65. Still really bad, but not nearly as bad. Factor in the .770 BABIP and frankly, Zito kinda got screwed. On a night where ATT park turned into pre-humidor Coors field, Zito gave up a pair of gopherballs and got both completely screwed by BABIP as well as sequence of events. After he gave up that last HR, he also looked PISSED... yelling on the mound - etc. I've never seen mr calm and cool like that before.

He didn't walk anyone and he was striking guys out. He was really not noticeably worse in this start than he was on the 24th against Seattle or the 19th against Washington. In fact, Matt Cain had almost as poor of a start on the 9th at Arizona and an even WORSE start on May 2nd at Colorado (10.70 FIP).

So what's my point? Don't flip out. Zito had 6 starts last year that were in the same catagory of suck as this last one, so it's hardly a surprise.

Zito got shelled last night - baseball is a funny sport and these things happen. Johan got shelled the other day, too. I still think Zito is doing pretty well this year.

It would be great if someone can look at pitch F/X and see if there was anything out of whack with his movement/location/velocity, or if he truly just got unlucky.

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love SSS).

Currently, TI is batting .250/.327/.330 for a whopping OPS of .657 and a OPS+ of 72. The Giants as a whole have an OPS+ of 39 at 1b relative to the rest of baseball.

Ouch. Clearly the blackest hole in the lineup.

So after TI's big game yesterday, I thought I'd look at his detailed stats and see if I could figure out what was going on.

I mainly looked at HR related stuff, because I can remember several deep fly balls that he has hit this year that, if either in a different park OR different conditions would have certainly been out. He's seemed a little snakebit so far this year with the long ball. One in SD in particular was about 2 feet from landing in the short porch, but instead landed in Giles' glove.

I was right. While his FB % is high - 40%... his HR/FB is incredibly low. A measly 3.8%. His K rate and BB rate are essentially the same as last year, as is his BABIP.

In a similarly sized sample last year, TI hit .274/.337/.432. A line I think today we would all be happy with (and combined with his above average defense, a line that might make him close to a league average 1b and certainly not the teams biggest problem.)

If we go ahead and regress his HR/FB rate, it gives us approximately 3 HR's thusfar (which, coincidentally, is how many he had last year w/ approximately the same sized sample, and how many I would think is reasonable based on watching him play.)

If I then pretend that essentially 2 of his deep fly balls had eeked over the fence instead of being caught for outs, his line this year looks like .270/.342/.410.

OPS of .742.

Again, a line I think we would all be a lot happier with. What does this mean? I think Travis is who we thought he was, and his supressed line so far this season is due essentially to a lack of power (everything else looks identical to last year, K%, BB%, OBP%, Etc.).

Because of the size of the sample, his lack of power can be very easily attributed to a little bad luck.

This also means that I am less enthusiastic about making a trade for 1b, because I think TI is probably capable of doing reasonably well there for us, assuming we continue to have faith in him and maybe find a reasonable platoon mate (Jesus?).

Also: Warning on Nick Johnson, benefactor of a .395 BABIP so far this season.

And what makes me a little hopeful for the rest of the season.

cue irrational exuberance:

Patience. Not everyone, all the time - but I saw a lot of good at bats. 5 walks for the game is great, even if it is mostly due to Milwaukee not being able to find the strike zone. I didn't get the sense that we were getting ourselves out, which was prevalent last season. Especially w/ RISP the team as a whole seemed more deliberate.

Bullpen not named Hinshaw throwing strikes: For the most part, we wern't walking guys. Joey Martinez got beat up a little, but primarily because ground balls found holes.

Rowand: Please Rowand, have a big April. Given the # of games this month v. the division, that would do a lot for this team. His swing on that HR looked balanced, and I'm hoping he is about to go on a hot streak.

Sandoval: Looks like he can play 3rd okay, and I loved the heads-up play to nab Cameron trying to advance. Also, still hitting it seems.

Ishikawa: Dude might hit this year. Looked patient and balanced at the plate, and was about 15 degrees in either direction away from a grand slam. Maybe next time, TI. Also looked good on defense out there.

Martinez again: I'm a big supporter of the Joey Martinez: Long Man. Experiment. This might work out really well - dude throws strikes and has good movement. Got unlucky on a few groundballs but that will regress. 

Affeldt: Wilson better look out, because I had no idea Affeldt threw that hard and had stuff that nasty. They could become quite the 8th/9th duo this year.

Bochy: Resisted the urge to PH Aurilia/Uribe/etc. I thought the game was managed well and the right players were used. Going with Martinez on opening day w/ the game on the line was a big vote of confidence in the kid, and I think it worked out pretty well. I'm glad Bochy's veteran love didn't cloud his judgement there. (And way to pick up the kid, Rowand.)

I also was glad he pulled Tim when he did instead of trying to do something stupid like get him through 5. He wasn't pitching well, and his teammates picked him up.  That's why you have the long man. Tim will be fine.

I also liked that he used Wilson in a non-save situation. Hinshaw probably could have gotten out of there fine (Hell, he had a 4 run lead) but at the same time the willingness to use Wilson as he should be used was refreshing.

Points of concern:

Burriss: looked a  little over matched at the plate, but I hope that doesn't last.

Sandoval: had an at bat that I HOPE doesn't become more and more common - striking out swinging on a pitch 3 feet out of the strike zone. He's going to have to adjust, I hope he can.

Hinshaw: Throw strikes, dude. Your curveball is a thing of beauty but if you can't get your fastball over the plate you are going to be back in Fresno faster than you can say Justin Miller.

Grant's marquee topic today brought this to mind - why are we all here? Punch and pie are nowhere to be found. How did you find it and why did you stay?

I found my way to McC at the beginning of the 2008 season. I had actually wanted to start a Giants blog and was going about the process of doing so. I was perusing around other shan't-be-named Giants baseball related websites when I somehow stumbled into this place. Turns out I liked it, I liked it a lot.

In fact, I liked it so much I realized I would be an idiot to try to start my own lame blog and have to fight with this place for readership. In a stroke of brilliant self serving intuition, I decided my eventual goals of writing about Giants baseball and having someone actually _read_ it would be more more readily served here.

So here I am, a year later, still indulging myself in the captive audience of McC. Even with this very post I urinate in the ears (eyes?) of the listeners (readers?) and watch them happily lap it up. 

It also didn't hurt that I started a new job in January 2008 and have a lot of free time at work as a result.

So tell me folks - we are all here for a reason, what is yours?

Also, I was just sent this picture from the meet & greet @ the Brit. I don't know what kinda f'ed up lense the photographer was using, but there's only two recognizable people in the photo, and one of us doesn't have any Cy Youngs on the mantle.

It was pretty fun, tons of access and not crazy like fanfest.

I got everyone who was there to autograph my ball, except Cap't Jack - who disappeared on me. I didn't even see him, but heard he was there.

Aaron Rowand is insanely ripped, and he doesn't mind talking. Did I mention he is huge? I think he's one solid trap.

Jeremy Affeldt and Alex Hinshaw were fucking w/ people by switching name tags.

Sergio Romo is short and goofy. He seemed to be having the time of his life.

Billy Sadler also isn't very tall.

Jeremy Affedlt is taller than I am. He's also a ham. Lastly, he dropped my baseball in someones beer.(After signing it, of course).

Barry Zito was wearing true religion jeans. I wonder if he got them free?

Brian Wilson recommended P90X to me. He said it was great. I might give it a try.

Ryan Rohlinger isn't a very big guy.

Krukow is exactly as tall as I am, and in person sounds exactly the same as he does on the air.

Yabu and Pat Misch had the lowest-key table, and were both very conversational.

Fred Lewis has a surprisingly high pitched voice.

Manny Burriss doesn't have any preference between Emmanuel or Manny.

Joey Martinez was very cool, and very humble.

Randy Winn simply exudes class.

Tim Lincecum seems to be aclimating to his super-star status pretty well.

John Bowker looks young, and I'm 27.

Nate Sheirholtz looks old.

Bob Howry looks nondescript.

Jesse English didn't stick in my mind at all, but he has curly hair.

A 70-200mm F4 lens doesn't work very well in a dark bar.

Did anyone else make it?

I've been relatively quiet around here since the season ended, but i've been working on something in my spare time that is the product of my own curiosity. I like quantifying things so that I can make comparative assessments - and I think most baseball fans do too.

So when I hear player X called "consistent" I want to have a way to measure that. I want to be able to say "player X is more consistent than player Y" and actually be able to back that up.

So I decided to try to create a stat that did this. I've done so and i've (manually, uugh) calculated it for every Giants hitter with greater than 100 PA's in 2008.  I think that it inherently makes sense, but there are some places where I made little leaps of faith and I would like to get feedback from the more statistically inclilned readership as to whether my approach is valid, and any suggestions on how to make it more deterministic and more cross-comperable.

So here is what I did:

Take Player X who played in 150 games last season. I've taken his game log and (manually, uugh) parsed it out to calculate wOBA for each game. I used wOBA because it is my favorite offensive all-in-one right now, and I think it serves the purpose well.

The equation I used for wOBA is from the original source @ http://www.insidethebook.com/woba.shtml

wOBA = (0.72xNIBB + 0.75xHBP + 0.90x1B + 0.92xRBOE + 1.24x2B + 1.56x3B + 1.95xHR) / PA

Using this my wOBA's are fairly close to those @ Statcorner. I'd like to use a version that includes SB/CS, but I haven't got around to figuring that out yet.

Having wOBA for each individual game performance, I then took the standard deviation of this group for the entire season. This tells me, essentially, how clustered the day to day performance of the player is around the season end result. Theoretically, consistent players should be more clustered around their season wOBA while inconsistent players should show more deviation.

That's the thought, anyway.

So this gives me a number that looks like other baseball numbers we are comfortable with, .xxx generally in the .200-.400 range.

The problem with this number alone is that it is dependent on overall wOBA. A player with a std. deviation of .300 and a wOBA of .300 is much less consistent than one with a std. deviation of .300 and a wOBA of .400. If I want to be able to compare players, (even against themselves in other seasons) I need to fix this.

So this is where I took a leap of faith. I tried to establish an arbitrary modifier that allows me to covert .xxx into a 0-1 number, 0 being entirely inconsistent and 1 being perfectly consistent (every game wOBA = season wOBA). No longer dependent on season wOBA. Essentially express it as a percentage.

The arbitrary part was deciding to define maximum inconsistency as the standard deviation of  Season wOBA * 2 and 0.

Thought being in the simple set of two hypothetical games, an excellent performance in one (season wOBA * 2) and a miserable performance in the other (wOBA of .000). The mean of these two hypothetical games gives the season wOBA. This is as bi-polar as a player can be.

Using that to establish the hypothetical "Maximum Inconsistency" I then am able to look at the players actual incosistency as a percentage of this. To make higher #'s better, I flipped it around and took 1 - (Actual Inconsistency/Maximum Inconsistency)

A score of 0 means that Actual Inconsistency = Maixmum Inconsistency, whereas a score of 1 means that  Actual Inconsistency = .000.

The part where this gets a little questionable however is that a player can actually be more inconsistent than that. Using this approach, one of our beloved Giants came up negative! (Turns out Ivan Ochoa is not a good baseball player).

But there is no actual limit to how inconsistent a player can be. While 2 * wOBA in one game and .000 in another is very incosistent, 3 * wOBA in one and .000 in 2 is even less consistent.

I guess the hypothetical limit in a given season is 162 * wOBA in one game and .000 in 161. Problem with that is the std. deviations get huge to the point of dominating the data.

So that is my biggest question : Is my approach for arbitrarily defining "Maximum Inconsistency" valid? It should not be dependent on players or on their wOBA (relative to each other) as the simple set is constant.

Anyway, that got kinda complicated and wordy. Using the approach defined above, here is how our Giants did last season:

Player : Consistency Rating

Winn: .52

Rowand: .48

Lewis: .44

Ishikawa: .44

Sandoval: .41

Durham: .40

Molina: .39

Castillo: .36

Burriss: .35

Aurilia: .32

Velez: .32

Bowker: .25

Roberts: .24

Vizquel: .22

Ochoa: -.08

Sandoval .72
Durham .72
Velez .70
Roberts .68
Ishikawa .67
Lewis .66
Winn .65
Burriss .63
Rowand .62
Castillo .62
Aurilia .61
Bowker .61
Molina .58
Ochoa .58
Vizquel .54

EDIT: New list weighted by PA's. Not 100% confident in the weighting scheme yet but it does make **some** sense.

Keep in mind that "consistent" can just as easily mean consistently BAD as consistenly good. I find this list interesting because it arguably reads in order as who are perceived as the "best" players on the team.

Part II of this will consist of a similar approach + suggested improvements for pitchers, using tRA.

I personally think that will be more interesting. The natural deviation should be a lot lower (pitchers have a higher success rate).

Oh yeah - and: This really says nothing about whether or not consistency is important or not.

My ultimate goal would be to try to use this (if it does turn out to be in any way valid) to try and look for trends in larger populations. After all, baseball statistics are primarily about predicting the future ;)

Lastly - I need to automate this. Can anyone point me @ gamelogs in .csv form? I'd love to be able to DL it for all players and then be able to look at some sorta league averages, etc.

I can use matlab for that - but I'm not going to manually copy the '08 game logs off the web for every player in MLB ;)

And then there is '07, etc...

I am really struggling to maintain my hatred for rectum face.

I mean, I know he does douchey things - I know he almost killed Conor Jackson w/ a helmet spear... but god damn that guy plays hard.

And watching him suck the wind right out of the crowd last night made me happy as hell. (Second only to watching Matt Stairs shoot one into orbit two batters later, THAT was a home run if I ever saw one... Lidge/Pujols anyone?)

Is it possible that we have prematurely judged Victorino? Maybe we've let a few instances cloud our judgment regarding a player who all in all seems to be the spark plug that a team like the Phillies needs to make it into the WS? The way he is playing I certainly wouldn't mind having him on our side.

I can see it now, 2008 NLCS offensive MVP's: Shane Victorino and Brett Myers.

Oh yeah, and isn't it weird watching a team that can actually score runs late? I'm pretty used to it being automatic game over if the other team scores more than 3 runs. Watching the 2008 Giants has really alterd my perspective when it comes to baseball.

Its about this time every year (for the last 4, anyway) that I live up to my monikor and I pick a team from each league whom I will root for in the playoffs.

Last year, it was the Rockies and the Indians. I picked up on the Rockies mid-surge and rode that wave all the way into the green monster.

In 2004 I happed to visit Boston in August and got completely swept up in the RSN. I even bought a damn hat... As much as I hate the damn Red Sox now, watching them upset the Yankees in that historic ALCS was one of my favorite baseball experiences.

Because frankly, My hatred for the Red Sox is fairly new compared to that I hold for the Yankees.

But I digress. Pick your teams, and maybe explain a little why. I'm going with the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays and your Philadelphia Pedro Pheliz'es.

I'm totally jumping on the Dr's bandwagon, but I've secretly liked the philles for a few years and Pete's addition to the team only made that bond stronger. I'd love to see them in the series (especially when the alternative is the Cubs or Dodgers).

Let's hear it.

A look at the importance of walks as a predictive factor of young players future success, using E. Velez, P. Sandoval, and F. Lewis as examples.

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