OED Online Word of the Day - Nov 2, 2011

Your word for today is: sabermetrics, n.

sabermetrics, n.

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌseɪbəˈmɛtrɪks/,  U.S. /ˌseɪbərˈmɛtrɪks/  

Forms:  19– sabermatrics irreg.,   19– sabermetrics,   19– sabremetrics,   19– SABRmetrics,   19– sabrmetrics.   

Etymology: <  sabre n. (after SABR, acronym < the initial letters of Society for American Baseball Research) + -metric comb. form: see -ic suffix 2.

   Baseball.   

  With sing. concord. The application of statistical analysis to baseball records, esp. in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players.

1. 1982  B. James Bill James Baseball Abstr. 3/1 Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records.
2. 1991 Rev. in Amer. Hist. 19 114 In the age of Bill James and sabremetrics, Scully's chapters evaluating player performance seem primitive and unsophisticated.
3. 1998 Toronto Star (Nexis) 5 Sept. b6 Baseball is as much about sabrmetrics as it is about fanciful imagination.
4. 2003 Calgary Herald (Nexis) 19 Oct. d1 The Oakland A's pioneered the use of sabermetrics to recruit players.

I am not a statistician.  I am someone who find scatterplots informative.

All I've done here is take the FightMetric data and compile it by reach advantage, which I'm defining as the difference in reach between the winner and the loser.  Naturally, this results in a negative reach advantage in cases where the longer fighter loses.

Within any given reach advantage, the number of winning results is compared to the number of total results to produce a Winning Ratio.  This is often called the winning percentage, but it's not a percentage, and I'm pedantic like that.

Then I dropped these two values into a scatterplot, plotting Reach Advantage against Winning Ratio.

You can obviously see a significant correlation there, but if you ignore the trendline you'll notice the distribution gets a little flat closer to a Reach Advantage of zero.   Obviously, there are many more fights contested with smaller Reach Advantages (advantages over 10" are very rare), so I think what we're seeing is the increased signal at smaller (closer to zero) Reach Advantage values drowning out the noise we see at less common Reach Advantage values.

Let's see if we can refine that by dropping all the Reach Advantage values represented in only one fight.

That's a flatter line.  We've only removed seven Win events from the data, but that's a visibly flatter line.  I'm sure someone can (or has) calcuated the r-squared values, but even without them we can see that this is a flatter line.

But there is still clearly some noise in the signal, as we have a few perfect records still scattered through the dataset.  Let's try again, raising the minimum from two fights to three.

Now we've removed 12 more fights from the dataset, and the line got steeper again (I foolishly changed the scale of this chart, but if you extrapolate the line out it is clearly steeper).  So some of that statistical noise was actually hiding a stronger correlation.

Can we show a causal relation?  No.  But these charts do offer some justification for the difference in reach being called an "advantage".

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I noticed that a Reach Advantage of 0 has a perfect record in all of these charts, but that's obviously not true.  If you remove that datapoint (as I had intended before I made these charts), it has a small effect on charts 2 and 3, making the trandline very slightly steeper in both cases.

I'm a Mariners fan, living in Canada.  The only live professional baseball in my immediate area is Oakland's short-season A-ball affiliate - the Vancouver Canadians.

Because I'm a Mariners fan, I went to see the Canadians play a couple of games last week when the Everett Aquasox were in town.  The Aquasox were entirely underwhelming, but Michael Choice (Vancouver CF) caught my eye.  He's easily the most powerful bat I saw in either game.  He hit the ball hard to all fields, often off the wall (Nat Bailey stadium is enormous - 335' down the lines, 420' to centre - so I can't imagine a lot of A-ballers hit homeruns there).  Watching him felt a lot like I was watching a future star.

So who is he?  I know he got drafted this year.  Am I right that he has serious potential?

I'm going to see the Aquasox on Thursday (I'm in Vancouver, and they'll be up here to play the Canadians).  Is there any player in particular to whom I should be paying attention?

Nat Bailey Stadium is a great place to watch outfield defense, incidentally, as it's enormous (335' down the lines - 420' to centre).  And the wall is always at least 20' high, so single-A hitters aren't hitting many jacks there.

Let me know if we (we being Seattle) have anyone interesting in Everett these days.

Thanks.

Ichiro did not have a hit in today's game, making it only the 16th game the Mariners have played this season that did not feature a hit by Ichiro.  The M's have played 90 games, and Ichiro has hits in 74 of them.  That's just over 82%.

Over a full 162 season, that projects to 133 games.

Of course, Ichiro hasn't played in every game; he spent the first 8 games on the DL.  So he actually has hits in 74 games out of 82 - just over 90%.

Over the 154 games Ichiro has an opportunity to play, that projects to hits in 139 games.

The major-league record for games in a season with at least one hit is 135.  That record is shared by five players:

• Rogers Hornsby
• George Sisler
• Wade Boggs
• Derek Jeter
• Ichiro Suzuki

Okay, so Ichiro already has a piece of that record, but if he breaks it he'll be the first person to hold it alone since Rogers Hornsby did.

That's nifty.

More information is always good, right?

If you're a BPro member, Here you go.

If not, here's a fun (and possibly irrelevant) piece:

One of Phillipe Aumont's top comps: Chris Carpenter

One of Roy Halladay's top comps: Chris Carpenter

One of Brandon Webb's top comps: Roy Halladay

And here's a fun game.  In which order does the 2009 PECOTA rank these players, by projected VORP:

• Milton Bradley
• Adrian Beltre
• Dustin Pedroia
• Cristian Guzman
• Mike Cameron

Hint:  If you listed Cristian Guzman anywhere other than first, you're wrong.

Like this is news.

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Dustin McGowan's motion looks EXACTLY like Roy Halladay's motion.

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First of all, I just got back from an Iron Maiden concert, and it was brilliant.  Iron Maiden is always worth seeing (I've not seen them before, but they were good enough I'm willing to extrapolate).

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"In my 23 years, I have never ever seen anything like this. We saw it the other way in 2001. I mean, you have to ask yourself, 'How did the Mariners win 116 games that season with that roster, compared to this roster?' This is just as inexplicable the other way."
--Mariners president Chuck Armstrong

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is...

apparently the 1990 Seattle Mariners.

Steven Goldman's article at BP today finds teams from history that are more like some teams from this season, through the first 30 games.

Strange Relations

It's a BP Premium article.

The 1991 Seattle Mariners turn out to be the best comp for the 2008 Blue Jays, which strikes me as an indication of how valuable this comparison isn't, since the '91 M's were poised to improve around a solid core of young players, while the Jays... aren't.

2006 - He ressurects Frank Thomas's career at a low price.

2007 - He lets some team other than Oakland pay the new high price for Frank's talents, pocketing a draft pick in return.

2007 - He spends draft pick on Corey Brown, currently hitting .316/.404/.592 in the Midwest League.

2008 - He signs Frank to prorated league-minimum contract following his release.

2008 - He trades Frank to contender for prospects at deadline.

For the price of a low contract and part of a minimum contract over 3 years, Beane has managed to get 1+ years of solid DH production plus at least one prospect.

Playing in the AL West is getting embarrassing.

Jays at Rays, with Toronto's Jesse Litsch facing Tampa Bay's Carlos Pena, produced the following pitch sequence:

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The (admittedly quite convenient) pressing of 'C' to advance to the next unread comment doesn't work in any post where the comments are closed.

I first noticed this in the "all time roid leader" FanPost.

I'm not sure whom to tell about this, so I'm posting it here (and now I'm going on at length about that decision in order to hit 75 words - but it's not working).

There, that should do it.

Lind is currently hitting .360/.411/.640 in AAA Syracuse, and Matt Stairs is splitting time in Toronto's LF with Shannon Stewart and Marco Scutaro (seriously, the Jays have 5 middle infielders, so they're playing them out of position - Ricciardi's being intermittently possessed by Peter Angelos and Allard Baird, it's the only explanation for some of his absurd decisions).

Wouldn't Stairs look good in RF for the M's, especially compared to Wilkerson and Morse?

SI Story

The Red Sox refused to take the field and are threatening to refuse to go to Japan if MLB welches on their deal to pay their coaches and trainers $40,000 each for the trip.  MLB appears to be trying to do that.

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Ichiro had 1,278 hits in his career in Japan.

Ichiro has 1,592 hits so far in his MLB career.

That's 2,870 total hits.

As he approaches 3,000 hits, will the Mariners make a big deal about this?  I can't imagine they'd let it pass without comment.

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So we're stuck paying Richie Sexson a bunch of money, Ryan Klesko retires.

Does this make sense to anyone?

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We can just recycle comments from last off-season, because they'll still apply just as well.

Like this one:

Bavasi says, "Our rotation is different. I'm not sure it's better, but it's different and it's certainly not worse. We have a rotation that might have a different approach to the game, and maybe that's an upgrade. But we certainly think we're as good and possibly better."

Willie Bloomqust turns 30 today.  This means two things:

1. We are now undeniably in Willie's decline phase.  He'll only get worse from here, and he'll do it at ever-increasing speed.
2. Willie is now undeniably a "veteran", and Mac will play him incessantly.

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in the Internet Baseball Awards AL Manager of the Year voting.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6897

Apparently I wasn't the only disaffected Mariner fan who threw him a vote for making his best ever single managerial decision: quitting.

*You know, I counted the characters in this diary, and I cleared 400 in the text before this footnote.  Even if I exlcude the link I still clear 300.  I don't get it.

A lot of pitching stats are now being presented as per batter faced rather than per inning or per 9 innings, because two guys could have the same K/9 rate but have very different K% rates.

So, when counting batters faced to work out something like this, how do plate appearances that straddle innings count?  In the Angels-Red sox game today, Lackey recorded one of his second inning outs at second base with a caught stealing, so the plate appearance Pedroia started in the second resumed in the third.  How many batters faced does Pedroia count as?

And if the answer is one, which pitcher gets credited with having faced him if the two halves of the plate appearance are against different pitchers?

Early in the season, I was happy to point to Jeff Weaver and call him the worst pitcher in Mariners' history.  But, he hadn't thrown that many innings yet, and someone admonished me and pointed to a previous pitcher who'd thrown mny more innings and been nearly as bad.  The worst M's ERA ever (min 50 IP) belongs to Steve Trout.  7.83.

Weaver got better.  He's not really threatening Trout's mark anymore.  But Horacio Ramirez is.  Ho's ERA sites at 7.38, and he's already well past 50 IP.

Horacio Ramirez might be the worst pitcher in M's history.

For anyone playing in the MLB Fantasy Open (and if you still are, you made the playoffs - congratulations), be vigilant about watching the scoring of your games.

On Thursday, my opponent was credited with 62.5 points, even though his team only combined to earn 29 points.  There weren't any doubleheaders to confuse the game, so I can't imagine what happened.

I have contacted MLB about it, but I wonder if they would have noticed had I not.