SB Nation User Blog: MJesser

Twins in the Windy City

MJesser — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:36:48 -0000

Hi all,

Wondering if there are any Twins fans here in Chicagoland that would like to get together for a game at the Cell or at Wrigley this summer?

I know tickets are still available for opening weekend April 10,11,12 on the Southside. They play again in May at the Cell, then at Wrigley in June and again in September at the Cell.

I'm going to attempt to make as many of the games as possible and would love to hit a game with someone who's NOT a Chicago fan.

Let me know!

Matt

Is it wrong that I'm not following playoffs?

MJesser — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 04:01:38 -0000

I've been checking in with my usual Twins blogs over the past week and a half since we lost our playoff chances. I like to stay up to date on what the Twins community thinks about their team.

This evening, as I was checking in, it occurred to me that I had no idea what was happening in the ALCS/NLCS games. I had paid just enough attention to know who was in it, but short of that, I didn't know how many games had been played, what the series were at, etc.

I live in Chicago, so I had my fair share of entertainment in the ALDS/NLDS watching the Cubbies and Sox self-destruct, but after the Sox were out, I stopped caring. Is my lack of interest in this year's playoffs due to the Twins being out of it? Perhaps it's because there are no teams left that are geographically close to me? Maybe it's because I have a vested interest in the AL Central and with the Sox out, don't care?

So my question to you is this: How closely are YOU watching the playoffs this year?

Poll

How closely are you watching the playoffs this year?

Watching every/most AL and NL games

13 votes

Watching an occasional AL or NL game

10 votes

Watching the AL games only

0 votes

Checking the scores each day, but not watching

9 votes

Checking scores/highlights occasionally

4 votes

Not paying attention

2 votes

38 votes | Poll has closed

Defense Wins Championships - Part 1

MJesser — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:03:22 -0000

We have all heard basketball and football coaches preach that "defense wins championships". Does the same hold true for baseball?

As an organization, the Twins have been among the leaders in voicing their opinion about team defense. Terms such as "Small Ball" and "Doing the little things" have become second nature to most Twins fans. These terms have served us well over the past 6 - 7 years. It is easy to look back and say that if the Twins have "done the little things right" by playing solid defense (among other things), and they have won their division 4 out of the last 6 years, then clearly things like playing solid defense is an important component of making the playoffs.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's jump into the data:

The first statistic I used to track defense was errors, partly because it is a simple continuous statisic and partly because it's easy to interpret. As with all these graphs, please note that the World Series data is much too small to make any real inferences about. I debated if I should pull it out of the graphs, but ultimately decided it was still fun to look at, and also because these graphs start to look a little bare when only plotting two lines.

The first take-away from this graph is that that there is a fairly consistent gap between playoff teams and non-playoff teams. The average difference between the two was 7.5, meaning that the average playoff team made 7.5 less errors during the regular season than the average non-playoff team.

Stat Geek Warning: I ran a t-test for two groups and found the difference between groups is significant at p>.01

The other major take-away from this graph is the fairly steady down-trend of errors over the past 8 years. My gut tells me that this is due to the post-steroid era and the increasing emphasis on speed, defense and, as I mentioned above, "doing the little things". However, there may be other factors at work, such as recent changes to rules (I just heard on a Cubs broadcast about an obscure rule change regarding errors made in foul territory). Another consideration is that errors are subjective. The downward trend could represent a decrease in the scorekeeper's willingness to charge errors.

The next statistic I used to track defense was Bill James' Defensive Efficiency. I honestly don't know the details about how the statisic is calculated, but here is a brief summary from www.baseball-reference.com:

This is a Bill James measure that estimates the number of batted balls turned into outs by a team. The estimate for plays made is based on outs minus things like double plays, caught stealings and outfield assists or total batters faced minus strikeouts, walks, HBP, Hits and errors times a factor.

The only take-away I have from this graph is that the difference between Playoff and non-playoff teams has decreased, but is still present

Stat Geek Warning: The t-test for two groups is still significant at p>.01

Now that we have adequately researched what the data looks like, I'd like to turn our attention to a more rigorous statistical approach. We're moving beyond Correlation and into Causation. It's all great and good that lower error rates are correlated with playoff appearances, but what we are really trying to uncover is if having a good defense will Predict playoff appearances. For this, we turn to the statistical method, multiple regression.

Quick Stats Disclaimer: I understand that not everyone can understand complex statistical procedures and have tried to be as friendly to non-stats people as possible. I have highlighted the most important numbers but will not attempt to give a full explanation of how to read the chart.

If your eyes start to glaze over, skip to the highlighted portions of the last two boxes as they will be the easiest to understand. If you really, really hate stats, just skip to the graphical chart below.

This chart attempts to take my defensive metrics and show how well they predict regular season wins.

The model shows that Defensive Efficiency is a slightly stronger predictor of wins than is errors. The last box, entitled "Predictors" allows you to calculate what it would take, according to this model, to gain 1 win. For example, say a team had 110 errors at the end of the season. If the team had reduced their errors by 5 (rounded from 5.48), we could predict that they would have won 1 more game.

Now, to put this graphically, I have charted wins along the bottom and the standardized defensive metrics along the left (I standardized the scores so that I could put both errors and DefEff on the same graph). A zero on the defensive metrics can be interpreted as average.

As you can see, there is a fairly linear relationship between defensive metrics and wins. As wins increase, your DefEff increases and your Errors decrease.

Next up: Defense Metrics as Predictors of Playoff Appearances

Buying a World Series

MJesser — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:59:03 -0000

I've been playing with a dataset I pulled from baseball-reference last weekend (should have been doing stats homework... ah well).

My idea stemmed from Montanatwinsfan's post and the respective dialog from the community on the validity of "new" vs. "old" statistics. The ultimate goal is to compile a dataset of team statistics by year and run a series of multiple regressions on the old and new stats to see which ones hold up under statistical scrutiny. The research question is "Which statistics contribute the most to predicting wins, playoff appearances and ultimately World Series appearances?"

I currently have all data from 2000 through 2007, but unfortunately haven't yet bought SPSS to run the regressions. In the meantime, I've been playing with the dataset in pivot tables a la Excel 2007 (which, for you data miners out there is pretty slick compared to the 2003 version).

I realize that most of this is common sense stuff, but thought it might be interesting to have the numbers to back up the common sense. In what I hope will be the first of several posts based on the data, here is a look at average salary by year, broken into three groups: Teams that did not make the playoffs, teams that made the playoffs but not the WS, and teams that played in the WS.

I did not break it out any further because the variance becomes too large to find any meaningful data. This means that for each WS data point, there are two teams, and for every playoff data point there are eight teams (includes the WS teams).

The first observation I took from the data is that teams that did not make the playoffs have steadily increased their salary, but fall well short of the kind of money teams that make the playoffs are spending. The second observation I made from this data is that the average salary of WS teams wildly fluctuates to the point where it's almost impossible to draw conclusions on the data. Four of the WS data points fall below the playoff average (2002, 2005, 2006, 2007) and the other four fall above the playoff average (2000, 2001, 2003, 2004). We'll approach this anomoly in a moment.

Next, it was time to take a step further into the data. I created linear regression lines and removed the trend lines from the graph. You will also note that I provided the regression equation and R-squared calculation, if you're into that sort of thing.

The first thing to note about this graph is that the R-squared value for WS is extremely low, again validating that there is just too little data and too much variance to make an accurate inference about the regression line. The other two lines, however, seem to fit the data quite well and tell an interesting story. Simply put, non-playoff teams are averaging a 2.4 million increase per year, while playoff teams are averaging a 6.8 million increase per year. To put it in context, playoff teams in 2007 spent an average of 24 million more than non-playoff teams. If this regression holds true, by 2012, playoff teams will spend an average of 46 million more than non-playoff teams!

While these results may not be earth-shattering to most people who have been lamenting about the Yankees (and now Boston) "buying" the World Series, I wanted to slice this data one more time. This time, I removed both Boston and New York (Yankees) from the data to see how our regression lines would change:

Wow! The increase in playoff team salaries is now only 1 million more than non-playoff teams. Additionally, the differences between playoff teams and non-playoff teams is holding fairly constant at about 8 million.

While again, we can't make any actual inferences about the World Series regression line because the R-squared is too small, it's really crazy to see the shear randomness (is that a word?) of the World Series team's payroll. With New York and Boston out of the picture, the Marlins (2003) and Rockies (2007) look almost comical when compared to the rest of the data.

The conclusion drawn from the data above are as follows:

1. The ability to "buy" a world series is still inconclusive because there is just too little data to accurately predict world series based on salary. In fact, several of the past WS teams had significantly lower salaries than even the non-playoff teams.

2. The ability to "buy" a playoff berth seems to be a fairly established trend. The rate of increase for playoff teams is more than non-playoff teams, so we can expect the margin to grow over time, regardless of whether you include Boston and New York or not.

3. New York and Boston's combined salary will soon be larger than the sum of the other 28 teams. (Note: Intentional hyperbole thrown in for comic relief... it's late and I've just spent an hour writing about statistics, give me a break)

Unwarranted Pessimism?

MJesser — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:14:23 -0000

SI just released their annual MLB Preview , which predicted the Twins to rank last in the AL Central in 2008. Obviously these are just pre-season predictions from a national media outlet, but I find it hard to imagine the Twins losing more games than both the Royals and the ChiSox.

I certainly don't blame the writers for being pessimistic about the team this year. After all, we have retained 3 (4 if you count Kubel) of the 9 opening day position players (Mauer, Morneu, Cuddyer) from last year and only 1 of the 5 members of the rotation from opening day (Bonser).

What do you think? Does the off-season turnover lead to the Twins finishing 5th in the AL or are the writers at SI way off base?

Poll

What is your reaction to Sports Illustrated ranking the Twins last in the AL Central in 2008?

My middle name is Pessimism. Their prediction is spot on.

2 votes

Twins will finish better than KC but behind the ChiSox.

3 votes

Twins will finish better than the ChiSox but behind KC.

2 votes

Are they crazy? The Twins will finish better than both.

33 votes

Who gives a flying flip what Sports Illustrated thinks? Just give me the Swimsuit Issue and shutup.

17 votes

57 votes | Poll has closed