While chatting with a fellow LLer on the topic of Carlos Peguero, I wondered aloud if Carlos Peguero was the least disciplined hitter in baseball. Sure he swings at everything, but how does his lack of discipline compare to the rest of the league? At 50, 100, and 140 PA cutoffs (Peguero is at 142 PA on the season), there isn't a single position player with less restraint than Peguero. Also, for fun, here's what happens when you set the cutoff at 30. R.A. Dickey and Kyle Lohse, Carlos. Woof.

But swinging at the highest percentage of balls out of the strike zone isn't the whole picture, right? It turns out that Peguero is also leading baseball in overall swing rate. He swings a lot. We know this. Invariably, when discussing people with Peguero's general swingyness profile, Vlad Guerrero or Alfonso Soriano's names get brought up as they too swing at everything. In their honor, here's a chart comparing the various discipline stats for the highest OSwing% rates in baseball at 140 PA. 

Click image for full size

Soriano and Vlad really do swing at everything too. I'll now ask you all the question I once asked seattlebruin while standing in the third deck at Angel Stadium looking down at the Mariner dugout: What immediately stands out to you, looking at that? Correct. Griffey's ass is enormous. Also, Carlos Peguero does not make contact with anything. That swinging strike rate is the highest in baseball amongst players with 100 PA. While Carlos Peguero is whiffing on all of the balls out of the zone he swings at, he also is terrible at making contact with strikes. In fact, only Kelly Shoppach has a lower Z-Contact rate in that 100 PA group. League average is 87.9%. Go down the list of O-Swing maniacs and you'll find that no one else is below an 80% Z-Contact rate with the exception of Miguel Olivo. The rest of the guys make contact with strikes and Sandoval makes contact with extraterrestrials. If Carlos Peguero wants to swing at everything, he'd better at least punish strikes when a pitcher accidentally throws him one.  Right now he doesn't appear to have any idea where pitches are going or how to make his bat touch them and that makes for a bad hitter. 

Additional note that a Jeff Tweet reminded me of: Peguero has seen just 7 PA against left-handed pitching. Holy shit is he terrible. 

The last Offtop is getting thick and you all are a lazy bunch of hyenas, so I'll take on the burden. This 4th of July was the first time that I didn't go to a specific fireworks show and instead watched upwards of ten shows at once from the roof of a friend's apartment. Since LAh is both massive and segmented by neighborhood, we saw fireworks in Culver City, Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, Anaheim, Hollywood, etc.

Question 1: So for starters, how do you like to view fireworks? Are you a fan of directly underneath or do you prefer to view them from afar? Over the water or on land?

Here is a neat collection of the best fireworks photos taken by readers of the blog Lifehacker. Pretty neat.

The multiplicity of fireworks also reminds me of the story of San Gimignano in Tuscany. Like most of the towns in Tuscany, San Gimignano is a hilltop town as it made defending your home easier. San Gimignano is notable as there are seven towers rising above the town. Towers at the time were built in order to get a better view of potential attackers. Why seven? Instead of pooling together as one in the defense of their town, seven wealthy families built their own towers in what amounted to a pissing contest. Ours is bigger. Italians will be Italians. Question 2: Do you have any examples of a failure to collaborate resulting in something awesome and notable?

Question 3: What is your favorite summer barbeque food?

Question 4: What style of music do you most enjoy during the summer? I find my taste in music is somewhat seasonal, and summer sees the biggest spike in my hip-hop listening.

Of course, the usual topics are also encouraged.

I don't remember exactly when it was that I got into sports. I certainly enjoyed playing them from an early age, but it took me a while to develop an identity as a Seattle sports fan. Blaming your upbringing rarely reflects well, but here's a case where I can do it accurately. My dad hardly cares about sports. He loves March Madness and cycling and played an awful lot of hockey and tennis as a kid, but he doesn't really watch sports and as a result I didn't have a heritable rooting interest. So it was up to my friends to help impart the love of local teams that I wasn't getting at home. I remember the 1995 Mariners season mostly because I went over to one of my elementary school friends' house to watch the game in which Edgar hit the salami. I didn't have context and so the magic of 1995 did not catapult me into serious fandom, but I was 9.

I also don't really remember the Seahawks from my early youth. By about 12 or 13, I started paying attention. I have dusty memories of Warren Moon's last season as a Hawk and the Ricky Watters / Joey Galloway days. Looking through Football Reference, I'd say 1999 was the first year I started listening to or watching games regularly. Reading the names Derrick Mayes and Sean Dawkins is like running a finger over a dusty old dresser, and I have fond memories of Willie Williams, Anthony Simmons, and Chad Brown too. My parents not being big on TV meant that I listened to most games on the radio. Brian Davis and Steve Raible were regular guests in my room on Sunday mornings. By the time Shaun Alexander started getting some rookie carries and Isaiah Kacyvenski was doing whatever it was that he did to earn himself some space in my brain, I was hooked.

All of that made last season a strange experience. Following the team from afar has become easy in the internet era, but following a bad team while inundated with more important things requires a special brand of curiosity or idiocy or something else I hadn't figured out yet. The first two years of med school are akin to having a gallon of milk delivered to your house every morning.* Drinking it takes up a good portion of every day and you know there's another gallon coming the following day. If you don't finish, there's just that much more milk to drink the next day. But I made time to watch the Seahawks on Sundays because part of staying sane requires doing things you enjoy doing. The Seahawks were terrible enough that watching the games wasn't entirely enjoyable. You know this. I watched anyway, but a funny thing happened as the season progressed: detachment. Not the kind that usually occurs with bad teams where you stop worrying so much and can turn the game off at halftime because it's sunny out and the autumn leaves are fluttering in the breeze. I almost stopped caring about the team on the field all together and just maintained the attachment to being a fan, to caring about keeping that connection. I identify myself as a fan of the Seahawks and had motivation to preserve that identity even while the team was busy licking Scratch 'n Sniff stickers under the dining room table.

So I learned something. I learned that my identity and history as a fan of a particular team mean as much to me as the experience of watching the team play. I learned how ribs articulate with thoracic vertebrae and how Matt Hasselbeck doesn't care whether or not his do. I learned that, while cheering for good teams is the ultimate stated goal of fandom, there's more behind team loyalty than dreams of championships.  Losing seasons suck, and losing seasons when you could really use something more interesting in your life suck with great gusto,  but nothing is wasted entirely.

*I have no idea why I chose this particular analogy.

Note: Edited to reflect a more accurate coefficient. The net result is still crazy. 

I commented in today's Game Chart thread that I was quite interested in the combined effects of the Mariners struggling offense and awesome run prevention, and I wanted to follow up on that. We've discussed at length around these parts the effects of various presences on the roster and their effect on the outcomes of games. The most common and handy conversion factor for runs to wins is about 10:1. For every additional 10 runs of value produced in any phase of the game by a team, you'd expect an incremental win. For instance, I took a look at the effects of some of Don Wakamatsu's decision making and the likely decrease in wins we should expect based on those moves. To get my results, I used the standard 10 run/win conversion. However, this conversion rate is based off of the average case over the course of a season. The Mariners haven't been an average case. 

To date, the Mariners have scored 121 runs and allowed 144 runs over their 37 games. Since the run to win conversion comes from the Pythagorean expectation formula, it's a pretty simple task to plug in our current numbers. Based on their current run numbers, the Mariners should have won 15.3 games. Fine. I'm not interested so much in that. What I'm interested in is the change in win value predicted by an increase in one run, which comes out to .136 wins. Therefore, the run/win conversion rate for the Mariners as they stand right now is 7.4, a far cry from 10. The run environment created by our zany Mariners creates an increase in Win Leverage (10 / 7.4) of 135%. Previous sentence bolded for your pleasure.

This is really important. Every upgrade or downgrade at any position is magnified by ~1.35 times the win value. Of course, making a change at any position that alters the team's run profile will also adjust the Win Leverage going forward, but that's to deal with later. If you've watched games with the gut feeling that runs are just more important in contests involving Seattle than they are for other teams, you're correct. Right now, any move made by the Mariners has a third more impact that it would for an average team. Wrap your noodles around that. 

I like Don Wakamatsu. He comes off as an intelligent and level-headed guy with a good feel for people. Those are certainly useful traits when you are in charge of handling 25 people of various backgrounds and degrees of sanity. However, I believe he can use some help. Whether directly or indirectly, some of Wakamatsu's decisions are going to cost the team several wins over the course of the season. To get the best out of our team, our front office should be determining the construction of the roster so as to allow Wakamatsu to handle only what he should be responsible for: managing. 

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According to the Seattle PI (and several other sources), the Seahawks signed Ruvell Martin to a one-year deal.. You've all been waiting for a tall receiver and the Queen and Prime Minister have delivered. Martin is a 6'4" receiver out of Saginaw Valley State. Undrafted, Martin has spent time with the Chargers, the Amsterdam Admirals, the Packers, and the Rams. He hasn't played much and had the best game of his career in a week 17 matchup against the Bears (one Martin catch in the footage + bonus footage of Sexcannon picks). Some of you may remember him for the 60 yards he pinned on the Seahawks this past season. That happened. 

Given his pedigree, Martin isn't likely the hero needed to bring the Seahawks to respectability. Martin is much-needed depth. The team was staring at a functional depth chart consisting of Houshmandzadeh, Deion Branch, Deon Butler, and Ben Obomanu. Martin is an inexpensive, living human under the age of 30 (he's 27) with NFL starts and catches to his name. Okay? Okay.

As an aside, some friends and I drove up to to watch a Packers training camp in the summer of 2006. Guess who else was there? Ruvell Martin, that's who. Guess what? He wasn't all that interesting there either. 

The transition between winter and spring does not come linearly. 55 degrees one day, snowing the next. I don't know whether to walk out of the house each morning in gloves and a hat or short sleeves. There is a benefit to the bipolar weather, though, at least in regions that get snow. For two or three days a year, a day of snow precedes a day of blue skies and sunshine and those are breathtakingly gorgeous (and blinding, but that's just bah humbuggery). Combination sunny / snowy / warm days are like finding a rerun of a Seinfeld episode that I've somehow never seen before: rare, magical, temporarily transformative, fleeting. I feel a different person on those days, prodded to run outdoors and perhaps in possession of a more effervescent aura. 

It's late as hell in Chicago. Why am I awake? BECAUSE IT'S CURLING. Curling is awesome, and so awesome that I shall stay awake through the tenth end of this match. Why should you watch? The Norwegians have amazing pants. The Americans aren't all that good but they are at least from Minnesota, so that's something. John Shuster seems like a total asshat and he makes me miss Pete Fenson, who also wasn't good enough to bring home the gold. Expect this to get deleted in the morning because it is not baseball related, so go nuts. 

Jay Glazer is reporting that the Seahawks have sent Jim Mora Jr. back from whence he came. After a season in which the Seahawks failed on nearly every level, Mora is out of a job.

I'm not ordinarily a fan of making sudden moves with respect to regime change, but I think the validation for cleaning house isn't hard to come by. Mora took over the secondary as the coach-in-waiting and the secondary got worse, but that's not damning. Secondary play is a byproduct of the passrush, a passrush that declined last season. From the standpoint of personnel, however... Brian Russell. That's not a point in Mora's favor. This was a trend. 

As Head Coach, Mora brought in some interesting coaching talent in guys like Dan Quinn and Gus Bradley. Do we credit Mora for seeing some bright young minds or do we debit him for bringing in coordinators running a zone defensive scheme that was ill-suited for his on-field talent? It's the evaluation of personnel that strikes me as the larger failing. This season saw the continued overuse of Patrick Kerney, Craig Terrill, and Colin Cole.  Owen Schmitt had a lot of development time wasted as Justin Griffith kept playing. While I like Julius Jones and what he can bring offensively, Forsett was frequently the more effective back (DVOA agrees) and didn't see enough touches. Olindo Mare and Chris Spencer. John touched on his leadership issues quite a bit, as well as the handling of the offensive line. The late-season loss of Derek Walker just to avoid some vague notion of mailing it in. The retention of Bruce DeHaven (this will likely be remedied in short order). There are plenty of reasons to help justify a change. 

We live in terrifying times, do Seahawks fans. Exciting, too. After a few years of relative predicability with respect to the noted Tim Ruskell draft style and the Holmgren offense, we saw Mora come in and rock then sink the boat. No one survives. Now comes the uncertainty of a new GM, a new coaching staff, and a cornerstone roster year. Change for the sake of change is rarely a good idea, but firing Mora doesn't fall into that category. Today, the Seahawks ripped off the bandage and are in the market for a good surgeon. Choose wisely, Mr. Leiweke. 

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Arkansas / East Carolina and Michigan State / Texas Tech. Endless football marches on. Enjoy it, because the long hiatus approaches. 

If you look to assign blame for the crumbling of the Seahawks, the potential targets are plentiful. Perhaps when everything falls apart this markedly, there's enough blame to hand out to each and every player, coach, and executive. What bothers me is the seemingly pervasive public notion that the offensive line and the defense are to blame. Case in point. Jim Moore decided that Mora and Hasselbeck should be absolved.

When you call out Olindo Mare after the Bears game and the offensive line after the Houston game when the defense should have been called out even more, you don't build a good case for yourself as a leader of men. It's possible that he's lost the team.

But then I think, wait a minute, could Bill Belichick do a better job with the Hawks? It's hard to gauge the quality of the coaching when the players aren't very good.

If that sequence doesn't bother you, you didn't pay close enough attention. Suddenly the whole team is garbage and so Mora gets a pass on his admittedly poor leadership because of it? That's the sort of logic that brings us to my point. 

Assuming the defense is bad means you haven't paid close enough attention to the failings of the offense. The offense has failed primarily because of poor quarterback play. Very poor quarterback play. Yes, the line was not very good in the early portion of the season. The last several games, however, have seen pretty good protection and still the offense sputtered. Yet people cling to Hasselbeck. Read towards the bottom of the article and see the author's recommendations for the new GM. Among them:

Publicly support Hasselbeck. If you think he's part of the Seahawks' problems, you're out of your mind.

I'm out of my mind. Around much of the Seahawks fandom and even on here on Field Gulls, there are some that would prefer to scrap most of the team instead of finding a new quarterback. Change is difficult. As you read articles or listen to the radio or talk to your friends about the Seahawks, don't allow yourself to be swayed by the excuses being bandied about for the failings of the team. Separate your love for a player and their value to a team. Oh, and the failures of the team don't somehow excuse the antics of the head coach. Articles like this drive me bonkers. 

Brady. Brees. Maroney. Thomas. Moss. Colston. Sharper. Applebee's commercials starring Chris Berman, and of course, Ron Jaworski's incredulous chin wagging. Talk about appointment television!

No Seahawks this week. Instead, we have the privilege of watching Favre and Big Ben challenge the limits of pocket protection. 

This is why we love football, after all. Anything can and will happen in any given play, game, or season. Anything except Seattle winning, of course. Doormats turn around and wear the crown and the mighty are made to kneel and kiss the floor.  Remember: It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game.  RAT BASTARDS. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. 

The Colts are going to score. Given the health of the defense and the Manning across the line of scrimmage, the Seahawks offense had better put together a strong performance against an indy defensive unit handing out fewer doses of Dwight Freeney than usual. As the Cardinals showed last week, abandoning the run game plays right into the hands of the smaller, quicker Colts defensive front. Whoever starts on the Seattle O-line had better get some seams for Julius Jones and Justin Forsett. Seneca Wallace looked comfortable making throws on the run last week, drifting backward out of his drop and then running toward the line of scrimmage to find his receivers. He still needs to make better decisions. How will the Seattle offense manage this week with a patchwork line to compliment their patchwork quarterback?  Will John summon the strength to get in front of a television? Will Scruffy send a shipment of live bears to Lucas Oil Stadium? Will Edgerrin James, like a spurned former lover, tear through the Colts like a man possessed? Probably not. But stay tuned. 

A week and a half ago, John brought up an open thread for the public lusting after college running backs. Not only were we all looking at backs that caught our fancy, but:

So to head off every thread devolving into fantasy GMing and rosterbation, here's a few 2010 prospects, passed through the Ruskell sieve, to enjoy on this autumn day of August.

Blount was brought up fairly quickly, but he was almost immediately dismissed by a certain someone for his track record, which was dubious enough to wilt under the heat of the Ruskell Code. The point of this isn't to toot John's horn, although the timing is hilarious. Unless you don't own a television, computer (demonstrably false), or newspaper subscription, then you probably know that LeGarrette Blount punched a Boise State player on the field after last night's loss for the Ducks. He has now been suspended for the entirety of the year, ending his career at Oregon and possibly his career as a football player. 

Each year around draft time, there's usually a bit of teeth-gnashing about the players that Tim Ruskell doesn't bother drafting, namely those with any bit of red flaggery in their background. Sure, not every college kid who urinates on a parked car will go all Maurice Clarett and start their own mobile militia. We forget, however, just the magnitude of the investment in these players. Blount came into the season with a scholarship and likely the majority of carries for an Oregon team trying to contend for a Pac 10 Title. Investing a good deal of their trust in a particular player, Oregon was let down.

Just as the level of competition ratchets up with the jump to the NFL, so too does the magnitude of the investment in players. Rosters are smaller and salaries are immense. When thinking about draft-worthy players, we tend to consider the inherent risk of failure to develop or the risk of serious injury. We need to remember to add in the risk of immature or unstable character . It's nice to marvel at the potential of players like Blount, but last night we saw the bottom face of that sort of coin flip. 

113 posts. That is the extent of my career at Field Gulls. While I've had a good time over the last six months, I am sad to say that I am moving on from this wonderful site after having just been accepted to medical school. While I will certainly try to read John's work as frequently as possible, I just can't afford to dedicate the time necessary to do daily football-related blurb writing.

I hope you all appreciate the outstanding quality of the work that John turns out on a daily basis because we as Seahawk fans are spoiled rotten. I'll try to drop by and post once in a while if something tickles my fancy, but in a month's time I'll be up to my neck in textbooks and up to my wrists in cadaver.

Last week we talked about the validation of the Advanced NFL Stats WP model, and Brian Burke noted in his writeup that WP still failed to account for home field advantage. Now it does.

Although it’s clear that home teams perform better during a game, at least in terms of points scored, it’s not clear exactly how this translates into an increased chance of winning minute by minute. From simple win-loss records, all we know that at the outset of a game the home generally team ultimately has about a 56.5% chance of winning.

The problem, as should be fairly apparent, is that Burke only has WP available to test these win-loss probabilities. So what happens when you chart the home team win probability (go look!)? After extracting the results from the context from which they were derived (a model that learns over the course of the game), Burke found a WP curve with respect to HFA .

Starting with a 6.5% advantage at kickoff, and following the shape of the curve, we see the real, no kidding, actual HFA as the game goes on. This isn’t HFA in terms of yards per play, first downs, or points scored, or in terms of anything except the probability of winning.

The results are interesting in that HFA effect on WP decreases over the course of the game. Would you have expected this? Crowd intensity down the stretch of the game does continue to aid the winning team, but the marginal WP returns decrease. Why?

So there are (at least) two mechanisms at work. First is the decrease in performance advantage for the home team as the game goes on that I discussed above. Perhaps fatigue neutralizes the home team's edge, or perhaps it's visitor acclimation to a hostile, unfamiliar environment. Second, as the game clock ticks down, there is less time for the home team to capitalize on its advantage. By the end of the game the scoreboard doesn’t care which team is the home team and which is the visitor. A 1-point lead is good enough to win, period. So it’s a complicated thing to model. We just can’t add 6.5% to the win probability (WP) for the home team throughout the game.

The second point is the key from a WP standpoint. At the start of the game, the home team has 60 minutes of advantaged football ahead of them. As WP predicts the odds of winning the game from a given moment through the end of the game, you can't expect the same cumulative advantage at any point in the game. By the time a game has reached the final two-minute warning, home field advantage can only do so much.

It really is that sparse, so here's new NFL.com blogger Jason La Canfora's top 20 NFL players, in no particular order. Note that Walter Jones made the cut, which is fairly questionable at this point in time. Anyone else you guys feel should be on the list?

On an administrative note, here's a poll for all of you. This is a particularly dry stretch of the offseason, but I've tried to find something of NFL interest (Advanced NFL Stats and the like) even when there isn't anything remotely related to the Seahawks.

via media.thenewstribune.com

Between John and I, there have been a couple of posts at FG related to the Advanced NFL Stats Win Probability charts. If you've paid any attention, you know just how neat they are. If you are a generally curious person, you probably have wondered about the accuracy of the WP charts. Wonder no more. If you have no interest in probabilistic models, you should probably just stare at a wall for a few minutes.

For readers who are accustomed to linear regression models, you'd expect to see a goodness-of-fit statistic known as r-squared. And for those familiar with logistic models, you'd expect to see some other measure, such as the percent of cases predicted correctly. But the win probability model I've built is a complex custom-built model, using multiple smoothing and estimation methods. There isn't a handy goodness-of-fit statistic to cite.

We can still test how accurate the model is by measuring the proportion of observations that correctly favor the ultimate winner. For example, if model says the home team has a 0.80 WP, and they go on to win, then the model would be "correct."

But it's not that simple. I don't want the model to be correct 100% of the time when it says a team has a 0.80 WP. I want it to be wrong sometimes. Specifically, in this case I'd want it to be wrong 20% of the time. If so, that's a good feature of any probability model. This is what's known as model calibration.

Right, so that's it for the wall of text. If you are still reading, now go check out the charts in the article. The first shows a very nice relationship between actual results and the predicted results. There's a problem, however: The top chart shows the relationship between the 2000-2007 data and the model, which was built off of the 2000-2007 data. When building and subsequently testing a model, it's important to split the data into what's known as test and training data sets, part of the cross-validation process. If you test a model with the same data you created it with, the results will almost certainly show a very good model*. To ensure that this wasn't the case, Burke tested his model against the 2008 data, and the results look pretty good for a single-season sample.

Also, Burke charted out the model confidence, which is pretty interesting to look at from a fan perspective. It makes sense that the average game should start out with a roughly 50/50 split at kickoff. As late as the ten minutes from the end,  however, there is generally only about ~80% confidence in a winner. That leaves a lot up for grabs.

*Unless you screwed up.