The Problem
Wins, Losses and Saves are possibly the most arbitrary statistics in all of baseball. At times, wins are given to pitchers who had poor games, but were saved by their offense driving in high amounts of runs. Other times, pitchers throw gems, only to be penalized by their offense's poor output. And saves are given almost by simply showing up at the end of the game. None of these stats are tightly based on any sort of statistical analysis - they are given according to a set of rules that don't take the quality of the pitcher's performance into account.

The Solution
Win Probability Added and Leverage Index, I believe, are possibly strong tools for awarding wins, losses and saves. While there are strong criticisms of the use of WPA and LI in aggregate, they are excellent at telling us how well a player did in a given situation or game, and how much that performance was worth. By analyzing how well a pitcher performed in a game we can properly dole out wins, losses and saves - these are single game awards.

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I read in today's Clemens update:
""I did everything I wanted to do with the baseball, pretty much," Clemens said, though he cited some problems with his splitter because of the difference in size between the Major and Minor League baseball"

The balls in MiLB are different than in MLB? I wasn't aware of this - are they smaller, bigger, and why?

Was discussing the Carlos Zambrano mystery with a friend of mine, and it came up - did Zambrano play winter ball? Could he be nursing an injury from then? Is there anywhere that has, at the very least, a list of players who participated in winter leagues? It would be nice to have statistics too, but it would be helpful just to have a list of who played.

A while back I mused on converting player VORP by position to see what a player might be worth at a different position. For calculations I used the formula stated by hentler a few diaries ago. It's not perfect, I checked the calculated VORP against the "official" VORP from BPro. Most were close (Joe Mauer) but some were pretty off (Granderson, Sizemore). I'm not sure where the discrepancy comes from.

Anyway, I've got the basic functionality of the little tool down. There's plenty of bugs in the cosmetic function, and it looks ugly, but it works. It also displays comparable VORP scores of players at the "new" position (so if you move Granderson to 1B, it will show his 1B VORP compared to his CF VORP, and then will show the 1B players with the most similar 1B VORP scores). So far, this is 2006 data only. I'll work on other years at some point.

Oh, batting VORP only.

http://www.cephyn.com/vorp/vorp.php

Jeez the offseason is TOO LONG. Killing me. Come on baseball!!!

So Neyer had a short article on ESPN today about VORP. I showed it to a non-saberfriendly pal. His biggest question was: OK, so how well does Joe Mauer do if you move him to first base?

Is there a VORP calculator out there? Is the formula and the numbers needed readily available? And can you apply a conversion to a VORP score directly, or do you need to recalculate from the start?

If someone has this or an excel sheet that will do it, I'd love to play with it - if not, then if someone can point me to the formulas and data, I might build something myself.

Can someone tell me how Pedro had a month like he did and get no wins? Dear lord....has anything that ridiculous happened before? You'd think that 42.0 IP, 55K, 2.14ERA, 0.74WHIP, and 9.17K/BB would result in, oh I dunno, a win?

Via Hardball Times:
Fangraphs is now tracking WPA stats for all players.

Fangraphs, which has been generating Win Probability Totals graphs for every game, is now collating the Win Probability Added (WPA) totals for all players and listing them on the team pages.

I know David plans to develop a "WPA leaderboard" soon, but I thought I'd jump the gun and list the top 10 WPA leaders, based on a quick review of each team's list. Remember that every 50 WPA points is a game above average.

Player           WPA
Pujols           323
Swisher          195
Carpenter        183
Chavez           171
D. Sanchez       157
Jeter            156
Ensberg          155
V. Martinez      151
Papelbon         150
Gomes            148

You could almost field an entire team from this list, with a starter (Chris Carpenter), setup man (Duaner Sanchez) and closer (Papelbon) on the mound, a catcher, first baseman, shortstop, third baseman (two, actually) and a couple of outfielders. Biggest surprise to me is the Mets' Sanchez, who has given up no runs in 17 innings and pitched in some high-leverage situations.

Other totals of note include Barry Bonds (138, despite the low batting average), Lance Berkman (138 too), the Reds' Todd Coffey (137!!) and Tampa Bay's Ty Wigginton (130!!!!!).

still not working! For any SB site that I read too. Any word on this? I can't be the only person who relies on RSS... 8(

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Saw this on Baseball Analysts:
"# In total, there were 156 runs scored--or an average of 11.2 per game--in the first 14 contests. Last year, the average number of runs per game for the season was 9.2. Just wait 'til we run those #4 and #5 starters out there."

Additionally it sure seems to me that HR's are WAY up in the first couple days of the season. And then in today's Cub game, 4 HR in 5 innings, including one by Bronson Arroyo! I thought steroids were gone? Or is it that greenies are gone and the pitchers are suffering?

Too soon for hard numbers maybe, but it sure seems like a lot of HRs....

Around many of the SBNation blogs I've noticed site admins doing the "predict player x's line" posts. They then take the users' predictions, average them, and say "here's our prediction!"

I had two long term thoughts on this:

1)How do the sites populations' predictions compare to PECOTA?

2)After all is said and done (next year, obviously) - who ended up closer?

Just some things I thought today. I wonder if the various site admins wouldn't mind sending/posting their sites' predictions to a nice simple place (BtB cough) where we could hold them for analysis next year.