SB Nation User Blog: giveml

The College Pitcher Fallacy Redux

giveml — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:37:42 -0000

I posted my views on the desirability of drafting a college pitcher vs. drafting a high school pitcher about a week ago, but I was traveling quite a bit and didn’t have to time to follow/rebut the conversation. I wanted to have another go at it, so I figured I needed to do some additional research in order to make it worth anyone’s time to read it.

First, I want to address a couple of points that were raised in response to the original post. I thought I actually addressed one of them, but I guess not since it didn’t seem to get through. Maybe I am the only one who thinks it makes any sense. That point would be that only measuring performance for the years a player is under team control is an incomplete analysis. Obviously, the first sixish years are ones every team can count on and should be looked at closely, but my point is that the only chance the Cardinals have to obtain a top of the rotation starter is to develop and retain one. If you are one of the small market teams that is going to lose every single player the minute they are eligible for free agency then it makes sense to look at those years only.

I hope the Cardinals are a team that can make a run at retaining their best players. If someone knows for a fact that they aren’t please tell me now so I can stop yammering and quit being a Cardinal fan. After all, the Cardinals have signed Adam Wainwright through his first two free agent years, at least if you count club options. I think the ability to have a Wainwright-type pitcher signed for what should be significantly below market for two additional years shows that the Cardinals are a team that needs to look beyond the team control years in making value assessments. In fact, it is probably their only hope to be successful in the long run.

I think it is particularly important to emphasize that strategy as the Cardinals have utterly failed to sign a top-tier free agent starting pitcher that was available on the open market. I can’t remember a top starting pitcher that has ever signed with the Cardinals unless they were already on the team. Chris Carpenter was a dumpster dive, Adam Wainwright was obtained via trade, Daryl Kile was also a trade, Matt Morris was a draft pick. However, each of these pitchers has signed contracts to remain with the Cardinals and bypassed potential free agency.

Secondly, someone raised the issue that looking at the statistical leaders in an attempt to find out where the elite pitchers come from is somehow a small sample size issue. I may be obtuse, but I don’t see how looking at a three-year running total of all innings pitched by all major league pitchers is a small sample problem just because you are only interested in who the best ones are. Especially if you have already analyzed fifteen years of data to attempt to identify where top of the rotation starters come from and have data that supports the same conclusion. Anyway, I digress.

I have reviewed fangraphs WAR data for all MLB pitchers since 2002 and isolated a running group of pitchers that were the top 35 in WAR for each three year interval – e.g. 2002-2004, 2003-2005, 2004-2006, etc through the 2008 season. It made sense to me that sustained success would win out over any single outstanding season. The results clearly indicate to me that high school pitchers have significantly more upside than college pitchers and should be considered at least as desirable when making a draft decision.

For each of the running three year intervals there were about twice as many HS pitchers in the top 35 as college pitchers in spite of the fact that there are on average about 50% more college pitchers are drafted and signed in each draft, especially in the first five rounds. Of the top 35 starters in these five intervals two-thirds of the pitchers were consistently players drafted and signed out of high school while only one third were drafted out of college. The percentage of WAR achieved by HS players ranged from 62.1% in 2002-2004 to 70.4% in 2004-2006. For the most recent period, 2006-2008, HS pitchers accounted for 238.6 WAR while the college guys only earned 125.8.

When the comparison is limited just to pitchers drafted in the first round the results are very interesting. In the first interval examined (2002-2004) there were more than twice as many 1st round college pitchers in the top 35 as there were HS pitchers with the college guys earning 89.9 WAR to only 40.3 for the HS kids. However, the trend has been in favor of the HS guys as both the number of 1st round pitchers and their respective WAR are have increased substantially. By 2006-2008, the roles were reversed with 60% of the first round picks represented being from HS and the WAR advantage being 82.1 to 44.6. For the entire period from 2002 to 2008 there were 22 1st round picks from college and 25 from HS.

Maybe all I succeed in doing here is showing my lack of statistical sophistication and wasting everyone’s time, but I think these data show that any club that bypasses HS pitchers in the draft in favor of college pitchers is missing out on a superior talent pool. This may not prove that HS pitchers are better, but I don’t see how anyone can view this information and still believe it is a better idea to draft college pitchers. Unless, of course, you are Pittsburgh, Kansas City, or some other hopeless small market team who can’t/won’t sign your best players. By the way, Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright, and Kyle Lohse were signed out of high school.

The College Pitcher Phallacy

giveml — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:47:27 -0000

I have read many articles on this subject that argue pretty forcefully that it is a bad idea to draft a high school pitcher in the first round. Various reasons are given for this view including that HS pitchers are less likely to make it to the big leagues, the “higher upside” theory is a myth, college pitchers will get to the big leagues faster, etc. Many of these articles are well done and offer significant data to support the opinions expressed in them.

A trend I have seen in articles by erik at futureredbirds (link) and others is to evaluate the HS and college pitchers in the aggregate using wins above replacement (WAR) during the years that pitchers are under team control. I agree that WAR is a fine yardstick, but I have issues with only evaluating the years a team has a pitcher under control. This gives a natural advantage to the college pitchers as they are typically older and more mature when they reach the league. Furthermore, it is only a valid way to analyze the value of the respective classes if you are a franchise that has no chance to retain the drafted player.

Being a Cardinals fan, I hope ownership and management will make an effort to retain their best players. I certainly think we have a much better chance of signing a premium pitcher that we develop than one that is available on the free agent market. I mean, when was the last time we signed a premium FA pitcher off the free agent market? I am pretty sure the correct answer is NEVER. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that Wainer will remain a both a top tier pitcher and a Cardinal beyond his existing contract. We already have him signed to a below market contract that bought out one of his free agent years with club options for two additional years.

I prefer to look at the first round draft pick as an opportunity to acquire an elite player whether it be a pitcher or a position player. That being said, it only makes sense to attempt to figure out where the elite pitchers actually come from. Given the preponderance of opinions that college pitchers are safer bets and offer equal or better upside one would think the data would support that conclusion. From the perspective I have chosen, it appears not to be the case.

Last year I researched this question and posted my findings (link) that the best pitchers are more than twice as likely to have been drafted and signed out of High School (55%) as from college (24%). I thought it would be a good time to review the data from a slightly different perspective than before. In the 2008 article I looked at all active pitchers with over 1000 IPs who had ERA+ ratings of 110 or better. I thought that was a good approach because the data was easy to find at b-r and was both park and league adjusted. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can find similar data at b-r without a subscription, so I decided to look at fangraphs and use the top 35 pitchers in terms of WAR over the last three seasons. I would have preferred a longer window, but it seems three years is the largest one I can select.

The data don’t really look much different from this perspective. There are essentially three ways for pitchers to enter the MLB system: 1) drafted from HS; 2) drafted from college; and 3) amateur free agents (mostly international players). Of the top 35 pitchers over the last three years as determined by WAR, 18 (51.4%) were drafted from high school, 10 (28.6%) were drafted from college, and the remaining 7 (20%) were signed as amateur free agents. This is in spite of the fact that over the last twenty drafts MLB teams have taken 59 more college pitchers in the first round than HS pitchers. In 19 of the last 20 drafts there were at least as many college pitchers taken as HS pitchers, and in 17 of the last 20 there were more college pitchers taken. Overall, 60% of the pitchers taken in the first round have been from college with 67% having been college picks in the last five drafts. Since some of the HS pitchers taken have elected not to sign, the ratio of college picks to HS picks is probably somewhat higher.

Of those 28 that were actually drafted players, 10 were drafted in the first round. Seven of these were drafted from HS and three were from college. The HS 1st round draftees were:

C.C Sabathia

Roy Halladay

Scott Kazmir

Cole Hamel

Matt Cain

Gil Meche

Josh Beckett.

Interestingly enough, six of the seven HS picks were drafted with the 15th pick or later when the Cardinals are more likely to be drafting. Most years the majority of the early picks spent on pitchers are on those from college. The college picks were:

Mike Mussina

Justin Verlander

Jeff Francis.

I don’t have a problem with drafting college pitchers in general, but I don’t think it is correct to say they are a better investment. If your goal is to draft a top of the rotation type starter in the first round (what other reason could a team possibly have for drafting a pitcher in the first round?) it sure seems likely you will have better success by drafting a HS pitcher. However, if you want to have a system that is chock full of middle relief prospects like the Cardinals, then keep drafting those safe guys.

The Cost of WAR

giveml — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:08:15 -0000

As most of you know there has been quite a bit of discussion here about valuing free agents, with most of the discussion being tied to wins above replacement (WAR). The really smart guys will tell you that the cost of a win above replacement on the free market is somewhere between $4.5-5M . I don't know what they might say about the potential long-term impact of this season's free agent contracts on the future market value of a win. The common thread at VEB has been, "let's sign player X for $9-10M because he is a 2 WAR player". I wondered why our front office never really seemed to be making "market" offers based on this valuation method, so I started to do a little research.

I used free agent salary data from espn's free agent tracker and WAR data from fangraphs. Since the espn site only has data for the past three off-seasons, I have only attempted to draw conclusions based on the 2006-2008 timeframe. Obviously, data for the current off-season is still incomplete, but the picture is somewhat clear.

I doubt that any of this information comes from a large enough sample set to actually "prove" anything, but I think it is sufficiently valuable to stimulate some conversation nonetheless. What I have done is simply take the average annual value of each free agent contract without regard to any incentives, deferred money, or back loading and divided each player's WAR for the season completed immediately prior to signing the contract in order to obtain a cost per WAR for each free agent. Then I have compared the costs for each WAR range and also compared the cost to the succeeding season's performance.

According to this admittedly simplistic look at the data, 2006-07 free agents were paid an average of $4.2M per WAR which is pretty close to what you would expect. For 2007-08 that number drops to just under $3.8M and currently sits at just over $3.3M for 2008-09. If you dig a little deeper it gets more interesting. It is extremely difficult to value certain classes of low WAR players like relief pitchers, aging players, and near-replacment bench types.

When the data are separated into two buckets and you look at the <1 WAR players separately it is stunning to see the effect. For example, in 2006-07 there were 78 free agents signed with a 2006 WAR below 1. In fact, there were 28 players signed who posted 2006 WARs that were negative - indicating they were below replacement level. The bulk of these were relief pitchers and players coming off injuries. These players signed free agent contracts totaling over $200M in annual value despite a cumulate 2006 WAR rating of 9.2, making for a cost per WAR of nearly $22M! That certainly skews the cost per WAR for the players who actually have significant value.

There were 55 players in 2006-2007 who signed free agent contracts worth a total of over $400M in annualized value. These players 2006 WARs totaled 135.6 for a cost per WAR of just under $3M. A similar, but not quite so dramatic, difference can be seen in the numbers for the succeeding seasons.

During the 2007-08 off-season there were 50 contracts signed by free agents with 2007 WAR values below 1 for a total of over $130M. There cumulative WAR total was 14.2 resulting in a cost per WAR of over $9M. In the same period the 36 >=1 WAR players signed contracts totaling almost $266M for a cost per WAR of just over 2.9M - nearly identical to the 2006-07 class. During the current off-season, 51 players with 2008 WAR <1 have signed for a total of over $95M resulting in a cost per WAR of just under $7.9M. The >=1 WAR group has seen a modest decrease in pay with an average price of just under $2.8M per WAR.

There are a couple of interesting conclusions here:

If you are a marginal player, or a relief pitcher, or any other near-replacement type then your value is dropping precipitously. The <1 WAR group has seen its value plummet by nearly 65%.
When we talk about the value of significant free agents, $4.5M per WAR is much more than the market seems to have been paying. In 2008 only two players out of 20 with 2008 WARs above 2 signed contracts worth more than $4.5M per WAR. They were Kerry Wood at about $4.7M and Raul Ibanez at $4.56M. Other than those two players, the highest cost per WAR was one Brian Fuentes at $3.5M. CC Sabathia was at a cool $2.99M. The numbers aren't much different for 2006-07 and 2007-08.

I have posted the complete data if you care to look at the details.

Some explanations of the column headings:

The column headings with years (i.e. 2008-09) represent the value per win based on the preceding season's WAR.
The column headings with "Actual" in the heading indicate the cost per WAR of the players in the year they actually earned the money.
"% Incr" is how much more (or less) the given group cost than the value assigned at the time of contract signing.

I would be curious to hear whether the community thinks that WAR undervalues bench players and relief pitchers or whether "baseball men" put too much value on situational context.

Feel My Pain - A Defensive Metric For The Rest Of Us

giveml — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:40:45 -0000

I like numbers and I am generally pretty comfortable with them, but I have to acknowledge there are limits to that comfort. After all, I am by education a liberal arts/social science kind of guy and never really had any advanced statistical training or any cause to use advanced statistics in my work. Nevertheless, I have always loved the numerical side of baseball and was thrilled to find a community of similarly minded people, especially since it included a number of people I could learn from.

I have recently been trying to get my arms around the various methodologies and measures of defensive ability and I am writing this post because I am hopeful there are many similarly confused people who are hoping to find some firm footing in the area of defensive metrics. I feel like I am wading around the continental shelf in cool, refreshing water, but the 500 foot drop could just be a couple of steps away. So, I am going to present some information that may well demonstrate that I am in over my head. I am counting on the more statistically sophisticated to throw me a lifeline when I flounder and hopefully not ridicule me too terribly much for being out in water over my head when I don’t know how to swim very well.

I make no claim that I have figured out any thing of earth-shaking significance. Mine is a simple quest to try to understand baseball a little better and to actually be able to participate in seemingly esoteric discussions about the worth and desirability of various players with some degree of coherence.

I have seen a number of measures purporting to objectify defensive prowess and many of you have no doubt seen them as well. I will not endeavor to explain all the various methods here as others more capable than I have done that very well in other places. I have found a couple of articles useful in gaining what I hope is a basic understanding of the various approaches. Justin Inaz has what is about as comprehensive an overview as I can wade through on defensive metrics at his site, jinaz-reds.blogspot.com, as part of what he calls his Player Value Series. You can check it out by scrolling down the left hand side of the home page. Many, but certainly not all, VEBers seem to like Justin’s approach. Another useful spot, at least for me, is the fine article by David Gassko at The Hardball Times called “Evaluating the Evaluators” (http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/evaluating-the-evaluators/) with additional information available at his blog that is linked in the article.

What I am searching for is a publicly available, up-to-date statistic that can be used with some confidence when talking about the relative value of a particular defensive player. I like rate stats in general because I think they give you a more accurate picture of a talent level and seem to allow discussions of players who may play multiple positions, or are just part-time players, or have been injured and missed some time. For example, if you want to get into a discussion of the defensive abilities of various Cardinal OFs or MIFs the various amounts of playing time they have been afforded would skew their rating by counting stats.

Pay attention, because here comes the part where I am going to get out over my skis a little and will need some guidance from the more sophisticated. The various rating systems I see quoted most often are John Dewan’s +/-, David Pinto’s Probability Model of Range (PMR), the fielding component of Justin Inaz’ Total Value System, Zone Rating (ZR, readily available on espn.com), Revised Zone Rating (RZR, readily available on hardballtimes.com), and MGL’s Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). I believe they all draw their data from either STATS, Inc. or Baseball Information Solutions (BIS). Justin’s Player Value Series has a nice overview of the features of each and both scatterplot and correlation matrices if you care to see them.

For me as a relative novice, each of these systems has at least one significant drawback. They are either not freely available, are not compiled until the end of the season, don’t correlate well with each other, are difficult to manipulate, or are no longer being published. As far as I know, the only way to get comprehensive +/- info from Dewan is to subscribe to it. He provides the top ten in MLB at each position and the bottom six at www.fieldingbible.com or in The Bill James Handbook. I like the method they employ and I think the results jibe with what I see with my own eyes, but it has limited value to me as a chaotic blogger who wants to do ad-hoc analyses.

I am somewhat intrigued by David Pinto’s PMR data, but I have to admit to some skepticism. It doesn’t really seem to correlate well with anything else, so either David is just way smarter than anybody else (very possible) or there are some problems with either his data or his methodology. David uses a predicted defensive efficiency ratio (DER) and then compares it with an actual DER to see who outperforms, or underperforms, the expectation. One thing I can’t seem to understand is that his top five rated SS all have low predicted DER, while he has guys like Adam Everett, Yunel Escobar, and Jimmy Rollins as barely above average. David, if you happen to read this the prevailing assumption here is that I am not qualified to pass judgment on anyone’s method, but I am just groping for a useful tool. So please don’t be too harsh to me, even if I deserve it. PMR is also only available after the end of the season and is in a pretty static format, so it doesn’t serve my purposes well.

Justin Inaz’ Total Value system has the benefit of being expressed in runs so it can easily be used to calculate player value in dollars, plus it shows Albert Pujols as the best player in the known universe by a ridiculously wide margin, so I like that. While Justin’s discussion on his site indicates he thinks the ideal metric would be a blend of UZR, PMR and Tom Tango’s Fans Scouting Report (FSR), I think the data he actually uses is based on RZR. FSR is a compilation of subjective impressions from serious fans.

ZR has the advantage of being readily available on espn.com, while RZR is accessible at hardballtimes.com. I am not certain what other differences their may be in the data, but the most obvious one is that RZR includes out of zone (OOZ) plays made while ZR does not. My understanding is that Mitchel Litchman, known as MGL, no longer makes UZR data available, at least partly because he is currently an employee of the St. Louis Cardinals.

So what is a poor neophyte to do? I got tired of attempting to draw conclusions from the readily available RZR only to get stomped by someone with a better tool, so I decided to see if I could cook up something that might be a better indicator. I think I may have found a reasonable dataset that is freely available, has data for the last five years, is sortable on a number of parameters and may have some statistical validity as well. I call it POOZBIZ.

POOZBIZ is a simple acronym for the components for RZR and it seems like you can use those components to come up with a reasonably accurate indicator of defensive ability. All you have to do is do the simple calculation of: (Plays + OOZ) / BIZ. What that tells you is how many plays in the zone (Plays) and out of the zone (OOZ) were made as a percentage of the total balls in the zone. I started looking at this because I had read in multiple locations that one of the problems with the STATS and BIS data was that they used different methods of assigning a batted ball to a zone and were somewhat misleading.

It seemed sort of common sensical to me that most good players field most of the balls within their field of play, but I kept seeing that many players missed a relatively high number of plays yet managed to get to quite a few balls out of their zone. That just didn’t make sense with what I was seeing when I watched games. What I would call a true OOZ play seems to be a relatively rare event. For example, RZR shows Cesar Izturis missed a whopping 41 plays in his zone, or almost 15%, while he made 58 plays, or over 20% of his total plays, outside his zone. I think PIZBOOZ corrects that, at least in a practical sense, and shows that Cesar made 105.43% of the plays in his zone. Since he made only made six fielding error all season at SS, that would mean he made about 7-8% of his total plays outside his zone. That sure sounds reasonable to me.

I thought I better do a sanity check by correlating my results against the systems whose data was readily obtainable. So I put together some data for SS only to see whether I might be on to something. I should note that my baseline was all the shortstops in both leagues that The Hardball Times refers to as “qualified”. In this instance that meant 20 SS with a minimum of 880 innings at the position. The correlations are below:

	Dewan +/-	Justin Inaz	Pinto’s PMR	Zone Rating	Revised Zone Rating
POOZBIZ	.939	.946	.593	.683	.701
+/-	1	.924	.594	.604	.760
Inaz	.924	1	.612	.851	.796
PMR	.594	.612	1	.440	.416
ZR	.604	.851	.440	1	.777
RZR	.760	.796	.416	.777	1

NOTE: I got my +/- data from Dewan’s website, and he only allows freeloaders like me to see the top ten and bottom six at each position, so all the correlations from to +/- are based only on eight hits to my baseline. The remaining data is for all twenty players. I have very little concept as to whether this is truly statistically significant, but I was encouraged at the extremely high correlation between Dewan’s and Inaz’ numbers. I would probably be willing to run the data across the remaining six positions (no P, no C) if the community thinks it would actually be a worthwhile exercise.

I thought it would also make sense to take a quick look at the data for other positions to see who would rise to the top as a sanity check. So, here it is, the first ever all-POOZBIZ team:

Position	First Team	Second Team	Third Team
1B	Albert Pujols	Mark Texeira	Lance Berkman
2B	Chase Utley	Mark Ellis	Placido Polanco
3B	Adrian Beltre	Scott Rolen	Jack Hannahan
SS	Cesar Izturis	J. J. Hardy	Yunel Escobar
LF	Ryan Braun	Fred Lewis	Carl Crawford
CF	Michael Bourn	Carlos Beltran	Carlos Gomez
RF	Kosuke Fukudome	Randy Winn	Brian Giles

That is all I have. I hope it is interesting and I hope it was not a waste of my time.

So, just how good is Tony LaRussa anyway?

giveml — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:58:30 -0000

As a Cardinal Manager, TLR has won 1133 regular season games (as of 9/16), six NL Division Series, two LCS, and one World Championship. His teams have made the playoffs in seven of his thirteen seasons and have only suffered through three losing campaigns. He was National League Manager of the Year in 2002 and he is certain to be elected to the Hall of Fame. In spite of his success he remains a polarizing figure among Cardinal fans in general and at VEB in particular. Some think he represents the pinnacle of success of the Cardinals franchise and others believe he has squandered a terrific run of talent. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.

Attempting to evaluate the impact any manager has on his team’s success, especially in any kind of detailed way, is a daunting undertaking. Trying to evaluate all the managerial decisions during over 2000 games would be a task worthy of a multi-volume work. I am not qualified to do that and I still have a day job, so I’ll see if I can arrive at any meaningful conclusions by using a couple of macro measurements. I will preface my remarks with my own bias that I think a manager’s contribution to the success or failure of a team is typically over emphasized. I am a strong believer that the manager’s primary contributions are in the areas of recognizing talent (i.e. playing the correct players) and nurturing a winning atmosphere.

I will attempt to see if any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from two main areas: Pythagorean win expectancy and the amount of on-field success in relation to the team payroll. I think most VEB readers are familiar with Bill James’ Pythagorean algorithm and I found a reasonable explanation and refinement here http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=342 courtesy of Clay Davenport and Keith Woolner at Baseball Prospectus. The algorithm essentially states that if you divide the square of a team’s runs scored into the sum of the squares of runs scored and runs allowed (RS*RS)/((RS*RS)+(RA*RA)) the solution will be a winning percentage projection accurate to within approximately four wins of the actual total. I decided to look at every instance of NL teams Pythagorean Wins deviating from their actual wins by more than four to see if the manager might possibly be due either the credit or the blame.

DISCLAIMER: I am not making any argument that any of the following data proves anything. I am merely trying to promote discussion on the topic of just exactly how we evaluate manager performance. So, please don’t abuse me too badly if you think this is all just a bunch of hooey. If you have other thoughts I would love to hear them, but please try to support whatever opinion you express so that we can all hopefully learn something.

Pythagorean Wins

Since TLR became Cardinals manager in 1996 there have been 356 “team seasons” of which 89, or exactly 25%, have experienced season win totals that differed by 5 or more wins from their projected total. The Cardinals have experienced three seasons outside the Pythagorean win projection during TLR’s tenure. The first was in 1997 when the team came up six games sort of its projection during its 73-89 season. From 1998-2003 the team was within expected parameters, but the 2004 team that went 105-57 was only projected to win 100 games. Unbelievable as it may seem to Cardinals’ fans, the 2007 team was actually TLR’s best managing job as measured by Pythagorean Wins. While we all found the 78-84 record disheartening, the projection for that team was a record of 71-91.

As a sanity check, I decided to evaluate all of the 89 seasons that were outside of Pythagorean projections to see if there were any trends that seemed meaningful. I looked for managers who consistently underperformed the projection as well as those who exceeded it on a regular basis. I know this is completely unscientific, but I still found the results interesting. For lack of a better term I will call the teams and managers whose actual records were five wins or more short of the Pythagorean projection as “underachievers” and those whose actual records exceeded the projection by five wins or more as “overachievers”.

When you look at the list of underachievers it is littered with managers most people would regard as below average managers. The single worst season in the 1996-2007 period belongs to Tony Muser and the 1999 Kansas City Royals who only managed to win 64 games despite a projection of 76 for a total of -12. The closest pursuer was current Cleveland Indians manager Eric Wedge with a -11 total in 2006. There was a four-way tie for third worst at -9 between Don Baylor of the 2002 Cubs, John Boles of the 2001 Marlins, Buddy Bell of the 2001 Rockies, and Larry Dierker who managed the feat twice for the Astros in 2000 and 1997. Other notables on the bottom end of the scale were John Gibbons, Jimy Williams, Grady Little, Davey Lopes, and Alan Trammell.

The overachievers list is headed by Joe Torre’s 2004 Yankee team whose 101-61 record exceeded projections by 12 games. Bob Melvin’s Diamondbacks managed to overachieve by 11 games in both 2005 and 2007. Other top overachievers were Dusty Baker, Bobby Valentine, Dave Miley, Mike Hargrove, Tony Muser, Ken Macha, and Ozzie Guillen.

As you can see, Tony Muser made the list for top underachiever and overachiever. He was one of several managers who managed single seasons on both ends of the spectrum, so I decided to look for models of consistency. There are five managers who have more than one season of underachievement with no offsetting seasons of achievement. They are Buddy Bell (-9,-5,-5), Clint Hurdle (-5,-5), Davey Lopes (-7,-5), Alan Trammell (-7, -6), and Eric Wedge (-11,-5). As a footnote, Wedge’s 2008 Indians club is currently at -4 so he may join Buddy Bell as the only three-time loser. Consistent overachievers include Joe Torre (12,5,5,5,5), Ozzie Guillen (8,5), and Ron Gardenhire (7,5).

During the years of this analysis there were only three managers who guided the same club for the duration: Tony LaRussa, Bobby Cox, and Joe Torre. I lived in Atlanta from 1990-1995 and had the opportunity to watch Bobby Cox in action for virtually every Braves game during that time. While the Braves were extremely successful, I was never particularly impressed with Cox’s managerial expertise. He never really seemed to be able to figure out matchups very well and was not particularly effective in managing his bullpen. His cumulative record from 1996-2007 exceeded Pythagorean projections by +4, with a high of +5 in both 2000 and 2003 and a low of -6 in 2006. TLR’s record is very similar as his cumulative total is +6. Neither Cox nor LaRussa’s performance is statistically significant. However, Joe Torre’s record of overperformance is truly significant.

Torre’s cumulate total over 12 seasons is an astounding +37. The statistical variance for this metric over this time is 13.85, so Torre has exceeded the variance by 167%. The second best team was the Chicago White Sox with 17, followed by the Reds with 16, the Padres with 15, and a tie between the Angels, Giants, and Nationals with 14. The worst teams were the Royals (-32), the Rockies (-27), the Cubs (-26), and the Tigers (-25).

Team Payroll

As far as salaries go, it seemed only fair to me that a manager can only achieve a limited amount of success given the hand he is dealt. I don’t think any managers of the Washington Nationals or the Pittsburgh Pirates are going to be getting Hall of Fame consideration any time soon. Joe Torre serves as a fine illustration of the effect of payroll on managerial success. From 1996-2007 Joe Torre’s Yankee teams made the playoffs every year, won 28 divisional playoff games, 27 league championship games and won four of the six World Series they participated in. When Torre accepted the manager’s job for the Cardinals in August of 1990, he inherited a team with the eighth highest payroll in MLB and fourth highest in the NL. Unfortunately for Joe, and for Cardinal fans, the BOB would be in the bottom half of MLB payroll the next five years, including 24th in a 28 team league in 1993. As we are all painfully aware, Joe Torre, Hall of Fame Manager, wouldn’t even sniff the playoffs during his Cardinal tenure.

Joe’s last season as Cardinals manager was the first for the Cardinals current ownership group and was also the first for as General Manager for Walt Jocketty. After 143 games and a 62-81 record Walt cut Joe loose and Mike Jorgensen finished out the season. The Cardinals weren’t the only team in MLB with a new ownership group at that time as the Oakland A’s had changed hands. The A’s owners wanted to run a leaner ship and emphasize player development. TLR had just completed his third straight losing season as the A’s manager and wanted a commitment from the new ownership group to spend more money on player acquisition and retention. TLR found the commitment he was looking for, but he found it from the Cardinals. After languishing in the bottom half of MLB in payroll under the post-Gussie brewery ownership, the Cardinals jumped into the top ten in 1996 and made their first playoff appearance since 1987.

Is it really that simple? Is spending money all you have to do to get in the playoffs? The answer is kinda, but not really. We have all seen franchises make dumb moves on overpriced free agents that cripple the franchise. The real answer is sort of the opposite. Spending money doesn’t guarantee a spot in the playoffs, but not spending it can come close to guaranteeing a spot in front of the TV come October.

Since TLR became manager in 1996, NL teams in the bottom half of the league in payroll have actually made the playoffs ten times for almost 21% of the available slots. 2007 was the only time in the last twelve years that two teams in the bottom half actually advanced to the LCS. Other than that, 21 of the 22 LDS matchups have been won by teams in the top half of the league in payroll. The only exception was the 2003 world champion Florida Marlins. In the remaining seven series the bottom half teams went a combined 2-21 against top half opponents. That adds up to 21 of 24 LCS participants from the top half and 10 of 12 League Champions from the top half. For those of you with statistical bents, the correlation between payroll and wins in the NL from 1996-2007 was .502. Most would consider that a strong correlation.

During the DeWitt/Jocketty/LaRussa era the Cardinals spent $827,002,528 on payroll and were outspent by the Dodgers ($969M), the Mets ($960M) and the Braves ($949M). In close pursuit were the Diamondbacks ($713M in two fewer years), the Cubs ($795M), and the Giants ($780M). All payroll figures are from the USA Today Salaries databases. According to 2008 figures that I believe are from the start of the season, each of the teams ahead of us will continue to outspend the Cardinals and the Cubs will outspend the BOB by nearly $19M. If the Dodgers hang on in the West then all four of this year’s playoff teams will come from the top half of the salary pool.

You can see from the numbers above that some teams spend more wisely than others. While the Braves are no longer the annual leader in NL payroll they were during the ‘90s, they have parlayed their almost a billion dollars into a pretty decent trophy case. They made 10 straight playoff appearances since TLR took over the Cardinals and have won more NLDS games during that time (22) than any other NL team. The sorry news for the Braves, and their fans, is they have only won five of those ten NLDS series, have only won thirteen NLCS games in five tries while going 1-4 in LCS matchups and only won two measly World Series games for their billion dollars.

Don’t feel sorry for the Braves. The Mets have outspent the Braves and have a grand total of three playoff appearances, a single league championship, and the ignominy of being abused by the Yankees in their only World Series appearance. And then there is the Dodgers. What a pathetic mess, as their billion dollars has so far purchased them a single win (one game, not a series) in the NLDS.

The Cardinals are certainly a shining example next to those drunken sailors. While spending well over $100,000,000 less than the top three, the Birds have managed to win six of seven NLDS opportunities. Even though I am personally bitterly disappointed at the 2-4 record in the LCS, the fact remains that the Cardinals have won more LCS games than any NL team and are tied for the most World Series appearances with the Braves and Marlins.

I guess this is all mildly interesting stuff, but I am not really sure what it says about TLR. It says he has won a lot of regular season games. TLR’s 897 wins from 1996-2007 is second in the NL to the Braves (941) and fifth overall in MLB behind the Yankees (985), the Red Sox (916) and, ironically, the A’s (901). For what its worth, the A’s did it while spending $340M less than the Cardinals. In the 1996 LCS we lost to a Braves team that outspent us by 24%. The 2000 Mets outspent us by over 26% and the 2002 Giants outspent us by a mere $3.7M. When we beat Houston in 2004 we had a nearly $8M salary edge, but when we lost to them in 2005 we had a salary advantage of over $15M. However, we made up for it in 2006 by beating a Mets team with a $9M advantage and actually winning the World Series!

While the Cardinals have experienced a very nice run of success since 1996 it is very difficult to parcel out the credit for that success. I would start with the ownership that has been willing to outspend other cities that are in vastly larger markets than St. Louis. I am amazed that we have outspent Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco. Especially Houston and Philadelphia as they are both more than twice the size of St. Louis and don’t have another team in their market. Along the same vane you have to give some thanks to the ownership of the teams that have outspent us, particularly New York and Los Angeles, and have very little to show for it. All that being said, some credit must certainly be due Walt Jocketty and Tony LaRussa. While I don’t think either one of them is necessarily the best in baseball, they were an effective team that got quite a lot out of the ownership’s investment.

I think, just like in any sport, you have to give a lot of credit to the players. Management can obtain all the right guys, but if they can’t stay healthy and perform then the team can’t win. Just look at the last two years. For all the various contributions that have led to the success of the team, none has been better than the collection of opinions that led to the selection of Albert Pujols in the 13th round of the 1999 amateur draft. The Cardinals only averaged 83 wins and had one division championship in TLR’s reign before Albert made the team in 2001. Since then, they have averaged 92 wins, made the playoffs in six of eight seasons, made the LCS five times, and the World Series twice. Let’s get him some help for 2009!

There's no place like home (unless you play at Petco)

giveml — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:19:51 -0000

I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about how park factors influence player performance, but I am really curious about it. I have always wondered how player movement has affected player performance and obviously the degree of friendliness of the home park has something to do with that. I decided to see if I could figure out just how important it might be to look at home/road splits when evaluating a potential acquisition. There has been quite a bit (some would say too much) discussion about this issue on the board lately, so I thought I would dig up some data and see if it spoke to me.

The first decision was to figure out whose park factor ratings to use. I didn’t really make too much effort to identify the definitive dataset as I located one on mlb.com that seemed useful. It was sortable by a bunch of different statistics and included data for 2005-2007. Since a lot of the discussion here has been around getting an additional bat, I thought OPS would be as good a metric as any to use as a baseline.

So I sorted the data by OPS and took the top five hitters parks, the middle four (there just happened to be four with an OPS index of 100) and the five least hitter friendly parks. Then I went to each of the home teams associated with these parks and looked at their top five OPS guys as a sample. My ultimate interest was to see whether these boppers tend to hit well in their home parks or whether the park factors dominate.

Some of the rankings may be a little surprising as the top five hitters parks for OPS are, in order: 1) Coors Field (COL); 2) Chase Field (ARI); 3) Citizens Bank Park (PHI); 4) Great American Ball Park (CIN); and 5) Cellular Field (CWS). Wrigley Field and Kaufmann Stadium tied for sixth. I expected to see The Ball Park in Arlington (10th) and Camden Yards (11th) rated a little higher.

The results for the hitter friendly parks were mostly as expected, but a little bit mixed. I know my methodology is mostly suspect here, but it seems safe to say that Coors Field is still a great place to hit the baseball. The top five OPS guys for the Rox are currently enjoying a 21% higher OPS at home than on the road for 2008 and the four-year average, including 2008 data, is 20.3% higher. Every Rockies player evaluated had a significantly higher OPS at home each year with the lone exception of Brad Hawpe’s remarkable road OPS of .966 in 2006. The much discussed Matt Holiday has a 26.1% boost over the period which is the single highest differential of any of the 70 players studied.

Arizona was a little harder to analyze as they have a number of young players without a lot of track record in the home park. However, the effect seems to be a pretty strong one as the average boost for the study period was 17.3%. This data is somewhat skewed by Justin Upton’s 2008 delta of a .550 road OPS and a 1.001 home OPS. Another player coveted by many VEBsters, Orlando Hudson, received quite a favorable boost of 19.8%. So look out MO, the guy has never put up an OPS on the road better than .734.

Philadelphia was actually quite puzzling as I expected to see a huge advantage to the Phils here, but it doesn’t really look that way. While Ryan Howard is doing 15% better at home this year, his four-year average is only 6.7% better. During his MVP season in 2006 he actually put up a slightly better OPS (1.089!!) on the road. Chase Utley has done quite well in the home yard, especially in 2007, but has only gained an 8% advantage since 2005. Pat Burrell is the mystery man here as he actually is hitting a whopping 42.5% higher on the road with an OPS of 1.163 for the season away from home. However, he hit .221 higher at home last year, so go figure. Over the four-year period he is at -1.5%. Neither Shane Victorino nor Jimmy Rollins hits particularly well at home, so the Phils net advantage is a pretty insignificant 3.4%.

Cincinnati’s numbers bounce around quite a bit from year to year and none of their top five OPSers has an advantage of more than 6% and the team average is 4.7%. The Chicago White Sox are similarly uninteresting with pretty small deltas, but Jim Thome is doing much better on the road this season.

The four parks in the “neutral” category are: 1) Minute Maid Park (HOU); 2) Comerica Park (DET); 3) PNC Park (PIT); and 4) Turner Field (ATL). A little surprised here as I would have expected each of the NL parks in this group to be slight hitters’ parks. I don’t really follow the AL much, but I have a recollection that the fences were moved in at Comerica somewhat recently – don’t know if it was since 2005 or not.

This is the group that ought to give some hope to the folks who think good hitters will hit better at home. There is no park bias to interfere with the results, so let’s take a look at the data.

Carlos Lee and Miguel Tejada both love Minute Maid with home field advantages of 13.8% and 17.2% respectively. Not a surprise that RH power guys would do well there. The bad news for Tejada is he is only OPSing .676 on the road. For all the damage I have seen Lance Berkman do in Minute Maid, he seems to hit equally well on the road for a net advantage of 0.8%. The overall team advantage is 6.9% or about .050 points of OPS.

I am guessing the fences were moved in Comerica after the ’06 season as that was the year that all their boppers did much better on the road. Since then, Miguel Ordonez has been a monster at home with 1.129 and 1.038 OPSes the last two years. Cabrera is .089 points higher at home and Guillen is hitting over 22% better at home this year. I think this park has morphed from a pitchers’ park to a hitters’ park, even thought it shows neutral in the data.

PNC looks pretty neutral with three of the top five guys showing better road splits in 2008 and 2 out of five doing better on the road in 2007. Only Ryan Doumit’s huge home field advantage of 30.4% this year and 19.6% in 2007 keep the Buccos in positive territory with a slight 4.4% boost

The final neutral park is Atlanta’s Turner Field. The two longest standing members of the top-five club are Chipper Jones and Brian McCann. Chipper has actually hit better on the road in two of the last four years, but when he is hot at home he really gets it done. His 1.220 OPS at home this year and his 1.056 in 2005 make the home field a slight advantage for him. McCann is essentially even year to year. It will be interesting to see how the recently traded Mark Texeira fares for the Angels as he loved hitting in Turner Field. His .957 OPS at home was .113 higher than his road number. Overall, the boppers for Atlanta hit 5.7% better at home.

Now for the pitchers parks (lowest OPS first): 1) Petco Park (SDP); 2) Nationals Stadium (WSH); 3) Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (MIN); 4) McAfee Colliseum (OAK); and 5) Busch Stadium (STL). I think everyone is aware that Petco is by far the worst hitters’ park in the bigs – just ask Jimmy Edmonds. However, I was surprised by both the Metrodome and Busch being in the bottom five.

Our own Cardinals are the best evidence I can find to counter the argument that hitters can adjust to their home parks and overcome park factors. The top five in OPS on the Cardinals are Pujols, Ludwick, Ankiel, Glaus, and Schumaker. Every one of them hits better on the road – most of them significantly better. Albert managed to hit better at home during the first year of Busch III, but fell to a .886 OPS, or 23.8% below his road OPS, in 2007. He is better this year, but still puts up better numbers away from Busch. While both Ludwick and Ankiel put up nice numbers at Busch in limited action last year, it is a different story this time. Ankiel is .074 better on the road and Ludwick is .091 better. Glaus is getting better at home, but is still .106 better away from home. Skippy is .112 better, or 15.3%, on the road as well. Total for the group since opening of Busch III is -7.8%.

Just in case anyone out there is still reading, if you discount Matt Holliday’s road performance by 7.8% it is not pretty. His career OPS on the road is .792., so if you discount that by 7.8% he would have a projected home OPS of .730 and a total OPS of .761. If you use his career best OPS of .863 and discount it you get a .796 home OPS and a combined total of .832. Really not what I want to spend a bunch of prospects and $13.5 M on.

Oakland is another one that is hard to get a handle on because they churn their roster so much. One thing to consider for all you Mark Ellis fans: he has a 16.5% home park penalty to his OPS so he is probably a better hitter than we give him credit for. His road OPS this year is .867. Otherwise, the A’s (with very questionable data) seem to hit slightly better (2.3%) at home.

Joe Maurer must get a lot of turf hits, because he absolutely stars at the Humphrey Dome. His OPS at home this year is .244 higher and last year it was .204 higher. Justin Morneau would be much improved away from the HeftyDome as his career OPS is 10.3% lower at home and has been significantly lower three of the last four years.

I don’t have much to say about the Nationals as their stadium is new this year and they have a bunch of stiffs hitting there. However, the stiffs like to take it on the road as they hit 14.7% lower at home.

I feel sorry for Missouri native and recent 3rd round Padre pick Blake Tekotte. If he is fortunate enough to make it to the show I hope he gets traded first. Petco is brutal, just ask Adrian Gonzalez. He is carrying a 25.3% drag on his OPS at home. This guy has put up a .900+ OPS on the road each of the past three seasons, but he gets no love. Ditto for Brian Giles who has a 17.6% millstone around his neck as well. If you take Gonzalez’ .935 OPS average on the road for the last three years and give it the Matt Holliday 26.1% boost that calculates to nearly a 1.200 OPS at Coors field. Now, obviously some of Gonzalez’ road games are at Coors already, but you get the idea. As a group the top five OPS guys are down 10.5% in the history of the park even though Scott Hairston has managed a .906 OPS at home this year.

So, what does all this crap actually mean? Probably nothing if you are into rigorous statistical analysis, but it tells me that the comforts of home are probably worth a little lift to the numbers, but probably not a significant amount. Maybe around 5% or so.

What to do when the best RH hitter of our generation returns to the lineup?

giveml — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:21:49 -0000

I am not sure if El Hombre is eligible to return to the lineup on 6/25 or 6/26, but his activation will bring some interesting decisions along with it. First, if he is activated on schedule there will be either three or four DH games left, so the roster mix will probably stay at 13 pitchers. The easy move would be just to send down the current occupant of the Reyes/Thompson/Parisi spot, but that is unlikely unless the pitching staff really performs well on the trip. More likely is that Boston and Detroit will beat the staff up pretty good and we will need all the bodies, especially if the Colonel (who clearly should have been disabled) is unavailable.

If no pitchers are sent out or disabled when EH returns then a position player would have to be taken off the active roster. Barring a dramatic change in performance, the sensible choice is to send Chris Duncan back to Memphis in hopes that he will eventually get his stroke figured out. However, since it really made no sense that Duncan was brought up when EH got hurt, it is unlikely the sensible move will be made. So far, Duncan has hit .161/.188/.161/.349 (yes, that’s a .349 OPS) since his return from Memphis. Only 32 PAs, but pretty evident he needs to continue to play everyday in hope of finding something. I wish I had some inkling that there was some sort of physical problem, ‘cause his continuing struggles are making me lose hope that he will turn around. SleepyCA, I know you are optimistic on Duncan, give me some reason to be.

If the sensible move isn’t taken and Duncan (plus 13 pitchers) stay on the roster then there only seem to be four options, starting with my favorite:

DFA Kennedy and go with three MIs, then give Barden a shot when we go back to playing real baseball again.
Make some sort of trade that creates an everyday starter at one of the MI positions or in LF
Ship Barton back to Cleveland
DL someone (Barton, maybe?)

I think the action taken will show us a little bit about who is really making the decisions on this team. It is looking more like TLR is in charge, but maybe Mo will surprise me and insist Duncan return to Memphis.

If Duncan stays it is pretty safe his tour of duty at 1B is over, so how much does he play and at whose expense? Does Ank the Crank become less than a regular? Does Lud the Stud get the platoon treatment again? Does Skip and his .949 OPS over the last 28 days lose some ABs? Do we go with small sample size “matchups” to determine playing time?

Come on, MO, show me you have an option I haven’t considered!

So where do you find the best hitters?

giveml — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:51:08 -0000

I have decided to switch gears prior to draft day and attempt to analyze where the best hitters come from. To that end, my methodology is pretty similar to how I analyzed the sourcing of the best pitchers. I have gone back to baseball-reference.com and looked at their career active leaders in OPS. I did a quick sanity check with adjusted OPS+ and the numbers were very similar so I stuck with OPS.

To start with, I compiled a list of all active major leaguers with at least 3000 PAs and a career OPS over .850. There are 37 players who meet these criteria and most of them are the ones you would expect to see. Given that there are probably about seven true regulars on each team, for a total of 210 players, this list represents about the top 15%. I should note that I have included Barry Bonds, Mike Piazza, and Sammy Sosa as B-R still has them active on their list.

The general breakdown is as follows:

High school draft picks 16 43.2%

College draft picks 12 32.4%

Amateur fee aents 8 21.6%

Junior College draft pick 1 2.7%

What really jumps out more than the source of these players is their draft position. Nine of the twelve college picks were taken in the first round, with one other player taken in the second round. Of the nine taken in the first round, seven were taken in the top ten picks and the latest one was at number 16. Five of the top seven career OPS players were college picks with four of them having been taken in the first round. The only exceptions in the top seven were Albert Pujols (at number 2 with a sweet 1.045 career number) and Manny Ramirez. Six of the top seven high school picks were also first rounders. Of the ten active drafted players with career OPS over .950, eight were number one draft picks. Fifteen of the twenty-eight (53.6%) players on the list who were actually drafted were taken in the first round and all fifteen were taken in the top 16 picks.

There has been a lot of casual talk on the board about not picking players who can only play first base because Albert is going to be at that spot for a very long time. I love Albert, and I hope he finishes the career with the Cardinals, but we need to be looking at first basemen anyway. 8 of the top 13 on the list are first basemen, with the lowest one having an OPS of .928. If a guy can rake like that we can find a place for him or trade him for quality.

I didn’t want to overlook the table setters, so I cross-compared the OPS leaders with the OBP leaders. There was not a whole lot of difference as only six players made the OBP list that were not on the OPS list. They were: Derek Jeter, Ichiro Suzuki, Jason Kendall, Kenny Lofton, Luis Castillo, and Luis Gonzalez. They don’t really affect the sourcing numbers as they were divided evenly between college pick, high school pick, and amateur free agent.

I also did a top five OPS list for each defensive position with the average for the top five listed next to the position designation. I have included ARod as a shortstop and tried to include players based on where they have played the most games. I also included six second basemen as Hudson and Giles are nearly even and I am not sure whether Giles is really active or not:

First Base 0.997

Pujols 1.045

Helton 1.008

Berkman 0.983

Thomas 0.979

Thome 0.968

Left Field 0.941

Bonds 1.051

Ramirez 0.999

Dunn 0.902

Alou 0.885

Klesko 0.870

Right Field 0.919

Guerrero 0.963

Giles 0.918

Sheffield 0.915

Abreu 0.906

Ordonez 0.894

Third Base 0.888

Jones 0.955

Cabrera 0.922

Rolen 0.878

Glaus 0.855

Chavez 0.832

Shortstop 0.866

Rodriguez 0.966

Garciaparra 0.889

Jeter 0.847

Tejada 0.820

Guillen 0.809

Center Field 0.864

Griffey 0.923

Edmonds 0.903

Beltran 0.849

Jones 0.833

Rowand 0.815

Catcher 0.836

Piazza 0.922

Posada 0.859

Rodriguez 0.816

Varitek 0.798

Lieberthal 0.783

Second Base 0.800

Kent 0.858

Vidro 0.810

Durham 0.786

Walker 0.783

Giles 0.782

Hudson 0.781

As a final note, the Cardinals have drafted two of the 37 players listed – El Hombre and J.D. Drew. The Astros have the most players with 4 and the Indians, Mariners, and Yankees each signed three. Conspicous in their absence are the Cubbies, Giants, and Mets.

I would be interested in your conclusions here. It seems to be that hitters are easier to project than pitchers with a slight advantage to high school players. However, three of the top four high school players were the first overall draft pick, so obvious talents like Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey, and Chipper Jones probably skew the numbers a bit.

The 13th pick in the draft

giveml — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:55:43 -0000

The Cardinals have the 13th overall pick in the MLB draft and have stated they are leaning in the direction of drafting a college pitcher. Mildly surprising, given the pretty sorry organizational track record of drafting college pitchers in round 1, but given the overall improvement in the last few drafts I am on board with whatever the team wants to do. Just get us a good pitcher who maybe can be a top half of the rotation starter and maybe throws left-handed.

My interest isn’t so much in speculating on who they should take as it is on what strategies seem to offer the best payback. A very small number of you may recall the discussion last December that tried to analyze where the very best pitchers come from. I took a look at all active MLB starting pitchers with at least 1000 IPs and an ERA+ of greater than 110. It turns out that 55% of those pitchers were drafted out of high school, while only 24% were drafted out of college. The remaining 21% were amateur free agents from various foreign countries. If you want to revisit the post here is the (ugly) link: http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2007/12/11/13108/090#1380152

It seems like if you are going to draft a pitcher in the first round your goal should be to find one who will be a superior starting pitcher or a dominating closer a la Chris Perez (college pitcher taken in the supplemental round). My previous study, by virtue of the fact that I was looking for guys with long track records of success, seems a bit dated so I decided to review this topic from a different angle.

I have endeavored to get a view of the success of college draftees vs. high schoolers with an eye toward younger pitchers. So I decided to look at pitchers who should be 22-26 years old and compare their success rates based on whether they went into pro ball out of high school or after the college experience. I haven’t made an effort to verify the ages of the pitchers in question, but have tracked the high school graduating classes of 2000-2004 (more or less). My assumption is that 1st round picks from college are generally three years removed from high school. To that end I have identified all the college pitchers drafted in the top 30 picks in the 2003-2007 drafts and the high schoolers selected and signed from the 2000-2004 drafts. This allows us to compare essentially the same “crop” of players.

I have tried to rate the two populations based on current competitive level. I have totally arbitrarily assigned a point value of:

0 no longer in professional baseball

1 A ball

2 Advanced A ball

3 AA ball

4 AAA ball

5 MLB

If a prospect has reached the big leagues, then I have further rated the draft class by the number of MLB wins it has accumulated.

Of the kids that graduated HS in 2004, only one pitcher has reached the big leagues (Phillip Hughes) and he has yet to win a game. There were nine college pitchers taken in the 2007 draft and 7 HS pitchers taken in the 2004 draft. The college guys have an average level of 2.22, or slightly above Advanced A ball, while the HS guys have a rating of 3.14 or slightly above AA ball. The best college prospects are probably David Price of Vanderbilt who has yet to throw a professional inning and either Casey Weathers or Donald Simmons who are both doing well at AA. The best HS prospects are probably the aforementioned Phillip Hughes and Cincinnati’s Homer Bailey. Seneca, MOs Scott Elbert would probably get a mention here if not for shoulder surgery.

The 2003 high school graduates are far more heavily represented in the college selections from the 2006 draft (12) than the high schoolers who signed in 2003 (3). The rating system yields a 3.75 total, nearly AAA, for the college kids and a 3.00 for the HS kids. This is somewhat deceiving as 2 of the 3 HSers drafted, John Danks and Chad Billingsley, have already made it to the big leagues while the other draftee is Jeff Allison. Allison is trying to make a comeback from drug addiction and become the mound version of Josh Hamilton. He is currently in the Marlins system in the Florida State League. Five of the 12 college draftees have made it to MLB and they are Tim Lincecum, Max Scherzer, Andrew Miller, Luke Hochevar, and Ian Kennedy. Interestingly enough, Danks and Billingsley have won more combined MLB games with 32 compared to the college guys 26.

The 2002 class is very interesting and makes a strong case for drafting the HS pitcher. The seven kids taken from this class have already amassed 117 MLB victories for a grand total of 18 victories for the nine college pitchers taken in 2005. The average rating for the college kids is 3.67. Despite the fact that Chris Gruler (#3 overall) is out of baseball after a series of shoulder problems, the HS class is still rated higher at 3.86. I would be happy with a rotation of the five high schoolers who have made it to the bigs already: Zack Greinke, Scott Kazmir, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, and Adam Loewen. The stars of the college class are Matt Garza and Mike Pelfrey.

The 2001 high school seniors are heavily represented as 8 of them signed out of high school and another 14 signed three years later as college pitchers. The ratings are pretty equal with the HS kids having a slight edge at 3.38 vs. 3.29 for the college guys. The HSers were really hurt by Colt Griffin, the first documented 100 mph HS pitcher, having retired from pro ball in 2006. MLB wins were also pretty equal with 75 for the college draftees and 71 for HS. Best college pitcher would be Jered Weaver and the best HS pitcher would be Jeremy Bonderman.

The 2000 class was pretty much of a bust with four college pitchers and three high school pitchers already out of baseball. This class has the lowest overall rating of 2.42 for the college guys and 2.63 for the HS kids. The college kids have the edge in MLB wins with 50 and Chad Cordero has saved 128 MLB games. Best college pitchers were Cordero and David Aardsma. Best HS pitchers were Boof Bonser and some guy named Adam Wainwright.

Summary

HS Yr	#Signed	% MLB	%MLB	Rating	MLB Wins
2000	8	2	25%	2.63	37
2001	8	2	25%	3.38	71
2002	7	5	71%	3.86	117
2003	3	2	67%	3	32
2004	7	1	14%	3.14	0
	33	12	36%	3.202	257

Coll Yr
2003	7	3	43%	2.42	50
2004	14	3	21%	3.29	75
2005	9	2	22%	3.67	18
2006	12	5	42%	3.75	32
2007	9	0	0%	2.22	0
	51	13	25%	3.07	175

Top Five College Picks

1. Tim Lincecum

2. Justin Verlander

3. Jered Weaver

4. Matt Garza

5. Chad Cordero

Honorable Mention

1. Max Scherzer

2. Ian Kennedy

3. Luke Hochevar

Top Five HS Picks

1. Scott Kazmir

2. Cole Hammels

3. Zach Greinke

4. Adam Wainwright

5. Chad Billingsley

Honorable Mention

1. Jeremy Bonderman

2. Matt Cain

3. Boof Bonser

I know this is all pretty small sample size and luck plays a pretty big part in the success of drafting young pitchers whether they be college or high school. I would be pretty careful about drawing too many conclusions here, but there is one that is pretty safe. Combined with the earlier study of veteran pitchers, it seems clear that the notion that HS pitchers are more risky than college pitchers is completely unfounded. The HS pitchers in this sample were more likely to reach the major leagues (36% v. 25%), progressed slightly further through the system (3.2 v. 3.1), and have already won 82 more MLB games than the college pitchers in spite of the fact that there were 51 college pitchers taken in the study period as opposed to only 33 high school pitchers.

As a final note, these data do not include the fact that Clayton Kershaw is already pitching for the Dodgers, while his high school classmates who went on to college won’t be draft eligible until June ’09.

Is a pitcher who gets poor run support unlucky?

giveml — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:46:03 -0000

I don’t really know if anyone much cares about this topic, but it is one that I have felt an important one for many years. Why is it that some guys always seem to be “tough luck” losers in tight games and some guys seem to be the “lucky” beneficiaries of scoring largesse? I am certain that luck actually does have some role in the phenomenon, much in the same way Mike Shannon always says Bob Gibson was the luckiest pitcher he ever saw. After all, Gibson always had the good fortune to pitch on the days the other team didn’t score many runs. Seriously, there is some luck in who the pitcher pitches against, how hot an opposing team is at a given point in time, how hot his team might be and so on.

Nevertheless, I have always held the completely unsubstantiated belief that pitchers who held the opponent down early in the game were more likely to get the opportunity to pitch with a big lead. In general, a pitcher with a lead can be a more confident and aggressive pitcher who should generally perform more effectively. Conversely, a lineup that is always playing catch up has to battle a more aggressive and confident opposing pitcher.

So, I decided to do another one of my not particularly scientific, sort of small sample size, analyses in the hope of learning a little something and stimulating some discussion. All I did was look at the 2007 starting rotation, specifically Wainer, Looper, Wells, and Reyes to determine in which part of the game they surrendered the most runs. Then I looked to see if I could find any correlation with run support. I thought about including WonderBrad as well, but less than half his appearances were starts and I couldn’t find a way (or at least one not too time consuming) to separate out his data.

I looked at each inning, but the primary determinant I used was how many runs were allowed in the first three innings versus how many runs were allowed in innings four through six. I must admit that I am using total runs allowed, as the fine statistics at baseball-reference.com only give total runs allowed in the inning-by-inning splits. What I came up with was pleasing to me as it fit my pre-conceived notions nicely. It remains to be seen whether that means much, but I will leave it up to the community to argue that point.

Here is the data:

Pitcher Run Support Runs 1-3 Runs 4-6

Wainer 4.92 3.66 4.17

Looper 4.79 4.60 4.73

Wells 3.55 5.01 7.09

Reyes 3.32 7.79 4.60

Let me explains the runs numbers above. I took the total number of runs allowed in each inning, divided by the number of times that particular pitcher pitched in that inning, and then multiplied the quotient by 9. The intent is to give it the look and feel of an ERA for familiarity’s sake, but it counts all runs allowed and doesn’t take into account partial innings as that data was not available to me.

It looks like a pretty clear conclusion for this dataset was that there was a strong inverse correlation between runs allowed in innings 1-3 and run support. I can’t really explain the big delta in run support between Looper and Wells as their numbers are pretty similar. In fact if you look at Wells numbers through the fourth inning, they are nearly identical to Looper’s. It might have something to do with Wells runs allowed number in the fifth of 11.88 (the single worst inning of all starters). Like I said this post is designed to promote discussion, so please feel free to chime in if you have an informed opinion.

Interestingly enough, Reyes got a big fat zero for run support in six of his 20 starts (30%) and Wells got a goose egg in four of 26 (16.67%). Wainer got at least one run to work with in every one of his 32 starts and Looper was only shutout in one of 30.

A final tidbit from looking at this years numbers: the starters are getting over half a run better support (4.85 v 4.26) and have much, much better numbers over the first three innings. The 2007 squad had a runs allowed average of 5.01 over the first three innings (or 1.67 per game) while the 2008 squad has allowed an average of 3.50 runs over the first three inning (or 1.17 per game). The difference is particularly pronounced in the first two innings with the 2007 staff averaging 1.14 runs per game and the 2008 staff at an impeccable .56.