There are two types of statistics that we can generate: those that are good at telling a story and those that are good at making predictions. There are some statistics that originated with sabermetrics that have started making their way into the mainstream--OPS is the most popular--but there is only so much room for sabermetric statistics in the vernacular. The reason is that the true goal of sabermetric analysis has been to move away from the existing paradigm --what happened in a game--to a new paradigm--what might have happened in a fantasy world.

Our stats don't work well for stories for three reasons:

1. Statistically improbable outcomes that actually happen are just as important to the emotional experience of the game.

2. Old, crappy statistical approaches work just as well to tell us that Roy Halladay is a fantastic pitcher.

3. The power of our statistical approaches is in discerning marginal differences between marginal players.

Continue reading this post »

Okay, so that's never going to happen. Still, I was talking about Delgado's woes the other day and wondered a few things, had a few ideas. Delgado's basically a pull hitter who's getting old. My thoughts were basically this:

In order for pull hitting to work, you have to guess early and meet the ball over the plate, swinging through it. This essentially requires the ability to apply a lot of bat speed over a very short time, which in turn requires a lot of physical strength. As players age, their strength ebbs, and their ability to get their bat through the zone quickly declines--Delgado can't catch up to the fastball anymore.

One problem with this is that in order to catch up, he has to guess earlier, which leads to poorer guesses and more strikeouts or foul balls. The other problem is that even when he does guess right, he's just not as strong as he used to be, and so the ball just isn't going to go as far.

There's nothing he can really do about the strength--maybe work out, but even then, strength just declines with age. One thing he can do, though, is wait slightly longer on pitches.

Doing so will mean he gets less power on the ball when he makes good contact, but that he'll make good contact more often, and so more efficiently transfer power to the ball more often. He'd morph into more of a singles-doubles-and walks hitter, and so clog up the bases, but he'd be able to beat the shift more often and get on base more frequently.

Questions:

Is this totally obvious? My guess is yes, but it felt original when it occurred to me.

Do pull hitters tend to have steeper drop-offs than other players?

Does anyone know of other pull hitters that have transformed their approach as they aged?

I'm sure most Amazin' Avenue fans already read Matt Cerrone's Metsblog pretty regularly, but there's a really good post covering several interviews with Nelson Figueroa, who makes his Mets starting debut tonight.

He sounds like the kind of guy you definitely want to root for.

Highlights:

-Figueroa's a huge Mets fan and has been for a long time.

-He likes to pitch deep into games.

-He name-drops Gregg Jefferies.

-Check the comments below the post for more quotes.

More here: http://www.metsblog.com/2008/04/11/berg-qa-with-figueroa-the-mets-fan/