Over 1000 comments on the other thread and I can't scroll down without that stupid spinny thing showing up on my monitor.  It's not even 3:30.  You guys are disgusting. 

More photos » by Morry Gash - AP

MVP!

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Wandy.  Despite being fruity and somewhat hilarious when uttered (especially if say it like "w-and-y" , that name has brought much anger and exclamations of, "f'ing gdm!" to game threads around VEB.  The primary reason for that is how much he has dominated Albert Pujols over his career.  Using the invaluable Baseball Reference, we can see that Pujols is just 5 for 31 against Wandy, with 2 doubles, 6 walks and a .523 OPS.  Interestingly enough, he's only struck out once.  

Fortunately, a large portion of Pujols' plate appearances vs. Wandy have come in the past 3 years.  That means we get a chance to explore the matchup more in depth using Pitch f/x data.  Overall, there were 96 pitches with full pitch f/x information on them, which isn't much, but probably enough to see some interesting results.  

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So the NL Cy Young award recipient was announced the other day, and surprisingly, it didn't go to the guy with the most wins, or the best ERA for that matter.  Instead, it went to Tim Lincecum, who lead the league in FanGraphs WAR by a pretty big margin. 

Naturally, given the two candidates that he narrowly beat, this sparked a lot of debate about whether or not FanGraphs' WAR was the best way to go.  From what I gathered, a lot of people thought that timing should be taken into account, and in the case of Carpenter, "pitching to your defense".  There were even some rogue mentions of wins and pitching to the score.  

Unfortunately, I don't know the right stat to figure out the Cy Young award winner.  That's because each person has a different interpretation of what it means to be the Cy Young.  What I can do is lay out all of the major stats so that you  can make the most informed decision about how you want the Cy Young to be decided.

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The CHONE projection system, created by Sean Smith of THT, FanGraphs and Anaheim Angels all the Way, we're recently released to the public.  They are generally considered the best system out there, and has been the most accurate since 2005 in terms of projection team performance. 

You can go to his website Baseball Projection, to view the projections for each player (it's organized by team):

http://www.baseballprojection.com/

Here is the link for the Cardinals projections.  The key number to look at is R/150, which is how many runs above average each player projects to be per 150 games. 

Pujols looks amazing of course, and Ludwick's is not bad either.  Allen Craig actually projects to be the third best hitter, but he's right about average along with Rasmus, Freese, Mather, Skip and Yadi. 

You can also view a list of all of the free agents here.  Matt Holliday projects to be the best hitter, at +27 runs, which isn't surprising, with Jason Bay right behind him.  Mike Cameron projects to be surprisingly low, at -4 runs.  Johnny Damon actually projects pretty well though.  

This will be the first official Hot Stove Post for 2010, and at the risk of sounding authoritative, it would nice if you guys put all your offseason thoughts in this post, so we don't have like 10 different FanPosts about the same thing.  I will update this thread once the pitcher and defensive projections are released.

H/T, the fantastic Tommy Bennent.

More photos » by Mark J. Terrill - AP

Mark Loretta? REALLY?!?!?!?!!!!!

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This year Ryan Franklin was an enigma.  Thanks to a nifty .269 BABIP (compared to a league average of .300) and an 85.7 strand rate (compared to a league average of 70%), his production was far better than you would expect based off of his peripheral statistics.  His ERA was excellent at 1.92; however, his FIP was a good, not great, 3.31.  And due to a super low HR/FB ratio, his xFIP was even higher, at 4.23.  Simply put, his career year wasn't so great when you adjust for luck.

What makes that worse is that he seemingly fell apart down the stretch.  His low BB rate rose, his low K rate plummeted and his low BABIP got a little bit less low.  During that time, he had regressed the pitcher he once was.  His command was worse, his stuff was not biting as much as it usually did and his goatee had finally completely taken over his face.  Obviously, that's what happened... or was it? 

I have a theory that Franklin actually didn't pitch much differently than he usually did, it's just his luck and timing were different.  I'll be honest, this is part of a larger study I'm working on, so I'm using you guys as guinea pigs, but I'll think you'll enjoy it nonetheless

What I did was take all of Franklin's appearances this year (65 including post season and all star game), and sort by wOBA allowed.  I took the 15 worst outings and the 15 best outings from him all year, at least as measured by wOBA, and pulled the aggregate PItch f/x data for each group.  I then took the two groups and looked at several attributes of the pitches, to see if I could spot any differences.  For fun, when I show you the graphs and data, I won't label them, so you could try to figure out which is which.

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More photos » by Morry Gash - AP

Brendan Ryan: the 2009 Cardinals honorary hacker of the year.

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I just saw "Men who Stare at Goats" last night.  Weirdest movie ever.  I laughed my ass off throughout the thing, but damned if I knew what it was actually about.  Accordingly, I got home late last night, so I don't have time for a full post, but I have a couple of things that I wanted to link to that I thought you'd all enjoy.

We'll start off with a very cool modification of WAR from Alex Krolewski at Beyond the Boxscore, called PZR Win Values.  Before you read that, let me give you a brief history of what WAR actually is.  The AR part of WAR stands for Above Replacement, and generally represents some minor league scrub who each team has.  Think guys like Brad Thompson or Blake Hawksworth.  You would expect such a player to put up an ERA of over 5 if he was in the rotation.

The W part stands for Wins, and it represents how much production over that replacement level player you can expect from a given player.  Wins are calculated mathematically (you can read the 
gory math details here), and are devoid of context (pitching to the score doesn't get you any cookie points).  They can be calculated using a plehtora of run estimators:

ERA... you should probably know this one.

FIP... attempts to take out some of the aspects of ERA that are much less under a pitchers control, such as defense and timing.  It relies on home runs, walks and strikeouts to rate pitchers.  Despite it's simplicity, or maybe because of it, it is the most used defense independent pitching stat out there.  Kincaid, over at 3-D Baseball recently wrote a two part series further explaining how it works, that I encourage you all to read.

tRA... is like FIP on crack, in a good way.  It includes the basic elements of FIP, but also adds a pitchers batted ball numbers to give them more credit for inducing weaker contact.

There are others, but those are the main three.  You can see problems with each of them however.  ERA is too reliant on things that are mainly out of a pitchers control, like defense, and thus doesn't measure pitcher skill very well.  FIP and tRA eliminate defense, but also timing, which can be a problem.  A pitcher who gives up a walk then a home run, is just as valuable by these estimates as a pitcher who gives up a home run followed by a walk.

Enter PZR.  PZR is a modification of of UZR, which is a stat developed by Mitchel Lichtman, a former consultant to the St. Louis Cardinals, to credit fielders with their defensive contributions on balls in play.  UZR takes many, many parameters into account including how hard the ball is hit, the batted ball tendencies of the pitcher on the mound, the location of each batted ball and many others.  You can read more about it here and here.  

Anyway, PZR takes UZR inputs and applies them to pitchers instead.  So instead of measuring feilding prowess, it measures how hard to field each pitches balls in play are.  Once you get those numbers, you can adjust each pitchers ERA accordingly.  That makes an adjustment for defense, while not taking out the timing aspect of pitching.  If you use PZR modified ERA to calculate WAR, you get some very interesting results, as Alex demonstrated in the link above.

If anyone has any questions about PZR or WAR, speak up, and I'm sure we'll be able to help.

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