Archive for the 'Power Users' Category

Note: What follows is the complete text of an email sent to us by B-R reader David Matchett, so all credit for this research goes to him. Enjoy!

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I was on a flight this weekend and watched The Town with Ben Affleck. When Ben and Jeremy Renner were scouting Fenway Park for their big heist they were in the upper deck in right field and there was a game going on while they talked. The scene cut to the game and a play was shown. I remembered your Ferris Bueller post from a few weeks ago and it got me thinking about the game that was being played in this movie.

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Our apologies for the long delay since the last time we did this... Since September, 29 new linker users have begun participating in our newsfeed program, bringing the grand total of users up to 83. Let's give them a warm welcome:

• The Sporting Hippeaux
• Raise the Jolly Roger
• Reds Fan Central
• Pittsburgh Lumber Co
• Splashing Pumpkins
• Above the Shoulders
• Philly Phanatics
• The Rally Cap
• The Biz of Baseball
• The Process Report
• The Writer's Journey
• The Golden Sombrero
• Blog Red Machine
• COSFBA
• Cubs Billy Goat Blog
• Baseball Reality Tour
• Nationals Daily News
• The "Mc" Effect
• The Friarhood
• A Diehard Cubs Fan Speaks Out
• GoldenGateBias
• The Perpetual Post
• The Juglandaceous Porthole
• Mets360.com
• PAAPFLY
• Chicago Sports Memories
• PhillyBaseballNews.com
• Subjective Baseball
• SocraticGadfly

Here's how your site can be added to our player newsfeeds. Our linker tool supports most common blogging and bulletin board software. Write your post and then one-click later links to the players' baseball reference pages will be added.

Patrick Flood's Mets Blog - Exile on 126th Street: WAR problems and the Mets Crazy Horse. / Part 2: the Pitchers

If you are a serious stathead and are curious about the differences between our WAR numbers as produced by Sean Smith and those on Fangraphs.com check out this two part (very extensive) set of posts by Patrick Flood. Very worth your while if you are into this sort of thing and written in an entertaining way as well.

We are continuing to weave our Wins Above Replacement data throughout the site. Today, we started updating Pitcher WAR on a daily basis. Yes, Ubaldo Jimenez has been pretty good this year.

In order to keep up with the league leaders in WAR, we now show each league's top five on the front page every day just below the league standings. All of the Play Index tools are likewise updated daily.

How we compute Pitcher WAR

Pitcher WAR considers how many runs a pitcher allowed and then compares that to the number a replacement pitcher would allow.

To compute the amount from the replacement pitcher, we begin with the average runs allowed by pitchers facing the same set of teams for the same number of innings as the pitcher in question. We then adjust that number by the defense's runs saved for our pitcher (using Total Zone) per ball in play and our pitcher's team's park factor.

So now we have runs allowed by an average pitcher with our pitcher's opponents, defense, and park. We then multiply this by 1.22 or 1.18 (for the AL and NL respectively) to get replacement level for the AL and NL. This gives us Replacement runs, RR.

The replacement level for starters and relievers is different so we then decrease RR by 12.5% times the percent of relief innings thrown. The replacement level reliever has a much lower ERA than the replacement level starter.

We now get the pitcher's runs above replacement (RAR) as actual runs allowed - adjusted RR.

Next, we adjust for leverage and bullpen chaining by multiplying the RAR by (average leverage + 1)/2.

Finally, we adjust this into wins above replacement by dividing by a context-adjusted runs/win value (which is typically around 10).

Phew.

This post is the seventh in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Sabermetricians have always been on the search for the best way to measure wins contributed by players. Baseball Prospectus has WARP, Bill James has win shares and now we are presenting Sean Smith's Wins Above Replacement or WAR data on the site.

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This is the sixth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.
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Automatic Player Linker / Statistical Sharing / Add your Blog/Site to our Newsfeeds

It has been a few weeks since the season started and I've found the time to return to our 10 for 10 anniversary celebration. We've added Newsfeeds to our active player pages. We've also added a linking tool that makes it very straightforward for you to add links to a player's Baseball Reference page from your blog posts or news stories.
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This is the fourth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

The first place I saw Win Expectancy (WE) was when I was writing for the Big Baseball Annual back in the late 1990's. Doug Drinen, who has since moved on to become one of the leading NFL analysts and creator of Pro-Football-Reference.com, wrote a series of articles on reliever usage that built on the original Mills Brothers work on Win Expectancy (WE). Doug even included a WS Game WE Graph in one of the books. I always have thought it was an elegant measurement of what happened during the game and I'm excited to now have it on the site.
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Pete Palmer is the godfather of baseball statistics. His old Total Baseball database (via the Baseball Archive) long formed the backbone of our site. We are now very honored to have his latest and greatest database on the site. The Batting, Pitching and Fielding stats now follow Palmer's data. The changes are subtle (a strikeout or two here, some RBI's there), but we believe the Palmer/Gillette database represents the most accurate view of baseball's history which we are always striving to present.

The site's birth and death data which was woefully (and embarassingly) out of date has now been synced (and will continue to be) with the SABR Biographical Committee Database which is the gold standard for biographical information for ballplayers. In addition, we have now added information on the player's burial following their death. This can be found on the player pages and in the bio directory.

One last update, we've added a number of tweaks and improvements to the minor league data as well. We now show appearances on Baseball America's top 100 list on player and affiliate pages.

With an update this massive it is very hard to check every possible contingency, so please let us know if you come across something that doesn't quite add up.

These are the first in a long line of changes and improvements coming down the pike. As always, thank you for supporting the site.

Sometimes PI can be more fun when used in conjunction with other basic programs. Here is a fun stat that I found by comparing the results of a game finder search and a season finder search. I simply converted the searches into CSV format, pasted them into Excel, and had the program compare the lists.

Most Strikeouts in a Season Without a Double-Digit Strikeout Game 1954-2009 (Rk is rank in seasonal strikeouts since '54)