Archive for the 'Stats' Category

2002 Oakland Athletics Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

If you look above the team batting stats you will now see a graphical summary of the team's season.  The height of the bar is equal to the margin of victory (up to ten runs).  Losses are in red and wins are in green.

I've grouped the games by month.  Double-headers are slightly narrowed since they occurred on the same day.  Off days are included as blanks, and if you mouse over the bar you will see a summary of the game as shown below. Clicking on the bar will take you to the box score.

Mouseover a bar to show the game's details

Currently this is updated back through 1985, but we'll have every team updated within an hour or so.

Regarding Albert Pujols' brutal season-opening performance vs. San Diego on Thursday, Greg Simons of The Hardball Times semi-facetiously wondered whether Pujols had the worst Opening Day performance ever.

The answer? No -- but it was close:

Of course, I don't have to remind you that this basically says nothing about Albert going forward -- Pujols will likely go on to have another MVP-type season, and this bad game will be forgotten within a week.

August 2, 1919 Philadelphia Phillies at Chicago Cubs Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com.

Thanks to the phenomenal work of RetroSheet, we now have 1919 box scores, gamelogs and splits on the site.  The play index has also been updated with 1919 data where appropriate.

In addition, a couple dozen previously undiscovered play-by-play accounts have been added for more recent  seasons and numerous bugs have been fixed both in our scripts and in the retrosheet data.

Please let us know if you come across any bugs or things that need to be fixed.

Over at The Book Blog, Tangotiger offers another friendly reminder about the required reading out there regarding the dreaded Bases Fallacy. Although it can happen to the best of us (one of my most embarrassing moments to be sure), once you know about the bases fallacy, you must do everything in your power to prevent the bases fallacy from happening again.

B-R reader Don recently asked about the most expensive starters per inning pitched (apropos of the Yankees' infamous Carl Pavano contract). Since the average MLB team payroll was approximately even from 2008-2010 (see below), I can calculate dollars per inning for those years using just raw salaries.

I considered a pitcher a "starter" if more than half of his games pitched were starts. Here were the most expensive starting pitchers per inning from 2008-2010:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here's a question from Ehud:

"Jose Bautista was the AL home run king in 2010, while the second-place HR leader (Paul Konerko) had 15 homers less. Is that the biggest difference in history of HR kings?"

Not quite. While the 15-HR gap between Bautista and Konerko is impressive, it actually pales in comparison to some of the leads Babe Ruth had in his HR races.

In 1920, the same year he famously had 4 more HR by himself than any other AL team, Ruth also placed a 35-HR gap between himself and runner-up George Sisler. And the following year, Ruth repeated that feat, hitting 35 more HR than Ken Williams. All told, Ruth owns 5 of the 6 biggest differences between a league HR leader and the runner-up. Here's the full list of biggest disparities between #1 and #2:

Read the rest of this entry »

Good read here from The Browser:

Interview: Andrew Gelman on Statistics

Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He mentions Bill James' Abstracts early on as one of his influences when he was growing up, and then goes on to talk about four other books that also deal with uncertainty, variance, and finding patterns in data.

When discussing these matters, most people point to Mark Twain's famous "lies, damned lies and statistics" quote (which, incidentally, may have actually been coined by Benjamin Disraeli or Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke), but Gelman has another great Twain quote in mind: "It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know." Statistics happen to be a great way learn about "what you don’t know you don’t know."

(Special hat tip to Chase Stuart of the PFR Blog for the link.)

During the 2010 season, starting pitchers took the mound 4860 times with varying degrees of success. Some were astounding and some were confounding. Some were unique and some unremarkable. Taken as whole, the starts of 2010 present us with an interesting and fun look at the season that was. They present us with an idea of what it took to win consistently as as big-league starter in 2010.

As I did last season, I am presenting each combination of innings pitched and runs allowed by starting pitchers in 2010. All this information was gathered simply by using the pitching game finder and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I have also added 2 new columns.  TRA refers to the average runs allowed by a team when their starter recorded that many innings and runs.  AGS is the average game score for those starts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Consider this a retro-bloop, since I didn't catch it the first time around, but here's a great piece at ESPN about the most valuable World Series HRs of all time by "series WPA".

What's series WPA, you ask? It's basically like regular WPA, except it also take into account the probability of winning the series (using a process similar to this). In essence, these home runs are the blasts that most swung the probability of winning the entire World Series, rather than just changing the probability of winning a given game.

As for the #1 HR? Well, it came in this famous game... but it might not be the exact homer you're thinking of.

When computing park adjusted stats like ERA+, OPS+, and by extension some of the parts of WAR, in season, we have traditionally extended the previous season's park factor through to the current season. So for 2010, we've been using the 2009 park factor.

For past year park factors, we use a three-year park factors when available. So for 2008, we used an average of 2007, 2008 and 2009, and for 2009 (and by extension 2010) we used 2008 and 2009. For a new park like Target Field, we just use 100 or neutral at the start of the season.

Read the rest of this entry »