Archive for the 'Stats' Category

Joe Posnanski's great post on Wins Above Replacement brought to the forefront for me an idea I've been kicking around now for a few months.
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Over the years, many users have written to us expressing confusion over the assignment of saves for seasons prior to 1975, the year the current save rule was put into effect. This post will hopefully set the record straight on what changes the rule has seen over the years, which version of the rule we apply to older seasons, and why the save totals on a player's main page might not always match those you find in the player's game logs and splits.

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I got this note from Pete Palmer clarifying how the catcher SB/CS data is computed for pre-1952 seasons.

The pre-retro data in my files is estimated. What I did was count of sb and cs allowed by each team and spread it among the catchers based on assists, and also estimated innings based on batting and fielding stats. The innings estimated are pretty accurate, probably off by 10 or 20 innings out of 1000. The sb-cs data is reasonably close. Of course, there are no team cs for NL 1926-50 and for most years before 1920, so I had to estimate that from catcher assists, outs on base and stolen bases. I gave up on before 1890 because the box scores left out a lot of stolen bases. Aside from some 1880s AA rbi, which are 90% complete, that is the only estimated data in there. Jon Frankel is working hard on strikeouts for batters 1897-1909 (1912 AL) which will include some estimated data. We hope to have that by the end of the year or next year at the latest.

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.

2010 Cubs Position Players Value and 2010 NL Position Player Value

I've added a column to the player value tables show how the team acquired the player. Amateur Draft, Free Agency, Waivers, Trades, etc. This column shows the last transaction involving the team and the player. This way you can see how many WAR the team's got through trades, or from their farm system, etc. I've also added it to the league registers showing player value.

The 2010 salaries have now been updated with the latest data.

I am still working on the 2010 daily Pitching WAR updates. Hopefully next week.

Update: I should mention that this column will appear on pre-2010 data later today.

Wilkins - Stathead Trivia & Esoterica: #2

Ryan Wilkins really likes the new WAR data on the.  Viva la revolucion.

2010 NL Standings

One of our company trademarks is our Simple Rating System discovered somewhere in the annals of time and dusted off and used by our Doug Drinen. SRS has two components, run differential and strength of schedule. I've added those two components to the 2010 standings page and it should be updated daily.

We also had an issue with the computation of luck and pythag W-L which I've rectified.

I just copied over the first day of minor league stats to the site. Murphy willing these will be updated each morning with the rest of the site.

Just like for 2009, we have complete 2010 stats:

*Team Stats, (Corpus Christi Hooks)
*League Stats, (2010 Eastern League, Batting and Pitching Leaders)
*Player Stats, (Carlos Santana)
*Stats by Franchise, (2010 Red Sox Affiliates),
*Organizational Batting (Orioles) and Pitching (Brewers) Stats and Depth Charts, and, of course,
*Much, much, more

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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This is the second of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

Due to the tireless work of the RetroSheet volunteers (otherwise known as heroes) Baseball-Reference.com now has play-by-play (PBP) for the 1952 and 1953 seasons and box score level accounts (BSEF) of all games in the 1920-1939 seasons. This is the first time that I have incorporated seasons with just BSEF data, so it necessitated some changes which I'll try to highlight below.

Beyond that major change there have been many, many additional improvements to the
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