Granillo: “Rise of the Robot Umpires”

It troubles me that the world is just one big rip-off of Ferro Lad.

We’ve all thought it. Heck, many of us have even said it. Watching the exploits of Eric Gregg, Phil Cuzzi, Jim Joyce, and so many others, it’s hard not to believe it at least once. “We want robot umpires!”

A new project by Dan Levy is working to explore just what might happen if baseball ever heeded that call. Rise of the Robot Umpires is a graphic-style novel set in the not-too-distant future where the commissioner finally listens to the fans and eliminates all human umpires.

  Flash forward a decade, and the game has never been better…until things start to go wrong. With his 100th birthday approaching, readers are taken on an adventure to decide how The Commish will handle the sudden rise of the robot umpires. Can baseball be saved?

  Well, it can, if the reader chooses the right path along the way. In a throwback to the Choose Your Own Adventure books popularized in the 1980s, Rise of the Robot Umpires puts the decisions in the hands of the readers, choosing which path they think will lead to Big Baseball’s salvation.

Each of the many branches in this chooseable-path adventure will be written by top-notch baseball writers, many of whom are very familiar to the Baseball Prospectus crowd. King Kaufman and Will Carroll are scheduled to contribute to the project along with Will Leitch, Lang Whitaker, Dave Brown, Erik Malinowski, Dan Steinberg, Jay Busbee and many more, including yours truly. And the art will be done by Stephen Slesinski, who has done some beautiful work around the web and who currently works as an illustrator on the F/X show Archer.

Forman: My Answer to “I Don’t Like How Complicated WAR Is and How It Is Constantly Changing.”

Forman: Valuemont.

Some of the common critiques of the Wins Above Replacement framework include: 1) Why do FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com have such different numbers, 2) How can we trust it when the numbers change, and 3) How can we trust it when I can’t calculate it?

For the first question, our announcement today of a consistent replacement level between FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com has done a considerable amount to bring our two methodologies into alignment at least on the question of how big of a basket of WAR to hand out to players each year. Previously, FanGraphs allotted nearly 300 additional WAR due to a much lower replacement level. Our meeting in the middle has erased this difference to zero.

For the next two questions, I would point to a very widely quoted and very widely used statistic from economics, Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Here is the Wikipedia article on Gross Domestic Product. I’m going to argue that WAR is essentially GDP for baseball.

  8 - The people who compute and create GDP calculations are economic experts who are building on years and years of economic study and research. The people who compute and create WAR or WAR-like frameworks are building on and expanding the years of sabermetric research by experts now employed directly by teams (Sean Smith, Tom Tango, Keith Woolner, Bill James) as advisors or experts in the area of statistics and evaluation (Nate Silver, Pete Palmer).
  9 - The people who use and rely on GDP, news media, politicians, business owners don’t have a prayer of computing it, but rely on subject experts to provide well-reasoned and carefully calculated estimates of economic value. The people using WAR (GM’s, news media, agents) to estimate player value don’t have a prayer of calculating it, but rely on subject experts either publicly or privately to provide well-reasoned and carefully calculated estimates of player value.

I can certainly understand unease with using one-number estimates like WAR, but I would point out that it comes from a long line of research, thought, and process that is common throughout the social sciences.

Walk Like a Sabermetrician: Calculus

Pickover Calculus and Pizza? I can’t decide.

What prompted this post was not a calculus barb directed at sabermetrics, but one of the reactions to such a barb in a Baseball Think Factory thread: a flat out statement that “calculus has no place in baseball statistics”. On one hand, I really should just ignore this. The statement itself is so outlandish as to be difficult to respond to. It’s akin to saying that “cymbals have no place in music” or that “rice has no place in one’s diet”. Calculus is obviously not used directly by most sabermetricians, and one can certainly be a practice high-level sabermetrics without using any calculus. But to simply write off the possibility of using an entire branch of mathematics in the discipline is absurd.

...I do not wish to give the impression that I think the application of calculus is central to the current practice of sabermetrics. Clearly it is not, given the paucity of work applying it to sabermetric questions. But it is another tool at our disposal, and one that is perfectly suited to assist in the types of sabermetric questions that have always interested me. Calculus certainly has vast applications in understanding the mathematical relationships between sabermetric formulas. Why can you predict team runs scored fairly accurately (at least in a normal team context) using a dynamic equation like Base Runs or a linear weights equation? Why does any variant of the Pythagorean family of win estimators match up so well in practice with linear equations that follow the rule that ten runs = one win? Calculus is also inherent in any sort of exercise involving hypothesis testing, even if it is only implicit. After all, the normal distribution is defined as an integral of a particular function.

I will close with a list of links to articles on this blog that have used calculus in some manner. As you will see, the scope of topics that I have applied calculus to are fairly limited—mostly to understand how events are valued in various offensive measures and to estimate runs per win from non-linear win estimators. Hopefully those of you with more imagination and a broader range of research interests can come up with other applications. Even if what I’ve written about did represent the full extent of possible applications of calculus in sabermetrics, it should be clear that there is a place for it. And if there wasn’t a place for a branch of mathematics which has countless applications in the sciences, statistics, and probability in sabermetrics, I’d suggest it would be time to re-evaluate how we practice sabermetrics.

Posnanski: Finding Peace In WAR

Anybody catch this…

And so, good news, he (Sean Forman) says that he intends to meet with Fangraphs folks and try to hammer out a consistent value for replacement level. He said they might try to get Tom Tango and others involved too. I think this would be great news for the statistic. It’s a fine thing for Fangraphs WAR and Baseball Reference WAR to be different. But it would be great if they could start in the same place.

Rob Neyer: Jack Morris, the Tea Party, and WOW THE INTERNET

PAYDIRT! As you know…I’ve has been trolling the site for a decade now with anything remotely related to the peds issue, Rob Neyer, Jack Morris, and the Tea Party!

Later in the show, Tom Verducci previewed next year’s ballot, which will include first-timers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas. What will happen, Verducci asked Ken Rosenthal, next time? Here’s Rosenthal’s response:

  I think those three get in, and Morris is going to be awfully close. And I will say this about Morris: I don’t vote for him, but the level of discourse against him, by certain segments of the sabermetric community right now, is over the top. It’s almost a crusade, and it’s ridiculous. One thing that has bothered me, at times, not among many of us, but some of us, is the almost polarized view of the world now, that has come to pass. It’s as if the Tea Party is taking over one part of baseball discussion, and that’s not right.

Heyman, of course, weighed in there: “And the internet campaign against Jack Morris has really hurt him. I think it was the opposite with Blyleven, the internet campaign got him in.”

Here’s a question for Ken Rosenthal (who I like, and who generally does great work) ... How, exactly, should certain segments of the sabermetric community best present their case that Jack Morris was not, for example, as good as Bert Blyleven or Curt Schilling?

Basically, in Rosenthal’s world-view, it seems that it’s okay to mention in passing that a candidate isn’t quite good enough for the Hall of Fame. But if you truly engage the question, and do some ACTUAL RESEARCH, then you’re engaging in some ridiculous ill-spirited crusade.

Buckley: Should anyone be elected to HOF this year? (Video)

Butch points out…“Even more HOF Gizmo-love!”

Steve Buckley joins Sports Tonight to discuss the 2013 candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame and asks if anyone should be inducted this year.

Baseballthinkfactory.org currently projects no player will garner the 75% of votes necessary for election into the Hall of Fame.

The last time no candidate won the necessary 75% was 1996, and Buckley says the HOF voters that he talks to says it’s likely it could happen again this year.

There are a number of players who Buckley believes will ultimately earn induction, but most of the players who would normally be considered a ‘slam dunk’ are those tainted by the steroid era and are therefore unlikely to garner even a significant percentage of votes.

Deadspin: According To Exit Polls, Nobody Will Make The Baseball Hall Of Fame

Shiit…next thing you know Pitchfork will be clipping my Idiotic Top 75 Indi/Undi Song List.

The results of 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame voting will be announced on Wednesday, and this year represents a unique ballot. Steroid users, suspected steroid users, a cocaine user, a catcher, Jack Morris. Want a preview? Baseball Think Factory has compiled the votes from every writer that made their vote public (including two who aren’t voting at all), and the results are only shocking if you somehow didn’t read our headline.

The 2013 Hall Of Fame Ballot Collecting Gizmo is being updated daily, and as of now has 84 full ballots—nearly 15 percent of the total. That’s a much larger sample size than election day exit polls, though it is self-selected.

...Nobody gets a plaque! (Except for three Veterans Committee selections, all of whom have been dead for at least 74 years.) We predicted this result, but it’d still be a shock to see Craig Biggio left out. He’s a sportswriter’s wet dream, atop a ballot without any sure things. But I suppose proximity to PED suspicion is damning enough these days.

If you’re curious about accuracy, exit polls proved remarkably prescient last year. Both BBTF’s (scroll down to comment #10 to see their 2012 predictor) and a second ballot tracker had Barry Larkin as the only man in, both nailing his percentage in the high 80s. There are still plenty of uncounted ballots, but Craig Biggio is going to need a surge or Cooperstown will be kind of lonely this summer.

Vote: The 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, Version 3.0

As Graham Womack notes…“I’ve kicked off voting for my annual project on the 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame. Big year for the project with so many newly eligible greats.”

As some of you may know, I do an annual project having people rank the 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame. It’s that time again.

I invite anyone who’s interested to take part (please free also to pass ballots along to anyone interested.) To vote, click on this link which will take you a Google Form that’s accepting responses. I’ve also included a reference ballot with about 430 names.

I don’t have too many rules for this project, but here they are:

1. You must vote for 50 players. Next to each player you vote for, include a Y or N for if they belong in the Hall of Fame
2. Any player who’s been inactive at least five years is eligible, whether they’ve played in the majors or not
3. All votes are due by next Sunday December 9 at 9 p.m. PST. I’ll post the results on December 16

Beyond this, please feel free to email me at thewomack@gmail.com with any questions.

Anyhow, I look forward to seeing how you all vote!

Sean Forman to appear on Clubhouse Confidential, MLB Network

As I said yesterday…“The ONLY downside to Clubhouse Confidential is the nightly commercial for Intentional Talk.”

I’ll be appearing on Clubhouse Confidential on the MLB Network. We are taping this afternoon and I’m pretty sure it will be broadcast tonight. The show typically airs 5:30pm and 7:30pm ET and then probably 8 more times after that. We’ll be talking baseball-reference.com and some other stuff.

I’m looking forward to meeting their crew and I’ve been incredibly impressed with how they are promoting sabermetrics on the show. If you are a stathead, it is time well spent.

THT: Jaffe: The possible upcoming Cooperstown ballot apocalypse

What should happen? Well, among non-Bonds/Clements voters, Biggio should get around 85 percent. With the others, he’ll get less in what’s already a crowded ballot for people willing to support PED-rs. I’d guess he gets 65-70 percent of their vote. Maybe less.

Upshot: Biggio has a very good shot to get in. Assuming he gets 85 percent of the non-Bonds/Clemens guys (and he really should, given the clustering of Molitor/Winfield/Murray right at 85 percent), and assuming Bonds and Clemens get about 40 percent of the vote, Biggio needs only 60 percent of the votes from the supporters of Bonds and Clemens. That should happen.

Actually, I find this a bit surprising. A week ago, I assumed that Biggio was doomed on this messy ballot. That would set off the real nightmare, because if everyone from this year’s vote went into next year, it would be that much harder for anyone to rise up.

But Biggio should go in next year. No one else should. If Fisk couldn’t get elected as the fourth-best new guy in 1999, Piazza won’t in 2012. Schilling will finish further down, and Sosa may be under 10 percent. As for the backloggers, Morris probably won’t move up enough because it is such a strong batch of new guys. I think he’ll get close but ultimately have to go to the VC.

VC = Viva Caputo!

Don Malcolm: PERSPECTIVIZING POSADA

Or as Rob Neyer just tweeted…“Good news! Still early January, and Don Malcolm’s already gotten in a gratuitous insult. With that out of the way…”

The thought of playing anywhere else probably also influenced Posada. Of all the ballparks in all the major leagues, the one he really didn’t want to walk out of (to rework that Casablanca reference just a bit…) was New Yankee Stadium. The revamped “House That Ruth George Built” proved to be exceptionally cozy for Jorge: in the three years he played there (at the advanced age of 37-39), the park literally kept his career going. He hit .302 there, with an OPS of .938. On the road, those number were considerably more wan—as in .209 and a .665 OPS. In 2011, Posada hit .165 away from the Bronx, with a .524 OPS.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t work in a couple of “midwestern angst” digs into this. First, Rob Neyer’s knee-jerk notion that Posada was held back from enough career games in 1996-99 to cost him a slot in Cooperstown wasn’t really worth the time it took to write the column. (That’s the Damoclean sword of the Internet—it just coerces that empty content out of you…)

There’s a good chance that Jorge will end up in the Hall—but it will be sometime after 2030 or so, when many more things have shaken out. Second, it turns out that Posada’s very favorite place to hit is—you guessed it—Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (.340 BA, 1.011 OPS).

Blyleven lobbyist not convinced Morris is worthy of HOF

No jack for The Jack!

Morris will return to the ballot a 14th year, which is how long it took Bert Blyleven to get elected. After his election, Blyleven thanked and credited an investment manager named Rich Lederer for lobbying for him. Lederer used baseball blogging site, BaseballAnalysts.com, to pump up Blyleven. He also contacted writers with Hall of Fame votes and shared the numbers he crunched on Bert’s behalf.

I talked to Lederer today after Larkin got in and Morris didn’t.

BS: Were you surprised Morris wasn’t elected?

RL: I would have been more surprised if he did get in. That would have required a humongous jump (in percentage of votes). I actually thought Larkin would get in. I have personal favorites. I think Alan Trammell should be in, and Tim Raines. I also would vote for Jeff Bagwell and Edgar Martinez.

BS: Game 7 of the World Series. Both Morris and Blyleven are in their prime and available. Who do you start?

RL: I know a lot of people would take Morris based on what he did in 1991. The one thing I got a kick out of is, the one time they faced each other in the playoffs, Bert won (6-3 in Game 2 of the 1987 ALCS between the Twins and Detroit Tigers). So I think that’s an interesting stat. I think your question would generate a lot of Jack Morris conversation. But when they did face each other, Blyleven won.

Beyond the Boxscore: Hall of wWAR vs. Hall of Fame vs. Hall of Merit

Damn, zapped by Hall effect…can’t link to way cool interactive blob visualization thingee.

That’s just those who appear in the Top 144 eligible players. Here, I obviously use “eligible” as meaning “retired for five years”. Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson obviously are not eligible for the Hall of Fame.

I just can’t believe we have a Top 50 player who is struggling to get in the Hall of Fame.

One thing that makes me quite happy about this visual is how much more in sync the Hall of wWAR is with the Hall of Merit than it is with the Hall of Fame. For example, the Hall of Merit contains just 26 players who are not in the Hall of wWAR. Meanwhile, the Hall of Fame contains 64 players who are not in the Hall of wWAR. Those two groups have an overlap of 15 players. Five of them (Ralph Kiner, Clark Griffith, Enos Slaughter, Roger Bresnahan, and Sam Thompson) rank among the Top 25 players outside of the Hall of wWAR.

In fact, 49 players appear in the Hall of Fame but not either of the others. Just 11 players appear only in the Hall of Merit while 20 players grace only the Hall of wWAR. That’s a list I’m particularly interested in—the players enshrined by my Hall of wWAR, but not the others.

THT: Jaffe: Next week’s Cooperstown election results today

From the Daniel Dunglas Home of predictions…Chris Jaffe produces…

Based on the above criteria and my own semi-informed guesses, here are my predictions alongside last year’s performance to show the predicted change:

Name	      2012	2011
Barry Larkin	82	62
Jack Morris	65	54
Jeff Bagwell	54	42
Lee Smith	52	45
Tim Raines	52	38
Edgar Martinez	39	33
Alan Trammell	32	24
Larry Walker	27	20
Mark McGwire	24	20
Fred McGriff	24	18
Dale Murphy	19	13
Don Mattingly	18	14
Rafael Palmeiro	15	11
Bernie Williams	12	XX
The Rest	 3	XX

That’s 5.18 names per ballot, which would be a clear all-time low – and yet it might still be too high. You’re better taking the under than the over on 5.18 names/ballot.

Good news for Reds fans – Barry Larkin is going in easily. A guy in the low 60s rarely makes the jump over 75 percent like this, but this isn’t a normal year.

Don Malcolm: HALL OF FAME REDUX: 1936

He thought he had the world by the tail - till it exploded in his face, with a ballot attached!

A couple of years ago we suggested to the folks at the Hall of Merit that they extend their efforts by following the strictures of actual history and select potential Hall of Fame inductees according to the original rules:

—Vote for 10 players;
—75% of the votes produces enshrinement;
—Eligibility rules as in existence for each year in question, with the exception of Gehrig (presumed inducted via special vote in 1939).

So far the Hall of Merit folks have not taken us up on this idea. That’s fair enough: they have their own activities and approaches, and we can all applaud their alternative take on the best ballplayers in baseball history.

But we remain fascinated by the prospect of having a more sabermetrically-engaged membership take on a “Hall of Fame Redux” where the first ballot begins precisely when it did in 1936, using the exact parameters that the BBWAA faced (and continues to face seventy-five years later).

So here’s our pitch. If the good folks at Baseball Think Factory will see fit to link to this post, thus creating a thread where anyone who is interested can vote, we will tabulate the votes after a five-day voting period, announce the results, and continue with weekly posts moving through the years toward the present.

...Here is our vote for the 1936 election (in alphabetical order):

1. Pete Alexander
2. Ty Cobb
3. Eddie Collins
4. Rogers Hornsby
5. Walter Johnson
6. Nap Lajoie
7. Christy Mathewson
8. Babe Ruth
9. Tris Speaker
10. Cy Young

Vote early, vote once only, and let’s see how many players can receive 75% or higher in the vote count. Five players made it in the actual BBWAA election; we’re thinking that it might be possible to elect seven or eight in the Redux version.

BPP: The 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, Version 2.0

Uh-oh…don’t let Danny Peary see this.

45-Tie. Harold Baines, 28 votes (Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? 5 yes, 26 no): Guys like Baines illustrated an interesting point for this year’s project, earning far more votes by and large than many of the 19th century greats on the ballot, but with a much lower percentage of their voters saying they belonged in the Hall of Fame. Certainly, I doubt too many people will cry foul about this over Baines, a very good designated hitter for much of his career but no immortal. His 2,886 hits, 384 home runs, and .289 batting average are all respectful but they don’t demand a plaque.

45-Tie. Roger Maris, 28 votes (Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? 11 yes, 17 no): It’s been 50 years now since Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, and there are those who still consider him the single-season champion. This and his back-to-back MVPs for his 1960 and star-crossed 1961 seasons are the main things he has going for his Hall of Fame candidacy. Given that the museum rarely enshrines players on the strength of short-lived brilliance from Smoky Joe Wood to Lefty O’Doul to Denny McLain and many others, Maris’s chances don’t look great, though he’ll surely live on in the hearts of fans regardless if he ever has a plaque.

45-Tie. John Olerud, 28 votes (Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? 5 yes, 23 no): Olerud might be Keith Hernandez minus the mustache and the cocaine and with a batting helmet that he wore in the field. Both men were slick fielders and good contact hitters in their prime, and Olerud even got the attention of Ted Williams. “Olerud hits more straightaway than I ever did,” Williams wrote in his 1995 book with Jim Prime, Ted Williams’ Hit List. “He gets the bat on the ball very well. He has a great attitude and always waits for a good ball to hit. But he may lack one key ingredient to make a legitimate run at .400: speed.” Williams was right.

ChicagoSide: New sports website fields strong starting lineup

Borderline Primates unite!

Regardless of how the Cubs and White Sox fare in the coming season, serious Chicago sports fans could finally get what they’ve been waiting for on Opening Day 2012.

That’s when they’ll be introduced to ChicagoSide, which may turn out to be the most game-changing addition to the sports media scene since the Score debuted on radio 20 years ago next month.

“We’re launching the best Chicago sports website the city’s ever seen,” said Jonathan Eig, 47, the veteran reporter, columnist and nationally acclaimed author (Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, and Get Capone) who’s founder and editor-in-chief of the new venture. “And we’re doing it with an amazingly talented pool of writers and editors who are hungry because they love sports and they love journalism, and there aren’t that many places to write anymore in this city.”

...“We’re going to have the best piece of sports journalism every day in the city of Chicago that you can find . . . at least one piece of original material every day that we’re absolutely confident will get people talking,” Eig said. “Then we’ll also aggregate and link to the best stuff around the web — all on Chicago sports.”

Eig already has assembled a lineup of more than three dozen writers, including newspaper and magazine veterans Lou Carlozo, George Castle, Jim Coffman, Lauren Etter, Elliott Harris, Noah Isackson, Billy Lombardo, Amy Merrick, Joel Reese, Chris Silva and Alan Solomon, along with best-selling authors Joseph Epstein, James Finn Garner and Robert Kurson.

BPro: Jay Jaffe: Talkin’ Cooperstown on Clubhouse Confidential

Weee…my “Please Sack Plesac” campaign seems to be working! (Congrats, Jay!)

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I’ll be debuting on MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential on Tuesday at 5:30 PM Eastern. For the uninitiated, Clubhouse Confidential is a cutting-edge attempt to put advanced statistics in the television spotlight, using them not only to analyze the day’s big news but to explore some of the perennial controversies which often pit statheads against the mainstream. The show debuted earlier this month — Derek Carty gave an early review — and from the point of its inception, those of us at Baseball Prospectus had reason to hope we’d get into the mix, particularly since host Brian Kenny regularly featured BP alums Joe Sheehan and Keith Law during his days at ESPN; Sheehan has already become a regular guest on the new show. A couple of weeks ago, their producers reached out, and I auditioned last week. Maybe the tie was the key.

I’ll be discussing the top names on the Hall of Fame’s Golden Era ballot for a “Cooperstown Justice” segment, guys like Ron Santo and Gil Hodges who are staples of my annual JAWS review (see here for my full writeup). The spot should run about four minutes, so I’ll have to work on being concise, something that anyone who has waded through my 3,500-word pieces on the topic knows doesn’t come naturally to me.

BBTF Playoff Chats

Just a reminder that BTF’s IRC chat room is open for people who want to live chat during the playoffs.

Dan Werr’s directions after the break.

S.I.: Sheehan: The Moneyball revolution from someone who helped it happen

Given that, we were taken aback when Federal Express delivered a letter…

The revolution is over. Well, that one, anyway. The new ideas earned a place at the table on merit, by being good ideas that contribute to winning baseball games. While I’m no capital-S stathead, I was fortunate enough to work at Baseball Prospectus for a dozen years alongside some of the best in the field, from Clay Davenport and Gary Huckabay, through Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner, through Dan Fox and Nate Silver.

...All of this probably happens without Prospectus. The ideas were too important and there was too much money to be made for them not to become the way in which baseball teams were run. Nevertheless, Prospectus happened, and became the way in which many people within the industry were introduced to these ideas. Prospectus was, for a time, the center of the stathead world, publishing research that would set the discussion for years to come, that would change the way players were evaluated. Fielding Independent Pitching ERA shows up on the MLB Network. Felix Hernandez is honored with a Cy Young Award with 13 wins. Every team has a Peter Brand or three, collecting, parsing and presenting data, gaining credibility every time a defensive shift or pitch sequence or lineup change puts a W on the board.

Moneyball captures the tipping point in that revolution, when a team embraced something new because it had to, and won a lot of games because of it. I’m proud to have been a part of the history. The smoke has cleared and the guns have been laid down, and I’m excited to see what will come now that so much less energy is being spent drawing lines between two sides that both want the same thing: great baseball.

JFMB: Stat-Geeks are ruining Sports and taking over Mariners Blogosphere

Please Pardon Our Noise, It Is the Sound of Freedom!

I started this Mariners Blog last season as a way to express and share my love for the game of Baseball. Sadly the Mariners have had two terrible seasons despite employing sabermetrics types in the front office,which has made this team tough to follow but my passion for the game seems to drive me on. I guess there is no known advanced metrics formula to measure committment to this game but I suppose I have a high WAR in that area and I have a feeling I will out sit a lot of the Stat-Geeks who seem so cold and unattached to the beauty of this game.

I realize that most of the attention in the Mariners Blogosphere goes to the more established Blogs like USS Mariner, Lookout Landing and Sojo Mojo. And I even read these guys, but my perspective is more old-school in case you haven’t noticed. Perhaps I am part of a dying breed of Baseball Fans like Jason Whitlock from Fox who are trying to hold on to a more colorful and fun era of baseball where everything was not reduced to mathematical calculations. Well so be it, but I am too old to change now and I am not going anywhere for awhile so if any of you Stat-Geeks happen to be offended by my post or the one by Whitlock you may need to go read one of the Blogs that delights in always proving how superior they are with their new calculations and formulas. I love this game too much to reduce it to a mere science.

BPP: An interview with Dan Szymborski

You can’t spell ZiPS without…Dan!

How long ago did you come up with ZiPS?

Szymborski: The genesis of it was there’s a [person] who contributes to Baseball Think Factory named Chris Dial, and in the late ’90s, they were talking about how someone could make a projection system that’s very basic and get most of the way there, in a way kind of a primordial version of Marcel which is a tabulator.

Before 2002, I was thinking maybe I should try my hand at a projection system. At that time, Voros McCracken’s FIPS research was fairly new, so I wanted to [align my idea.] That’s why I made it rhyme with FIPS, and the Z stands for Szymborski, the second letter of my name. I mean, it’s just a little side thing that started. Then I decided to do hitter projections, because it seemed kind of stupid to do because there were not hitter projections. And then over time, as computers got faster, I could do more things. Over time, it became a pretty complex system… I’m pretty happy with how it’s worked out.

Do you think you have another ZiPS idea in you or do you think that’s going to be your big thing?

Szymborski: I dunno. I always kind of think of myself more as a writer than a statistics developer, but I have more ideas how to use it. I continually refine my aging models and long-term projections and the different things I can do with it. I certainly hope there are other ideas in me, but I don’t have those ideas yet. Hopefully they will develop over the next few years.

FanGraphs New York Meetup

Amity Hall? Wuh…you guys too good for John’s Pizza? (chomp…I’ll probably be heading over…chomp)

On Sunday, September 25th, we’ll blow the horn for FanGraphs East and announce happy hour drinks and our own private space for our particular brand of nerdery. Come to Amity Hall any time after one PM eastern, and we’ll be hanging out, talking baseball and enjoying happy hour prices. And there will be a ton of togetherness because really how much can you hate a Mets fan right now. Oh! Also, come downstairs. We’ve got the downstairs bar.

And this is who will be hanging out:

David Appelman, FanGraphs Dark Overlord, so dark
Mike Podhorzer, Serious about (fantasy) baseball, RotoGraphs
Eno Sarris, Fan of Graphs, Fan, Not and Roto
Amanda Rykoff, espnW contributor, beer lover and Yankees fan
James Kannengeiser, professional curmudgeon and Amazin Avenue writer
Chris McShane, Amazin Avenue backbone, ready to dance
Eric Simon, Amazin Avenue head honcho guy, generally nice dude
Mike Axisa, aka “Mike from RAB, FanGraphs & Trade Rumors,” you know, just Mike
Joe Pawlikowski, music lover, FanGraphs escapee and River Avenue Blueser

BPro: Carty: Reviewing “Behind the Seams: The Stat Story”

Paging JamesPotocki…

Once we get past this little detour—which is much smaller than I’m sure I’ve made it out to be—“The Stat Story” actually levels off pretty well, attempting to shed a positive light on statistics and telling the story of how statistics have impacted the game of baseball. In fact, after it was all said and done, our Finley/Brock/Lasorda spectacle became much more of an afterthought, almost included to say, “OK, there are still people who don’t agree with all this, but it’s here, it’s undeniable, and here is the impact it’s having on front offices, Hall of Fame and awards voting, and the way fans view the game”. All in all, despite my wariness after the first few minutes, the documentary wound up being fair.

In fact, one of the first such things I noticed and really appreciated was that many of the interviewees were prominent internet writers. Of course there’s excellent work being done behind closed doors in front offices, but much of the modern day sabermetric movement is taking place on the internet at places like Baseball Prospectus, The Hardball Times, Beyond the Boxscore, etc. I wasn’t sure if this would be acknowledged in the documentary, and while specific mention was scarce, many of their authorities came from our little corner of the internet: former BPers Jonah Keri and Joe Sheehan, SBNation’s Rob Neyer, The Baseball Analysts’ Rich Lederer, FanGraphs’ David Appelman, and Retrosheet’s David Smith.

...One of the biggest things that casual observers of statistics—and, it seems to me, the makers of this documentary—fail to understand is the distinction between statistics and sabermetrics (words which the documentary used fairly interchangeably). Sabermetrics is the search for truth, which isn’t limited to numbers. I’ve long been a supporter of using qualitative information and was both honored and thrilled to have had the opportunity to attend MLB’s Scout School a couple years back. Scouting is a part of sabermetrics. On the quantitative side of the coin, sabermetrics isn’t just about using numbers; it’s about analyzing which numbers are useful and how to properly use them.

Statistics, on the other hand, are composed exclusively of numbers and, in the improper context, can be misconstrued. In this documentary, it mentions how Earl Weaver used batter/pitcher matchup data to set his lineups, with one of the interviewees chiming in, “And it worked!” But batter/pitcher matchup data is essentially useless. Yes, it’s statistics, it’s numbers, and it’s quantifiable… but it’s not sabermetrics.

NYBD: Silva: Why I Applaud Keith Law’s Evolution

Law Abiding Citizen: How do you stop a blogger who is already behind Insider?

I can identify with Law because I see some what he is going through in me. I have grown since I started covering baseball in March of 2007. Before that I was just another fan who watched the game as a fan and listened to talk radio. By no means do I have the front office experience or analytical background of Keith Law, but I think I know baseball pretty well and can hold my own with the big boys, sometimes.That’s not my point. The point is interacting with people from all different backgrounds, experiences, and writing styles has made me well-rounded. It’s made me a better writer, radio host, and analyst of the game. The best part is how the learning process is fluid. I hope to be better at this in 2012 than I am in 2011. I have made mistakes in the past, but does that mean I can’t learn and grow from it? Should I be punished forever due to something I said in 2009? Should Keith Law be punished because of what he thought at age 29 as a new baseball executive?

Law basically did his mea culpa with the scouting community on the ESPN podcast. Assuming it’s a sincere take – and I have no reason not to believe that is isn’t- he should be applauded. I don’t know the guy personally, but by reviewing his evolution it appears he is someone that many in this community- writers, scouts, executives, and coaches- could learn from; both traditional and advanced thinkers alike. I know I just did.