Yeah, yeah, great.

Check out the ad on page 52, where they urge you to feed meat to your newborn.

That is one oedipal look.

What's F?

So we've got OBP, a weighted ISO and a "scoring efficiency" factor on offense. I'm not sure I'd expect the socring efficiency to be very stable from season to season though this is where baserunning goes. The pitching bit has, essentially, OBP against, opp scoring efficiency and K per 8 batters faced and the mysterious F. I'll admit to not having a clue why it would be K per 8 batters.

So we've got OBP, a weighted ISO and a "scoring efficiency" factor on offense. I'm not sure I'd expect the socring efficiency to be very stable from season to season though this is where baserunning goes. The pitching bit has, essentially, OBP against, opp scoring efficiency and K per 8 batters faced and the mysterious F. I'll admit to not having a clue why it would be K per 8 batters.

no DH?

What's F?

From the caption on the next page, if I squint, I think it says that "F" stands for "fielding". No, I have no idea how exactly one measures "fielding" there.

Fielding errors?

Check out the ad on page 52, where they urge you to feed meat to your newborn.

You mean I should be buying Gerber racks of ribs for my 8 month old?

F does stand for fielding. Says Rickey in the article,

Fielding averages? Utterly worthless as a yardstick. They are not only misleading, but deceiving. Take Zeke Bonura, the old White Sox first baseman, generally regarded as a poor fielder. The fielding averages showed he led the American League in fielding for three years. Why? Zeke had "good hands"! Anything he reached, he held. Result: an absence of errors. But he was also slow moving and didn't cover much territory. Balls that a quicker man may have fielded went for base hits, but the fielding averages do not reflect this.

Fielding then cannot be measured, although it must be admitted that, all other things being equal, it could be the difference between winning or losing four of five games or mean the run that wins the big game. But application of the formula to 20 years of statistics shows fielding to be worth only about one half as much as pitching or about 15%. No team would have an aggregate fielding percentage of 1.000. So the variation within the 15% between the best fielding team and the worst would be only a few percentage points and does not destroy the validity of the [greater] formula.

Fielding errors?

Can't be. In this "cluster" we want a low number, so if it was errors he'd be adding errors.

Fielding averages? Utterly worthless as a yardstick. They are not only misleading, but deceiving. Take Zeke Bonura, the old White Sox first baseman, generally regarded as a poor fielder. The fielding averages showed he led the American League in fielding for three years. Why? Zeke had "good hands"! Anything he reached, he held. Result: an absence of errors. But he was also slow moving and didn't cover much territory. Balls that a quicker man may have fielded went for base hits, but the fielding averages do not reflect this.

It's pretty phenomenal that someone within baseball wrote this over half a century ago. Even today, most of the sportswriters and old-school baseball types can't bring themselves to accept it.

FIXED:

most of the sportswriters and old-school baseball types can't bring themselves to UNDERSTAND it.

Some may remember Alan Schwarz’s NY Times piece about this from 2004. It’s here.

Schwarz also did this really interesting roundtable on stats vs. scouts. Someone should post a thread about that.

Some may remember Alan Schwarz’s NY Times piece about this from 2004. It’s here.

Schwarz also did this really interesting roundtable on stats vs. scouts. Someone should post a thread about that.

Do you mean this 2005 Baseball America article?

I didn't know Branch invented isolated power. Cool.

Without being able to calculate the F, I just put together a quick-and-dirty blog entry applying the formula to this year's teams. Thought it would be of interest to the community here, and thanks for posting the link to the Life article -- Here's the link to the 2009 G-ratings.

Please send page 52 to every vegan you know, hilarious.

kind of impressive that three of the top 8 pitchers for--(which year, 1953?) were Indians

if it is the 1954 season, then it is 4 out of 8

EDIT--turns out that "Ed Ford" of the Yankees was pretty good, too

I also thought it curious that the spelling of "goodbye" used to be shorter. More commonly when the usual spelling changes, the old one was the longer one.

What do you mean " Finally, we can all see the oft-mentioned article...?" BTF has had the text of this article posted for years. Jim Furtado posted it and he noted that I found a possible discrepancy. It is at

Goodby To Some Old Baseball Ideas

If you really want to blow your mind, read this article from Fortune magazine in 1935 about a very early and very sophisticated

The Base in Baseball By Travis Hoke

It is also posted by BTF

Oops. Thanks, Cyril. I'd never seen the Hoke piece. A quick read suggests it's another interesting classic. I'll re-read it again, though.

You're welcome. I hope you guys put clear links up to these articles. Who knows what else you got. Maybe something from a Dan Brown novel (hey, if he wrote a baseball book would it be called "The DiMaggio Code?"). It could be a about the long lost magic power of clutch hitting handed down by a secret society of Yankee players. It would explain Derek Jeter's super human powers

You can also go back to the 1910's and read FC Lane's linear weights work which I believe is posted somewhere on this site as well. Or you could also go to baseball-fever and look at leverage index work from the 1960's.

This stuff ain't new, not by a long shot.

Without being able to calculate the F, I just put together a quick-and-dirty blog entry applying the formula to this year's teams. Thought it would be of interest to the community here, and thanks for posting the link to the Life article -- Here's the link to the 2009 G-ratings.

I won't speak for the community, but I personally definitely found it to be very interesting. Thank you very much for sharing.

If I may make one point, you stated in your entry:

I also feel like this provides a little more evidence that the Mariners were big-time overachievers, and can't go into next year hoping to contend without making some serious upgrades.

You very well may be right; but (and I state this not as a point of contention, but rather as a point to ponder) perhaps the difference between the Mariners expectations per the formula and their actual accomplishments lay inside the immeasurable "F". Maybe, just maybe, their fielding really was that much above average this year.

DB

You can read that FC Lane article at

Why the System of Batting Averages Should Be Changed

Then his analysis of the value of walks is at

The Base on Balls

And links to more Baseball Magazine articles are at

Cyril Morong's Sabermetric Research

I posted the following at BTB a few years ago

The post below is the few pages from FC Lane's book called "Batting" that dealt with the batting order. Whether or not it matches up with some of the recent analysis on lineups I will leave up to readers. One expert mentioned that it was a good idea to bat Cy Williams 2nd. FC Lane was a great baseball writer and editor of Baseball Magazine in the early part of the 20th century. It comes to you through the miracle of scanning (well, it was a miracle that I figured out how to use the scanner-actually my wife who is a computer programmer showed me how-the miracle is that she stays married to me)

How the Batting Order "Colors" Batting

FC Lane on the Batting Order