User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Page rendered in 0.4034 seconds
55 querie(s) executed
You are here > Home > Transaction Oracle > Discussion
| ||||||||
Transaction Oracle — A Timely Look at Transactions as They Happen Friday, September 11, 20093 Decades of Minor League TranslationsAttached is the current fruit of a long-term project I’ve been working on. Namely, a large reference of minor-league-to-major league translations (zMLE or ZiPS MLE). We get back into the late 70s here as going back to then, there’s always some source that has the statistics required. Once we get earlier, there are some years that have BB and SO data, generally the most important missing data, but it’s extremely spotty and sometimes, not even whole years are filled. Some day, I’ll have these going back for as long as there was minor league baseball as SABR’s database project proceeds.
So, what value do these have? For me, two things stand out as the most important. First, having these either reminds us or introduces us to fine players that never got a shot in the majors. We live in a time when Japan is a real alternative option for Ken Phelpsers like Greg LaRocca to have lucrative careers playing baseball and when increased understanding of the usefulness of minor league statistics in the mainstream has resulted in fewer guys getting completely overlooked.
Second, more information helps us increase our knowledge of how players age and develop. For systems that look at comparable players, it’s quite useful to have more 18-21 year-olds that aren’t stars to help us crack, from a statistics standpoint, who will develop and who will not.
The biggest problem with doing these, aside from piecing together data that wasn’t kept all that lovingly at the time, is the lack of minor league park factors from recent years. For the original MLEs, James simply used the teams runs scored and runs allowed to estimate a park factor. With game-by-game data mostly lost to history, I had to take a similar approach. Using the decade of known data, I constructed a model for estimated park factors from minor league hitting and pitching statistics. To get these to have value, I used a longer time frame (5-year factors) and regressed the numbers more heavily to the mean. As such, the factors are fairly conservative, but a park that long-term has a “true” HR factor of 0.80 is extremely unlikely to model as a 1.20 without home/road data. This doesn’t work for major league parks (which it doesn’t have to, since I can use actual there), but for minor league teams, success and failure are generally pretty ethereal - a major league team’s farm system quality essentially boils down to just a handful of the hundreds of minor leaguers they employ in any given season.
So, I hope that so of you find this to be useful. This information can be used for any non-profit endeavor that you wish and can be used for any original research for either for-profit or non-profit. I would appreciated a credit, of course. And if you really find this useful and have the means, I’d greatly appreciate something stuck in my tip jar (using the donate button below), which will help reimburse me for all the beer I drank to get through all this number-crunching. 2009 is included, as well.
zMLE for Excel 2003 (there are more than 65 thousand rows, so data is split into extra sheets)
Minor League Park Factors, Real and Estimated
In the future, I hope to add biographical information to this and fix errors. While we have 30 years of reasonably good data, there are still holes in data (most notably by far, neither SABR nor BR nor the Cube have good data for the 1990 Sally League).
Dan Szymborski
Posted: September 11, 2009 at 01:09 AM | 57 comment(s)
Login to Bookmark
Related News: |
BookmarksYou must be logged in to view your Bookmarks. Hot Topics2012 ZiPS Projections, Final Edition
(23 - 11:21am, May 31) Last: craigsaboe 2012 ZiPS/RBI Baseball (20 - 10:58am, May 03) Last: tjans 2012 ZiPS Projections Spreadsheets, v. 1 (62 - 4:38pm, Apr 10) Last: nemodomi 2012 ZiPS Projections - Oakland A's (69 - 5:57am, Apr 10) Last: Athletic Supporter is USDA certified lean 2012 ZiPS Projections - Kansas City Royals (31 - 1:51pm, Mar 23) Last: hokieneer Pirates - Acquire Burnett (10 - 11:09pm, Feb 20) Last: You Know Nothing JT Snow (YR) 2012 ZiPS Projections - Pittsburgh Pirates (41 - 10:02am, Feb 20) Last: Dangerous Dean 2012 ZiPS Projections - Minnesota Twins (31 - 8:53pm, Feb 17) Last: A Random 8-Year-Old Eskimo 2012 ZiPS Projections - Boston Red Sox (46 - 4:41pm, Feb 17) Last: Jose is Absurdly Correct but not Helpful 2012 ZiPS Projections - San Diego Padres (29 - 2:33pm, Feb 17) Last: Dan Szymborski 2012 ZiPS Projections - Arizona Diamondbacks (31 - 2:03am, Feb 14) Last: Dan Szymborski 2012 ZiPS Projections - Texas Rangers (21 - 12:43pm, Feb 10) Last: DEF picks the pretty horsies 2012 ZiPS Projections - Miami Marlins (31 - 8:16pm, Feb 07) Last: Misirlou cut his hair and moved to Rome 2012 ZiPS Projections - Cleveland Indians (19 - 10:18pm, Feb 02) Last: DevinM 2012 ZiPS Projections - Atlanta Braves (28 - 6:25pm, Jan 31) Last: Spahn Insane |
|||||||
About Baseball Think Factory | Write for Us | Copyright © 1996-2021 Baseball Think Factory
User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
| Page rendered in 0.4034 seconds |
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Fresh Prince of Belisle Posted: September 11, 2009 at 01:37 AM (#3319359)Scanning through the list I see Adam Hyzdu with an MLE of 41 homers for 2000, in a year where he actually hit 31 - can that be right?
I'll have to check but I think I have stats for 1990 SAL. If I do I'll send them to you. At the very least I have them in a copy of that year's Baseball America Almanac.
Scanning through the list I see Adam Hyzdu with an MLE of 41 homers for 2000, in a year where he actually hit 31 - can that be right?
Nobody seemed to hit homers at Blair County. Here are the multipliers for Altoona at that time (and these are already essentially cut in half from the factors!)
1999: 0.79
2000: 0.77
2001: 0.79
2002: 0.81
2003: 0.70
Essentially, Petco Park squared. You add in the fact that 2000 was about the time between the biggest difference between major and minor league home run rate in recent years and you get a pretty nice conversion.
Hyzdu, of course, never played that well before or again. His translations those years:
1996: 274/348/478
1997: 247/337/410
1998: 271/325/408
1999: 273/333/517
2000: 273/375/581 (the 41 HR MLE year)
2001: 244/286/412
2002: 240/308/423
What you're pretty much looking at is a legitimate, but definitely non-star hitter having a big career year at the wrong place and time. Kind of like 2000's Ryan Ludwick but the Pirates were too stupid and Cam Bonifay had signed KY Jelly Roll at 1B.
The Pirates finally gave him sort-of playing time years too late. Didn't help that he was a terrible pinch-hitter, like most players:
Starter (271 PA): 250/325/496
Sub (136 PA): 186/281/322
Pinch-Hitter (71 PA): 190/324/293
Average player loses about 150 points of OPS as a pinch-hitter.
Seriously, this is awesome Dan.
For those that are wondering, he's translated to have 26162 hits in 30 at-bats and score 3666 runs. I must have got an errant keystroke in there.
I'm the guy that sent you $33, or $1 for each year.
Would you (or have you - haven't gotten to peek at the PF file at all yet) consider supplying a league factors tab?
***
Separate fun: Roberto Petagine MLEs, through the '90s...
'91: .236/.305/.355 in 462 AB with Burlington (MWL) <note - there's an error here - they were an Astros affiliate>
'92: .247/.316/.407 in 396 AB with Osceola/Jackson
'93: .259/.355/.396 in 455 AB with Jackson
'94: .237/.315/.399 in 253 AB with Tuscon
'95: .190/.319/.310 in 58 AB with Las Vegas (now in the Padres org)
'96: .255/.352/.413 in 322 AB with Norfolk (Mets AAA)
'97: .275/.370/.501 in 461 AB with Norfolk
'98: .274/.369/.476 in 376 AB with Indianapolis (Reds AAA)
My inclination is that we ought not regress much (if any) for BABIP in the context of MLEs (as distinct from projections, where we should) ... but I can implement that when I present my set of MLEs, sometime around the year 2150.
I checked and don't have the 1990 SAL in my database. I do have it in the BA Almanac though. If I decide to do the data entry on that one, I'll shoot you a copy. No guarantee as to when, since I've got a THT Annual article to write and volunteered to do some batting logs for retrosheet which I need to get to work on.
On the minor league park factor link, I just seem to get a bunch of html files?
...the trick would be (apart from stuff specific to his current model, as I understand it) that those are relatively closed systems - not much movement b/w them and the NA. If you do have that data + an estimate/assumption as to how strong the league is (+ are willing to agree w/ certain implicit assumptions about how various skills translate from setting to setting) - then the model he put out on BBTF (where you enter the stats, team, and year) would be pretty easily customized to your liking. [For instance, I was using it at one point to validate my own Cuban League translations.]
the OLD model he used to use that people could download maybe 2 or 3 yrs back could be customized easily. can't speak for the current one.
If you dig around the internet, you can find a spare one here or there from Clay D as well.
I *think* but don't know, that Sackmann messed around w/ Dutch data at one point - could easily be something I'm making up, though.
Again, your best bet might be to find Dan's old .xls model - tweak it (it's gonna need tweaks - for instance, standard K/W relationships won't apply], give it your inputs, then run from there. This assumes you have Cuban stats handy - if not, they're online (at least were - haven't looked in awhile) but the connection (Cuban servers) is terrible.
If nothing else, this is a good place for someone with a little time on their hands to become the web's "expert" w/o too much competition.
I'd bet money Davenport took a crack at the WBC guys already, though I'm not a subscriber so I don't know for certain.
If anyone needs an actual zMLE spreadsheet for research use, drop me a line at dan@baseballprimer.com and I'll send you a copy.
The reason I use regressed $H (but only moderately) is that people are more aware of regression and do a lot of that with things like FIP for actual MLB lines, so a line with $H regression makes sense. After all, when you see a guy with a .380 $H translation because of no regression, most people who care about that sort of thing are going to mentally push that down anyway.
Blurring the line too much between translation and projection is why I've backed off on some of the regression in the last couple of years, so people who have my older MLEs will notice a difference.
brian.cartwright2@verizon.net
Here is a link to an English/Spanish glossary
http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/stats/page.jsp?ymd=20080121&content_id=340901&vkey=stats_l125&fext;=.jsp&sid=l125
I've had it verified by a front office person that www.beisbolcubano.cu is blocked in the US.
beisbolcubano.cubasi.cu is available, and a few weeks ago had a page for each player, but now 'Estadisticas' links to Granma, which lists all the players, but not all the stats (like BB & SO for batters).
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/eventos/48serie/playoff/datos/epo-estad.html
Only the 8 playoff teams (out fo 16 total)
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/eventos/48serie/playoff/datos/epo-clasificados.html
Has Dan answered this question yet?
(obv, thanks!)
This looks really neat. I would have spent days and/or weeks with it back when I had time to do my own research. Sigh.
A question: what is the source of the minor league data? Is it publicly available somewhere? Lots of folks seem to have it but there is no equivalent (that I've ever found) of the Lahman database for minor league stats.
Dutch girls, yes. Dutch data, no.
It's a work in progress, started by SABR's Minor League Committee and now available through Baseball Reference.
-- MWE
Please continue to let me know when things are missing (that I haven't already said I know about).
Thanks Dan.
1996:
GCL Devil Rays (R/Gulf Coast League)
Butte Copper Kings (R+/Pioneer League)
1997:
GCL Devil Rays (R/Gulf Coast League)
Princeton Devil Rays (R+/Appalachian League)
Hudson Valley Renegades (SS A/New York-Penn League; I think it was co-op with Texas that year)
Charleston RiverDogs (A/South Atlantic League)
St. Petersburg Devil Rays (A+/Florida State League)
I played against him in mens league ball last year after he retired from professional ball. If I remember correctly, we got him out on a long fly ball to deep center, and then he hit two homers that totaled about 1000 feet. Nice guy, though.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main