Statistics | The Baseball Zealot

Rays’ getting defensive?

Just one reason for the Tampa Bay Rays upturn this year… their much improved defense according to Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus.

The Rays have gone from having one of the worst defenses in baseball history to one of the best. In fact their Defensive Efficiency Rating of .720 ranks second in baseball, just a couple ticks behind the Oakland A’s. This degree of improvement is literally without precedent. The Rays have improved their DER by 58 points this year, which is the largest year-over-year improvement that we’ve ever tracked.

The 2008 Marlins are #9 on the list as most improved.

Here’s an pretty cool web site I ran across tonight. Coach Bobby B has an extensive tutorial on his web site on how to score a baseball game. I realize I’m preaching to the choir since most reading this site probably have a pretty good idea how to do this but it’s interesting and good resource for those newbies learning the game.

Those of us in the Illowa APBA League have a lot of practice scoring games. Unlike other fantasy baseball, APBA is a simulation game. Actual games get played, stats are accumulated and therefore we need to score them.

There are ten managers in our league and we use ten different ways of scorekeeping. Everyone’s way is different. Some are incredibly thorough (bordering on anal). Others can fit six games on one side of a sheet of paper.

Anyway, for those who want to brush up on scorekeeping, take a look at How to Score Baseball.

Retrosheet upgrades their web site

Good news for stathounds. Retrosheet.org has updated their website. In addition to making changes to their user interface, they’ve added to their database.

The site looks great moving from a frame-based format to a top menubar complete with some new snazzy graphics.

More importantly, they’ve added some more seasons in their quest to add more play-by-play data from past years. According to David Smith from Retrosheet, seasons that have been added include:

1921 NL
1953 NL
1954 AL (NL was released earlier)
1955 both leagues

[Link]

Yankees leftfielders not always big on the stats…

…at least batting averages, that is. Johnny Damon may be changing that, though.

Steve L from Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day blog points out an interesting stat about the New York Yankees. He says leftfielder Damon who is currently hitting .326 may be on his way to a unusual season from a Yankee perspective.

When was the last time a Yankee leftfielder played in 100 plus games and hit more than .320? Steve did the math and you would have to go back fifteen years to 1993 when Dion James did it. James hit .332 in 115 games.

Ok, that’s believable but before James, you would have to go all the way back to 1927 when Bob Meusel hit .337 in 137 games.

An unusual occurrence indeed.

Happy birthday to the Stat of the Day blog, by the way, which celebrated its first birthday one week ago. The SOTD blog, hosted by Baseball Reference is a fun diversion for me where folks research statistical oddities, ironies, and other interesting fun facts. Check them out.

Baseball Reference makes awesome improvements in Minor League stats

Baseball Reference is always making improvements but I’m pretty impressed with their latest developments. Those of you who monitor players in the minors, you’re really going to like this.

First, they have made the leap to displaying up-to-date stats for all minor league teams affiliated with a major league team. They are displayed in the familiar format that anyone who is used to using B-R. That is, viewing a player’s page with his career stats and/or viewing a team’s page with its roster. Historical minor stats for players and teams are kept going back to the year 1992. B-R also features minor league leaderboards, award winners and draft listings.

Some examples:

2008 Iowa Cubs team page

Carmen Pignatiello’s player page

Pacific Coast League 2008 standings page (with links to sortable batting and pitching leaders)

Second, and I think this is pretty neat, Baseball Reference has set up for each major league team a dynamic listing of minor leaguers in their system sorted by position. What is essentially a franchise depth chart. Here is the Chicago Cubs depth chart, for example.

What a handy way to get a quick snapshot of an organization’s minor league development!

Soriano? Leadoff? Still?

According to Cubs beat writer Carrie Muskat, Sweet Lou Piniella is mulling over a 3-4-5 combination of Fuk, Lee, and Aram. Well, unless he plans to bat Soriano 6th, that probably means he means to continue the waste of power by batting Alfonso leadoff.

Sure enough, later in article, Muskat seems to read my mind and confirms a lot of Cub fans’ fears. She writes, “Alfonso Soriano would still lead off, followed by Ryan Theriot.”

I used to justify Soriano batting leadoff saying that it was the only place he could produce offensively. Which was true. You could look it up. But now, it’s getting frustrating and I’m wondering if it’s a self-imposed limitation. On the last podcast, Todd V expressed the same sentiment saying that it’s a case of a player making a decision for the team.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Soriano. I actually reeeeaaallly like him. I love his attitude. I like the fact that he shows up early to spring training. I like that last year, when Felix Pie was new to the team and new to the town, he befriended him and and made him welcome to the point of inviting him to his house for dinner. I like the fact that he’s made great strides in improving his defense so now we can even say, “Hey, he’s actually not bad out there!”.

But dang it, someone who hits 30+ homeruns should have more than 70 rbis. It’s no surprise, that’s the lowest figure in the majors for players with 30 homers. It’s not even close… Griffey is second with 93.

And if he isn’t driving in runs, he should be scoring them. Soriano didn’t break the century mark in 2007 with 97. A good number to be sure but not warranting a power hitter hitting in the leadoff spot.

Soriano historically has had issues with getting on base. To his credit, he HAS improved but not that much. Three years ago with Texas, he had a horrendous .309 OBP. He’s improved to .351 and .337 respectively.

But again, not enough and waste of power.

Lou Piniella has won more World Championships than I have and I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. But his reluctance to move Soriano out of the leadoff spot still frustrates me.

The Baseball Zealot’s Top Reference Web Sites for Every Baseball Fan- Part 3

This is the last of a three part series of articles where I talk about my favorite baseball websites I use for research and reference. In Part One, I hit on the top stats sites and in Part Two, I focused on prospect and player development.

In Part Three, it will be a bit of eclectic hodgepodge but a couple sites fall into the category of historical data collecting.

Baseball Almanac/Baseball LogoServer

Baseball LogoServer is exactly what it sounds like. It displays logos of pretty much every baseball team that has ever existed. We’re talking current major league teams as well as historical teams but it doesn’t stop there. Baseball LogoServer shows off the colors of teams from the Negro Leagues, Japanese leagues, most minor leagues, college conferences, even older defunct leagues like the Federal League, Players League and the Union Association.

The LogoServer is a fun trip through baseball history in graphic format. And for those interested, it has logos for other sports, too.

The Baseball LogoServer is associated with The Baseball Almanac, a website dedicated to preserving the history of the game of baseball. The Baseball Almanac probably deserves its own entry here given its breadth of historic data. The site is filled of pages of famous firsts, records, lists of all sorts and other baseball trivia. Those who are really into the history of baseball should definitely bookmark Baseball Almanac.

Hit Tracker

Make no mistake about it, the hits that Hit Tracker are talking about are Homeruns. This website is all about the dinger, tater, long ball and the four-bagger.

Hit Tracker is a online database of homeruns hit. With an interactive interface, you can find out all kinds of info about homeruns that have been hit (their info goes back to 2005) including true distance, wind speed, speed off bat, elevation angle. The site even includes a link to MLB.com’s video of the shot if you want to watch it.

Hit Tracker also has a leaderboard for non-conventional categories such as Homerun Distance, No Doubts (Homeruns that clear the fence with no problem) and Just Enoughs (those that just barely make it).

Baseball Library

Baseball Library.com is a database of player (both current and historical) biographies. I’m impressed at the number of entries in this database. Granted, the lesser known ones have smaller bios but they are there.

There are two features that make Baseball Library stand out:

Chronology: The Chronology for each player is so helpful. Essentially, it is a timeline with entries with important events in the player’s career. This includes transactional moves, great games, basically any time they made the news in a big way. There are helpful links to other players, teams and dates to further the interactive process.

Related Info: Under Related Info, Baseball Library provides links to news stories or articles about the player.

For info on individual players, Baseball Library is the first place I go.

That ends my series of Top Reference Web Sites for Every Baseball Fan.

All sites reviewed are ones that I use as often as I can. By the way, I polled the Baseball Zealot think tank on sites they used. The ones they used that I just didn’t have the time/space to write about include: Rototimes, Tango on Baseball, Fangraghs, Baseball America Online, ESPN, and CBS Sportsline.

I personally want to put a good word in for USA Today Sports. They display all the box scores on one page and I use them for that reason alone.

Here is the link to all three articles in the series.

I hope you enjoyed reading it and found it useful.

The Baseball Zealot’s Top Reference Web Sites for Every Baseball Fan- Part 2

This is the second in a three part series of the websites I find incredibly useful when researching the game of baseball. In Part One, I got to the heavy hitters but these websites are equally important. They are more focused on prospect forecasting, player development, and scouting.

Again, in no particular order:

The Baseball Cube

If I’m researching an up-and-coming prospect, The Baseball Cube is one my first stops. Yes, TBC has major league stats but to me, its strength is that I can easily find minor league and college numbers on any player.

Like other stats sites that cater to Major League baseball, TBC provides us with the same interactivity with minor league and college baseball teams. College team pages even provide quick links to players who have been drafted.

The stats are complete (they even include Spring Training numbers). In addition, the TBC has a baseball draft index that includes every baseball draft that occurred. One project that The Baseball Cube seems to have undertaken is the High School Alumni database matches players from their high school.

For updates, commentary and other related Baseball Cube matters, you can read The Baseball Cube Blog.

First Inning

First Inning bills itself as the website with “Insights on Baseball Player Development”. All players from rookie league to the major leagues fall within its scope. For each prospect and big leaguer, you get a host of statistical data from the basic stats to longitudinal trends to even batted ball charts.

For each MLB team, we are treated with a list of prospects categorized by readiness. Quite handy for those fantasy rookie drafts.

My personal favorite part of First Inning is the “Your Page” function. You can register for free then if you want to follow a player, his link will be on your page in First Inning. This is particularly useful for those minor leaguers you want to keep track of.

Baseball Prospectus

For everyone, Baseball Prospectus provides articles with excellent analysis not to mention their podcast, Baseball Prospectus Radio if you like your analysis in audio format.

Baseball Prospectus Online is the companion website to the popular Baseball Prospectus annual publication. It isn’t strictly dedicated to fantasy baseball or news reporting, but somewhere in between with a strong slant on statistical analysis. Stats like VORP, EqA, and PECOTA are defined and well-explained. Some of the best baseball writing you’ll find anywhere on the web or in print can be found here. I would rank Will Carroll as my favorite. His analysis of baseball injuries and the effects of steroids is the best in the business. Full access to all the Baseball Prospectus online content costs $39.95/year. Unlike all other pay sites, this one is full worth the money spent. In fact, it is the only web site that I personally pay money to read. It’s that good, whether you’re fantasy junkie or news hound, there’s a lot of worthwhile stuff to be found here.

Thanks to Shawn Lee who contributed to this article. When I informed him of my idea for this series, he rattled off a bunch of websites he uses… some I’ve never heard of. Maybe I’ll get HIM to write an update to this article someday.

Part 3, which will be an fun, eclectic assortment of websites, is forthcoming.

The Baseball Zealot’s Top Reference Web Sites for Every Baseball Fan- Part 1

Back when I became a hard core baseball fan, the one way to get access to data was to wait for the local newspaper to print them. For me it was Tuesday for the NL stats and Wednesday for the AL. Boy, I couldn’t wait to open the sports page on those days.

Obviously, things have changed with the advent of the Internet. Now we have any kind of data we want with a few mouse-clicks.

With that, I decided to write a series of posts detailing my favorite reference web sites I use when I want baseball stats, data or any sort of reference information.

A few points before we get started:

Keep in mind that I will be discussing websites which have a focus on stats, data or referential information. Not blogs, team fansites, or general baseball websites.
These sites are not necessarily listed in any order of preference.
I realize that there are the popular ones out there (I’m talking about the big media ones). I’m trying not to focus on them since you probably know about them (chances are you probably know the ones listed too).

In Part 1, I’m going to focus primarily on those web sites that focus primarily on stats. Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will discuss minor league and fantasy league sites.

Well, here goes:

Retrosheet

Any talk of baseball stats reference web sites begins with Retrosheet.org. Not only is it useful as an end user site but many sites use the data from it as a back end.

The mission of Retrosheet is threefold:

First is the collection of the game accounts… The second activity is the translation of these accounts to a unified, modern system which is essential since there are an extraordinary variety of scoring systems which have been used. The final activity is the entry of the translated accounts into the computer.

The end result is a compilation of boxscores and game accounts which are accessible by browser or downloadable in database form.

The philosophy behind Retrosheet.org is refreshing if unusual in this day and age.

The ultimate objective of Retrosheet is to make this basic play by play

information publicly available for all interested researchers.

Graphically, there’s nothing fancy about Retrosheet. No clickable maps or glowing images. Just honest to goodness baseball data. Do make the effort to check out their Noteworthy Events page, though. It’s very interesting.

We managed to have Mark Pankin from Retrosheet on our podcast earlier this year. It’s a very interesting show if you’re interested in the inner workings of Retrosheet.org

Baseball Reference

I honestly don’t know what I’d do without Baseball Reference. When I doing my APBA replay of the 1979 season B-R.com was indispensable. This baseball stats site has it all. In addition to being organized well, it is very interactive.

Stats are updated daily and are organized by league, team, and player. Historical stats from the beginning of organized baseball can be viewed as well as leaderboards for every stat. We can also view postseason stats, manager records, and awards.

Baseball Award has recently unveiled Play Index which can help determine streaks, events, and splits. Caveat: Some of more intense searches for Play Index require a paid subscription.

One of my favorite blogs is Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day. A dedicated cadre of stat freaks who play around with B-R’s Play Index post interesting stat anomalies.

Founder Sean Forman was kind enough to come on Baseball Zealot Radio to talk to us about Baseball Reference in January 2007.

Day by Day Database

David Pinto who keeps us all up to date on baseball news on Baseball Musings also has a little gem almost hidden away called Day by Day Database. This database is quite handy for:

viewing batting and pitching logs
comparing players stats over a given time
viewing batting, pitching and team splits over a given time
viewing batting and pitching streaks

Again, nothing fancy here but the interface is simple if you know what data you want. As is true for most event databases like this, the data goes back to 1957.

I find this most handy for splits data. With one search, I can find out stats on twelve different splits on Albert Pujols for the month of May 2007. Sometimes, you just gotta know.

MLB.com’s Sortable Player Stats

Sometimes the best place to get stats is the horse’s mouth. MLB.com’s Sortable Player Stats database is run on a robust engine and is very customizable.

Yes, it’s sortable on all stats and yes, you can filter by pretty much anything. It covers splits on all levels. However, the one thing that this database does that I haven’t seen elsewhere is the Milestone Tracker. This convenient little tool allows you to see which milestones (both who’s passing who and passing those all-important numbers) will be met in the coming future or have been achieved recently.

New for the MLB.com Sortable Player Stats: It now covers Winter League stats and Arizona Fall League stats.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will be highlighting websites that focus on minor leagues and fantasy baseball.

Dukes on his way to Washington

Elijah Dukes is on his way to the Nats for Glenn Gibson, a relative unknown lefty with a good BB/K ratio.

Andy from Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day points out that this year, Dukes broke the record for homers among first-year players who batted .200 or less.

1987 Matt Williams is third on the list with 8.

Category: Statistics