Tough Losses July 8, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, Dan Haren, Jon Niese, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Ubaldo Jimenez, weird lines, Year of the Pitcher, Yovani Gallardo
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Last night, Jonathon Niese pitched 7.2 innings of respectable work (6 hits, 3 runs, all earned, 1 walk, 8 strikeouts, 2 home runs, for a game score of 62) but still took the loss due to his unfortunate lack of run support – the Mets’ only run came in from an Angel Pagan solo homer. This is a prime example of what Bill James called a “Tough Loss”: a game in which the starting pitcher made a quality start but took a loss anyway.
There are two accepted measures of what a quality start is. Officially, a quality start is one with 6 or more innings pitched and 3 or fewer runs. Bill James’ definition used his game score statistic and used 50 as the cutoff point for a quality start. Since a pitcher gets 50 points for walking out on the mound and then adds to or subtracts from that value based on his performance, game score has the nice property of showing whether a pitcher added value to the team or not.
Using the game score definition, there were 393 losses in quality starts last year, including 109 by July 7th. Ubaldo Jimenez and Dan Haren led the league with 7, Roy Halladay had 6, and Yovani Gallardo (who’s quickly becoming my favorite player because he seems to show up in every category) was also up there with 6.
So far this year, though, it seems to be the Year of the Tough Loss. There have already been 230, and Roy Oswalt is already at the 6-tough-loss mark. Halladay is already up at 4. This is consistent with the talk of the Year of the Pitcher, with better pitching (and potentially less use of performance-enhancing drugs) leading to lower run support. That will require a bit more work to confirm, though.
How often should Youk take his base? June 30, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, binomial distribution, Brett Carroll, Greek God of Take Your Base, hit batsmen, hit by pitch, Kevin Youkilis, R
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Kevin Youkilis is sometimes called “The Greek God of Walks.” I prefer to think of him as “The Greek God of Take Your Base,” since he seems to get hit by pitches at an alarming rate. In fact, this year, he’s been hit 7 times in 313 plate appearances. (Rickie Weeks, however, is leading the pack with 13 in 362 plate appearances. We’ll look at him, too.) There are three explanations for this:
- There’s something about Youk’s batting or his hitting stance that causes him to be hit. This is my preferred explanation. Youkilis has an unusual batting grip that thrusts his lead elbow over the plate, and as he swings, he lunges forward, which exposes him to being plunked more often.
- Youkilis is such a hitting machine that the gets hit often in order to keep him from swinging for the fences. This doesn’t hold water, to me. A pitcher could just as easily put him on base safely with an intentional walk, so unless there’s some other incentive to hit him, there’s no reason to risk ejection by throwing at Youkilis. This leads directly to…
- Youk is a jerk. This is pretty self-explanatory, and is probably a factor.
First of all, we need to figure out whether it’s likely that Kevin is being hit by chance. To figure that out, we need to make some assumptions about hit batsmen and evaluate them using the binomial distribution. I’m also excited to point out that Youk has been overtaken as the Greek God of Take Your Base by someone new: Brett Carroll. (more…)
Edwin Jackson, Fourth No-Hitter of 2010 June 25, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: baseball-reference.com, BayesBall, Dallas Braden, Diamondbacks, Edwin Jackson, no-hitters, poisson distribution, Rays, Roy Halladay, Ubaldo Jimenez
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Tonight, Edwin Jackson of the Arizona Diamondbacks pitched a no-hitter against the Tampa Bay Rays. That’s the fourth no-hitter of this year, following Ubaldo Jimenez and the perfect games by Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay.
Two questions come to mind immediately:
- How likely is a season with 4 no-hitters?
- Does this mean we’re on pace for a lot more?
The second question is pretty easy to dispense with. Taking a look at the list of all no-hitters (which interestingly enough includes several losses), it’s hard to predict a pattern. No-hitters aren’t uniformly distributed over time, so saying that we’ve had 4 no-hitters in x games doesn’t tell us anything meaningful about a pace.
The first is a bit more interesting. I’m interested in the frequency of no-hitters, so I’m going to take a look at the list of frequencies here and take a page from Martin over at BayesBall in using the Poisson distribution to figure out whether this is something we can expect.
The Poisson distribution takes the form
where 
Using Martin’s numbers – 201506 opportunities for no-hitters and an average of 4112 games per season from 1961 to 2009 – I looked at the number of no-hitters since 1961 (120) and determined that an average season should return about 2.44876 no-hitters. That means
and
Above is the distribution. p is the probability of exactly n no-hitters being thrown in a single season of 4112 games; cdf is the cumulative probability, or the probability of n or fewer no-hitters; p49 is the predicted number of seasons out of 49 (1961-2009) that we would expect to have n no-hitters; obs is the observed number of seasons with n no-hitters; cp49 is the predicted number of seasons with n or fewer no-hitters; and cobs is the observed number of seasons with n or fewer no-hitters.
It’s clear that 4 or even 5 no-hitters is a perfectly reasonable number to expect.
| 2.448760831 |
AJ Burnett: Statistical Anomaly June 21, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: 2 outs, Adam LaRoche, AJ Burnett, baseball-reference.com, first inning, home run, Justin Upton, Mark Reynolds, weird lines
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Tonight, A.J. Burnett had a weird first inning in a game that’s still going on as I write this. He got the first two outs fairly easily, and then surrendered home runs to Justin Upton, Adam LaRoche, and Mark Reynolds. Before he knew it, he was down 5-0 in the bottom of the first. That can’t happen very often.
I queried Baseball-Reference.com’s event finder for home runs, then narrowed it down to first inning home-runs with two outs this year. Prior to tonight, there had been 82. None of them came in three-homer games – that answers that.
Just for fun, I checked 2009 as well. In total, there were 209 2-out, first-inning home runs in 2009. Only one of those home runs happened in a three-homer game, so it didn’t happen then, either.
Poor AJ.
Carlos Zambrano, Ace Pinch Hitter? June 21, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, bullpen, Carlos Zambrano, Cubs, Joba Chamberlain, Lou Piniella, Micah Owings, RE24, relief, setup man, starter, Ubaldo Jimenez
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Earlier this year, Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella experimented with moving starting pitcher and relatively big hitter Carlos Zambrano to the bullpen, briefly making him the Major Leagues’ best-paid setup man. Zambrano is back in the rotation as of the beginning of June. I’m curious what the effect of moving him to the bullpen was.
The thing is that not only is Zambrano an excellent pitcher (though he was slumping at the time), he’s also a regarded as a very good hitter for a pitcher. He’s a career .237 hitter, with a slump last year at “only” .217 in 72 plate appearances (17th most in the National League), which was 6th in the National League among pitchers with at least 50 plate appearances. He didn’t walk enough (his OBP was 13th on the same list), but he was 9th of the 51 pitchers on the list in terms of Base-Out Runs Added (RE24) with about 5.117 runs below a replacement-level batter. Ubaldo Jimenez was also up there with a respectable .220 BA, .292 OBP, but -8.950 RE24.
It should be pointed out that pitcher RE24 is almost always negative for starters – the best RE24 on that list is Micah Owings with -2.069. Zambrano’s run contribution was negative, sure, but it was a lot less negative than most starters. Zambrano also lost a bit of flexibility as an emergency pinch hitter (something that Owings is going through right now due to his recent move to the bullpen) – he’s more valuable as a reliever, so they won’t use him to pinch hit. As a result, he loses at-bats, and that not only keeps him from amassing hits. It also allows him to get rusty.
It’s hard to precisely value the loss of Zambrano’s contribution, although he’s already on pace for -6.1 batting RE24. It’s likely, in my opinion, that his RE24 will rise as he continues hitting over the course of the year. His pitching value is also negative, however, which is unusual. He’s always been very respectable among Cubs starters. It’s possible that although he was pitching very well in relief, the fact that he has the ability to go long means that it’s inefficient to use him as a reliever. This is the opposite of, say, Joba Chamberlain, who is overpowering in relief but struggles as a starter.
As a starter, Zambrano has never been a net loss of runs. He needs to stay out of the bullpen, and Joba needs to stay there.
Leadoff Home Runs June 19, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: baseball-reference.com, Jose Reyes, leadoff home runs, Mets, Nate McLouth, Phil Hughes, Subway Series, Yankees
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Jose Reyes led off today’s Mets-Yankees game with a home run off Phil Hughes. That’s the eleventh leadoff home run of the year. That’s a little over half as many as there were last year on June 19, when Nate McLouth hit the 19th leadoff home run of 2009.
Last year, there were 51 leadoff home runs over roughly 6 months (early April through the first week of October), which puts uniformly distributed homers at 8.5 per month (so McLouth’s #19 on June 19 was about 2.25 behind pace). So far, with eleven over 2.5 months, that puts us on pace for 26.4, or, to be generous, about 30 leadoff home runs.
The change probably isn’t indicative of anything other than chance, but in 2008 #24 of 52 came on June 20, and in 2007 they were already up to 28 of 59 by June 19. Over the past few years there’s been a slowing of leadoff home runs which may be due to chance or may be due to some other factor. Who knows? It’s way too small a sample to say anything about.
Appearances as Pitcher and DH June 17, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: baseball-reference.com, Cardinals, designated hitter, Diamondbacks, Felipe Lopez, Jeff Kunkel, Mark Loretta, pitcher, Wade Boggs
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Earlier this year, Felipe Lopez pitched in relief for the St. Louis Cardinals in their 20-inning game against the Mets. Last year, he also played DH during an interleague game for Arizona. That made me curious how many players have at least one appearance each at DH and pitcher. I generated this table at Baseball Reference to check.
Several of these – for example, the bottom two in the list – were pitchers who started games at DH to allow their managers to insert hitting specialists when the DH came up. This led to a rule that the DH has to come to bat at least once unless the opposing team changes pitchers.
More interesting are the three at the top of the list – Jeff Kunkel, Wade Boggs, and Mark Loretta – all of whom have two seasons in which they both DHed and pitched. Loretta pitched an inning in 2001 and a single out in 2009, with Kunkel pitching for Texas in 1988 and 1989 and Boggs pitching for the Yankees in 1997 and the Rays in 1999. Hopefully the Cards will find an excuse to DH Lopez at some point this year just to even things out.
Trends in DH use June 11, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, designated hitter, economics, Interleague play, Mets, regression, sports economics, Stuff Keith Hernandez Says
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Last night, Keith Hernandez was talking about how the Mets are scheduled to play in American League parks starting, well, today. He pointed out that the Mets will be in a bit of a pickle because they aren’t built, as AL teams are, to carry one big hitter to be the full-time DH. Instead, an NL team will be forced to spread the wealth among lighter hitters who are carried for their defensive acumen as well as their offensive prowess. Keith then corrected himself and said that AL managers are using the DH differently – to rest individual players instead of having an everyday DH.
That pinged my “Stuff Keith Hernandez says” meter, and so I decided to crunch some numbers and see if that’s true. I interpreted Keith’s statement as implying that the number of designated hitters should be increasing, since managers are moving away from an everyday DH and toward spreading the DH assignments around a bit more. The crunching also needs to account for interleague play, which should obviously increase the number of DHes. So, after controlling for interleague play, does DH use show an increasing trend with time?
Early one-hitters June 11, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, Jon Niese, Mat Latos, Mets, Padres
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Last night was an unusual confluence of events, in that the Mets lost the first game of a day-night doubleheader against the Padres and won the second game, with Jonathon Niese pitching a one-hit complete game in his 18th career appearance. That seems fairly unusual, so I generated a table with pitcher W, Complete game, 1 hit or less. It turns out that since 1920 there have only been 55 of them, and one of them belonged to the Padres’ game one starter, Mat Latos.
The complete table is here.
Win, 1 Batter Faced June 10, 2010
Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.Tags: Baseball, baseball-reference.com, Chris Narveson, Elmer Dessens, Eric O'Flaherty, George Kottaras, John Parrish, Jorge Sosa, Mets, Pedro Feliciano, Randy Flores, weird lines
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So far this year, 15 games have ended with the winning pitcher having faced only one batter. Using Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index, I ran a search for those games to examine the trends. The most recent was Elmer Dessens, but the Mets’ Pedro Feliciano leads the league with two.
The most interesting fact to me was that only one third of the games were won by left-handed pitchers (Feliciano twice, Eric O’Flaherty, Randy Flores, and John Parrish). That doesn’t quite make sense because LHPs are more likely to come in for one batter than RHPs. (So far, 189 right-handers have games with one batter faced, compared with 198 lefties). That indicates that wins aren’t distributed uniformly across appearances.
Also interesting is the efficiency shown by Jorge Sosa in the Marlins’ May 31 game against the Brewers. He threw one pitch to pitcher Chris Narveson, who was doubled up along with catcher George Kottaras. Sosa ended up credited with 2/3 of an inning pitched and the win.
