Statistically Speaking Latest Blog Posts |
Add as Favorite
Claim Blog 
|
http://mvn.com/mlb-stats - MVN - a statistical and sabermetric baseball blog
.
Recently I was over at Bucco Blog discussing the Pirates’ trading away of
Jason
Bay. An earlier rumor had Bay headed to
Tampa
Bay in exchange for Reid Brignac and Jeff Niemann, but instead the Red Sox obtained Bay, with the Pirates receiving Andy LaRoche and Brandon Moss, along with two minor league pitchers. I posted a
spreadsheet of Minor League Equivalencies (MLEs) to ...
Tags:
MLB
Pittsburgh Pirates
1
0
1
The roundtable probably looks a little different this
week. Not only is it appearing on a Wednesday,
but it features a few new names bantering back and forth. This week, the roundtable welcomes brand new full-time StatSpeak contributors Brian ...
Tags:
MLB
I’ve had two types of jobs in my life. The first started when I was 10 years old. My father runs a bunch of parking garages for a living, and his assistant manager at the parking lot had a side business selling baseball cards (and old comics) at card shows. I was never one for comics, but I could talk about baseball all day, so I stayed on that end of the table and sold cards to ...
Tags:
MLB
A couple weeks back we discussed standard deviations, t-tests, and z-scores in primer fashion to help alleviate any confusion stemming from the usage of certain terms in our articles. I got a very nice reaction from readers, asking for more, so I’m going to continue this “series” at least twice a month. Today, the topics at hand are control groups and selection bias.
A ...
Tags:
MLB
1
0
If you’re interested in starting a fistfight at
the next SABR convention (not that I’m advising this)
simply start bringing up DIPS in casual conversation loudly enough and I’m sure you can get something going. Voros McCracken set up the ...
Tags:
MLB
Instead of my regularly scheduled post for today there have been some developments behind the scenes here at Statistically Speaking that Pizza Cutter and I are very happy to bring forth to the public. We had a good talk about the future of this blog and decided to expand!
It is important in managing a blog to put out quality content as often as possible in order to keep readers coming back ...
Tags:
MLB
1
0
Who is baseball’s answer to Scottie Pippen? Baseball
has an answer to Michael Jordan (he did flail
around in AA for a while with the White Sox), but who in baseball deserves the Pippen-esque title King of the Second Bananas? Technically, ...
Tags:
MLB
2
0
StatSpeak is pleased today to welcome Paul DePodesta
to the roundtable. Paul is currently working as a
Special Assistant for Baseball Operations (when I asked Paul what his official title was, he said “Ballboy is good enough”) for the ...
Tags:
MLB
Yesterday we took a cursory look at the splits of closers in saves vs. non-save situations. Using a sample of 696 player seasons and 220 unique closers from 1980-2007 it was discovered that, yes, it appears closers perform worse in non-save situations. The metrics discrepancies were not drastic to the tune of a 2.00 ERA vs. a 5.00 ERA, but they were statistically different via our paired ...
Tags:
MLB
Eric Gagne
Dennis Eckersley
Keith Foulke
1
0
We’ve all seen it happen, right? Your team
trails or leads by five or six runs, and
in an attempt to rest the everyday heroes of the bullpen, the closer is called into action. He then gives up a few runs, all meaningless in the true context ...
Tags:
MLB
And now something that brightened my day. It’s my wife’s birthday today (Happy Birthday sweetheart!), so I didn’t exactly need my day brightened, but this made it extra-super-duper-bright…
Someone over at ESPN decided to do an article on the most over-rated position in sports. Their pick: the closer. There’s even a second article on how K-Rod being ...
Tags:
MLB
ESPN
For those not familiar, the Marcel system is Sabermetrician Tom Tango’s system for projecting statistics in the coming year. The idea is simple enough, and he’s been rather emphatic about that being the entire point. The steps in short:
Take three years worth of prior data (if available)
Regress to the mean (if you don’t know what that is, more on that in a minute)
...
Tags:
MLB
4
0
The roundtable today welcomes J.C. Bradbury, the man
behind Sabernomics , and author of the book The
Baseball Economist . (Ed. note: that means that J.C.’s got a book, Eric’s got a book, and I’ve got… yeah… -P.C.) ...
1
0
My general process of writing an article begins
with a thought or question. Last week, I asked
myself whether or not hitters truly do perform worse following their participation in the home run derby. From there, data entry and preliminary research ...
Quick, without any research or advanced thought, name baseball’s career leader in ERA! No, not Walter Johnson. It isn’t Cy Young either. Bob Gibson isn’t the answer nor is Sandy Koufax. The answer, friends, is Ed Walsh, a White Sox pitcher prior to the 1919 scandal. Kind of ironic that ERA is used as an end all barometer today and finds itself atop the lists of many ...
Tags:
MLB
Ed Walsh
I’ve got to hand it to the Los Angeles California Angels of Anaheim, California which is near Los Angeles. They didn’t get the Garrett Anderson replacement that they needed, but they got something that might end up being even better for them. And they didn’t really give up a lot. The Braves got hosed.
In case you missed it, the LACAoACwinLA’s got Mark Teixeira ...
Tags:
MLB
Los Angeles Angels
Mark Teixeira
Atlanta Braves
Casey Kotchman
1
0
The roundtable rolls into the trading deadline this
week with a visit from Sky King, who runs
his own blog (with a hint of lime). For a recap of all the moves that may or may not be made at the trading deadline in real time, be sure to tune into ...
OPA! is more or less finished. OPA! is my Retrosheet compatible fielding system that is based on out probability added above average (OPAAA… get it? OPA!) Over the past few weeks, I’ve been refining the system little by little, and I’ve finally gotten it where I want it. Now, I can have some fun with it.
For my first trick, I wrote some code that assigned a run value ...
Tags:
MLB
Greg Maddux
All-Star Game
Every now and again I’ll get an e-mail asking me to explain certain statistics terms or methods used in an article from myself, Pizza Cutter, or whomever. While I do not profess myself to be an all-out expert, I did pay attention in my classes through high school and college, and gladly try to make a post an author slaved over more enjoyable through a learned understanding. I pride ...
Tags:
MLB
1
0
In 2005, Bobby Abreu of the Phillies put
on a showcase at the Home Run Derby, breaking
the single-round record en route to a derby victory. All told, Abreu swatted 41 home runs into the Detroit stands that night. Since that fateful day, three and a ...
World Famous StatSpeak Roundtable: August 20