The statistical impact of switching leagues (for hitters) (flag)

www.hardballtimes.com — Monday, December 01, 2008 The statistical impact of switching leagues (for hitters) Posted by Derek Carty at 2:13am December is here and the rumor mill is churning. It's getting to be that time when the moves start to come at a faster pace, and with it, we're bound to see players ...

MLB

Al Reyes

Manny Ramirez

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• Psings

  +1

  Derek, nice article. Your methodology is good with the age adjusting, weighting and all, but even with that I think this is the type of study where including a few more years in the study would be benefical to the results.

  I'm not sure exactly how many batters were in the samples, but my initial feelings are that individual players improving/declining from 2007 to 2008 may have too large an impact. 

   I'd love to see you do this for another set of years to see if the results are similar. Great stuff.

   Paul

  Posted 12/1/2008 respond (flag)

• Ryan Langrill

  +1

  Good article. Just one thing...

  "a move to the NL would still allow a batter to hit an additional homer every nine at-bats given the big HR/FB spike."

  I hope so, because the Cubs could then trade for Teahan, who would then hit upwards of 80 homers. Should that be "An additional homer every nine fly balls"? Even that seems a bit high.

  Posted 12/2/2008 respond (flag)

  • Derek Carty

    +1

    Thanks for the catch, Ryan.  I'm not sure what I was thinking exactly.  We don't really treat the AB/HR stat as a percentage, meaning that looking at raw changes (as I originally did) will result in differing effects for each batter (and will give us wildly different results depending on which batters are in our sample).  Looking at it as a percentage (HR/AB) fixes this.

    I've made changes to the article (also fixing the 1B, 2B, and 3B stats, which were treated the same way as AB/HR), and I'll be sure to put an 'Errata' section into the corresponding article I do on pitcher directing readers back to this article to recognize the changes.

    Thanks very much.

    Also, as a quick side note, if I were a Cubs fan, I would be desperately hoping that a Teahen trade does not happen.  A quick glance at the numbers doesn't look pretty at all.

    Posted 12/2/2008 respond (flag)

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