Beyond the Box Score - A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

The Pitching DiamondView is here.

by Justin Bopp on Feb 8, 2010 2:55 PM EST in Graph of the Day Comment 48 comments

The cost of all great combined statistics is both understanding and context. Gross Domestic Product, for example, offers a combined look of various economic measures of consumption, investment, and spending, but overlooks sustainability, quality, and distribution. It's a nice stat that those that understand can glean meaning from, but generally doesn't help the average person understand what is really happening, other than "bigger is better, right?"

Having exhausted what little knowledge my Economics for Administration class and risky use of wikipedia provides, we can look at any statistical approach and see somewhat glaring omissions or oversights in combined one-for-all statistics. Still, the natural human tendency is to look for the one combination of all things known into a single description that tells us everything we need to know about a particular subject. For the NFL, we have QB Rating (ugh), for Physics, string theory, and for social networkers, the still unnamed "# of unwanted comments from ancillary friends per post."

The same need exists for baseball fans. The conclusion I came to after some extended consideration (beer and videogames), is that perhaps the best way to describe some total package of talent is visually, rather than numerically.

Thus, the DiamondView was born.

The Pitching DiamondView tells exactly what kind of pitcher we're looking at.

The DiamondView, as you may already know, is a visual way of describing the classic 5-tool set of hitting, power, running speed, arm strength, and fielding. Combining arm strength and fielding into one point on the graph, the results are something that works for both sabermetricians and the average baseball fan as a single-view tool to understand the type of player he or she is observing. The benefit (and goal), other than looking at the pretty colors, is the ability to look at an unlabled DiamondView and be able to guess which position that player plays. The cost, and why we're here, is the glaring omission of the other half of the game: pitching.

The Pitching DiamondView is this author's attempt to fill that need.

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BtB's "Ball On A Budget" Fantasy League - Discuss Participants, Payrolls and Position Eligibility

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Feb 8, 2010 2:41 PM EST Comment 22 comments

It would be nice to get the WAR draft started as soon as possible, but we do not have enough people signed up to do all the team payrolls, yet alone sending them to me finished (thanks Zach). I will now open up the draft to all the alternates. Just let me know which team you want and get me data. Here is a link to thread for how to do the payrolls. I will begin adding them as I get them to this location. Finally, we still need 4 more managers to help run the league that do not have to do the payrolls, but will have to do a few posts. Let's get the data done so we can get drafting. I know Sky is just itching to get Jose Guillen.

Also, anyone can feel free to join now and select a team to research.

List of participants, teams selected and status after the jump.

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On February 3, 2010, Deep Focus, Inc. withdrew its application to trademark the term "sabermetrics" for social media consulting services.

Sabermetrics was coined by statistician Bill James, who first introduced the word to readers of his Abstract in March 1980, writing: "Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records." Since that time, sabermetrics has become a ubiquitous part of the baseball landscape at all levels and by players, front office staff, the media, and fans alike. Most major league teams use sabermetrically derived statistics as part of their player evaluations. Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America and others who report on baseball refer to sabermetrics and its metrics on a regular basis. Recently James has said that sabermetrics is a "declaration of no ownership of knowledge."

From a press release by the Society for American Baseball Research, whoever they are.

about 9 hours ago SFiercex4 4 comments 0 recs

Ramblings on WAR

The first part of a sorta series on WAR for Viva El Birdos. Really, I'm just going into the theoretical and not really getting too technical with the exact calculations.

1 day ago vivaelpujols 0 comments 0 recs

Another F-Lop Post

by Satchel Price on Feb 5, 2010 2:13 PM EST Comment 15 comments

More photos » Rick Scuteri - AP

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On Wednesday, I wrote about how Felipe Lopez wasn't getting enough attention in comparison to his positional peer, Orlando Hudson. Well, as pretty much everyone knows, yesterday the Twins made an absolutely excellent deal to sign Hudson for $5M over one year.

Now, I'm not going to talk about that signing. Low relative price, consistently solid player, fits absolutely perfectly into their roster's needs. It's your basic good one-year free agent signing.

Rather, I'd like to ask the question: Why the hell does nobody like Felipe Lopez?

A slightly above average defensive second baseman with legitimate offensive upside who's coming off of the second 4.6 WAR season of his career. His reputation doesn't come close to that of Hudson so he has not garnered nearly the same attention.

Now that Hudson has signed for $5M ~~plus incentives~~ (I knew that) on a one-year deal, what is Lopez going to ask for? Something similar to what Xavier Nady signed for (one-year, $3.3M plus incentives)? Because at something slightly less than the bargain price that Hudson signed for, Lopez could very well make Hudson look like an overpayment.

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DiamondView 2.010: Los Angeles Dodgers

by Justin Bopp on Feb 5, 2010 11:00 AM EST in Graph of the Day Comment 26 comments

If you've been paying attention to this series (or are somewhat of a masochist), you know that the 2009 DiamondView series ended with the Los Angeles Dodgers with calls for something a little less in the past and a something a little more in the future, predictive if possible. One thing lead to another, and blammo, the DiamondView 2.010 series was born.

Rather than go straight back to LA, the new series stayed in the NL West and began with the Colorado Rockies, and continued with the Arizona Diamondbacks, the San Francisco Giants, and the San Diego Padres. To make each of these even better, we invited our favorite writers from each team site to provide guest commentary for each highlighted player, and the combined results have been absolutely fantastic.

It is with that in mind that the final DiamondView stop in the NL West is with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I couldn't be more proud of how this compares to the 2009 version. It really is impressive if you look at both side-by-side. On top of all that sweetness, I am excited to announce that one of my absolute favorite writers on all of SBN, Eric Stephen of True Blue LA, is here to offer guest commentary for the Dodgers edition. His comments follow each graphic. Let's begin.

CF - Matt Kemp

Batter-cf-kemp_medium

Kemp is the envy of mere mortals. He has power and speed, won a Silver Slugger and a Gold Glove, and topped off his offseason by dating a pop star. He made great strides in 2009, but 2010 looks to be The Year of The Bison, as Kemp moves up the ladder of stardom.

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Best of Sabermetrics: January 2010

by JinAZ on Feb 5, 2010 7:00 AM EST in Best of Sabermetrics Comment 10 comments

No, I'm not starting another awards project. However, one of the things that a lot of us noticed during the BtB Saber Awards was that it was really hard to remember some of the good work done earlier in the year when it came to nominating articles. I personally went through my entire 2009 twitter archive trying to find good stuff I had linked to.

This year, I'm going to post monthly threads like this where I'd like to ask you (our readership): what do you think were the best sabermetric articles of this past month? These can be research articles, commentaries, primers, new resources, or whatever else. This should make for a nice resource to help folks (like me!) keep current in our reading. And, should we do the Sabers again, this will be a handy way to go back and remind ourselves of some of the important work throughout the year.

I don't want this to be overly formal, but it might be helpful to follow this kind of format when linking to a new article:

Subject line: Article title
Link: [url]
Why: [brief blurb on why you think it's worth checking out]

Thanks in advance!

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