No Pepper

by Tommy Bennett on Dec 21, 2009 4:49 PM EST

Pat Andriola compares this year's non-tender class to those of 2007 and 2008. He is of the opinion that this year's is clearly the best. But is that just hindsight talking?

Pizza Cutter quantifies the catcher "mentoring" effect. Dr. Cutter uses hierarchical linear modeling and you may be surprised to learn that none other than Jason Kendall appears on both of his leader boards. However, he counsels that the effect is small.

The SEC has done the unthinkable: added a clock to baseball. Actually, they've added two clocks. A 20 second timer between pitches (with no one on base) and a 90 second timer between half innings. The average SEC game last year was three hours and twenty minutes in length.

MGL takes his aging show on the road over to THT. It's more digestible this way, but if you already read the PDF, I don't think there's much new here.

Patriot on the advantages and disadvantages of using plate appearances as your denominator. If you find this article interesting then you are a bona fide nerd. I mean that as a high compliment.

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Pizza cutter = retired

If by retired, he means writing his own blog, putting up FanPosts for BtB, writing for THT and BPro.

Yeah.

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 4:57 PM EST reply actions

They're probably going to get me back too

I left after Dan Fox left. Just found I wasn’t stopping by anymore. With Eric there, and now Pizza Cutter, I think I’m really missing something by not dropping by.

Tommy, when’s my check coming? I need some discretionary income. :)
-j

I write at:
Beyond the Boxscore | Red Reporter | Basement-Dwellers.com | Twitter: @jinazreds

by JinAZ on Dec 21, 2009 8:39 PM EST up reply actions

And someone else very cool is joining BPro also

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 9:06 PM EST up reply actions

Tommy himslef has has an article or two published at BPro

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Dec 21, 2009 10:18 PM EST up reply actions

yeah

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 10:24 PM EST up reply actions

Hey Tommy how much did you get paid?

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 10:24 PM EST up reply actions

Question - Are you nick05 at the Royal's Corner Forums?

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Dec 21, 2009 10:35 PM EST up reply actions

no

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 10:41 PM EST up reply actions

The person actually makes sense sometimes, which is pretty unusual for that message board

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Dec 21, 2009 10:56 PM EST up reply actions

Really enjoyed the article in THT today. Good job.

Giant Dirtbags: John Bowker, Steve Hammond. MIA List: Todd Jennings, Brian Anderson
Jeremy Affeldt induces DP's

by Giant among Angels on Dec 21, 2009 11:02 PM EST up reply actions

Thank you

I’d been sitting on that one for a couple of weeks – glad it came out well.

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 11:07 PM EST up reply actions

Seconded.

by Tommy Bennett on Dec 21, 2009 11:13 PM EST up reply actions

So, can someone give me a brief summary of what Pizza did in his article?

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 11:20 PM EST reply actions

As best I can understand

He uses the same method schools use to analyze teachers. Because teachers are nested inside schools, and schools nested inside districts, you can do a sort of WOWY analysis (the statistics of which I understand to be rather more complex) that compares performance to the baselines at the other levels in the hierarchy.

He did this with catchers and found the best catchers at encouraging strikeouts and discouraging walks. He also restricted it to catchers 32 or over so as to isolate the salty, experienced mentors. If he wants to tell me I’m all wrong he could presumably do so.

by Tommy Bennett on Dec 21, 2009 11:42 PM EST up reply actions

Thanks

by vivaelpujols on Dec 21, 2009 11:53 PM EST up reply actions

I'm more interested in the stat's part though

Did Pizza cover that, or did he just present the results?

by vivaelpujols on Dec 22, 2009 12:02 AM EST up reply actions

Here's the relevant paragraph

I then ran a hierarchical model that pulled apart the contribution of the catcher/mentor just being there. The gory details, for the interested: I used the pitcher as the subject, age during the season as the index/repeated variable, and an auto-regressive first order – AR(1) – covariance matrix. I used walk rate as my first dependent variable and set the intercept to vary randomly. I set the identity of the catcher/mentor as a fixed effect and asked for parameter estimates for each qualifying catcher. A catcher had to appear as a mentor in ten player-seasons to qualify. I ran separate models for walk rate (BB/BFP) and strikeout rate (K/BFP) as the dependent variables.

by Tommy Bennett on Dec 22, 2009 12:17 AM EST up reply actions

Yowza

A couple more years of stats before I understand that.

by vivaelpujols on Dec 22, 2009 12:31 AM EST up reply actions

If I'm reading it right...

Tommy got most of it right. It isn’t so much a WOWY approach as it is “if we see a consistent pattern that all the young pitchers with whom catcher X works seem to have lower BB rates, even after controlling for a few factors (including their own abilities), then it must have something to do with the catcher.” The problem is that the effect of catcher-mentor is very small in a variance explained framework.

And don’t worry, the actual mechanics of it aren’t as important as the conclusions. The Nats screwed up.

by pizzacutter on Dec 22, 2009 12:44 PM EST up reply actions

Yeah, I'm interested in the mechanics though ;)

I’m taking a stat course in my school right now, but the concepts are pretty basic and the class is going slow. So, I’m trying to learn about this stuff now.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/12/21/1211312/no-pepper#27532652

by vivaelpujols on Dec 22, 2009 1:14 PM EST up reply actions