Beyond the Box Score - A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

More great SB Nation Blogs

Doug Glanville explains the allure of free agency, or you never knew Arlington could be so seductive.

Dan Turkenkopf peeks his head above ground and declares four more years of HR/FB park factors. "Notorious Hitter's Park" Citizen's Bank Park's four-year average is a scant 94, while the bottom three are Petco (75), Kaufmann (78), and Busch Stadium (84).

Is it time to rethink the traditional fantasy auction? Brian Mills suggests a second-price, sealed bid auction. For my part, you can have my open auction if you're willing to come to my mom's basement and fight me for it.

Colin Wyers has a short guide to setting up a Retrosheet SQL database. He has promised more detailed instructions to follow.

Maury Brown has revenue sharing figures for 2002, 2003, and 2005. How about Les Expos?

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Why Don't Losses Count Anymore?

by R.J. Anderson on Nov 21, 2009 6:12 PM EST Comment 9 comments

Winning games is the whole point of baseball. Yet all these voters seem to have forgotten that. For whatever reasons these "educated" voters gave the best pitcher awards to pitchers who lost a combined 15 games in 65 appearances. Bollocks says I. Forget these calculators and mathematical equations and focus on what matters: winning games. Or, inversely, not losing games. The illustrious Herm Edwards once said "You play to win the game," right on Herm. That's why the best pitcher in the league is none other than Hideki Okajima. Oh, I'm crazy you say? Look at these artifacts of record:

68 games, 6 wins, 0 losses

That's more games than San Francisco Giants pitcher "Tim Lincecum" or Kansas City Royals pitcher "Zack Greinke". Oh, you can point to their increased win totals but that's just dishonest. Okajima is a reliever, one who never let his team down. You can't say that about these other jokers. In wins he held opponents to a .100 batting average and 100% of his hits allowed were home runs - showing that he let his defenders take the games off in which he won. What a great teammate.

It's time we put the bed sheets and new-fangled numbers behind us. Old-timers will tell you what really matters (wins) and that lead paint looks better than any water-based type.

As for the rest of my ballot:

Brian Bruney 5-0

Joe Nelson 3-0

John Grabow 3-0

Tony Sipp 2-0

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Tim Lincecum's Outstanding and Fatiguing Season

by Harry Pavlidis on Nov 21, 2009 4:08 PM EST in Awards & Honors Comment 5 comments

More photos » by Ben Margot - AP

Lincecum unleashes a four-seamer

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Tim Lincecum eeked out his second straight Cy Young on Thursday. While the voting was close and, to some, controversial, he's a deserving winner.

The Giants eeked everything out of Lincecum's campaign, with its 225 innings ranking 3rd in the NL and 8th overall. He didn't exceed his workload from 2008 (by two innings) but he did show some wear-and-tear, starting as early as a missed start in September. That extra rest was needed to recover from back spasms.

Following Lincecum's penultimate start of 2009 (against the Cubs on 9/25), I posted about a sudden drop in velocity, coming in his third start following the brief shutdown.

Should the Giants Back Off Tim Lincecum? - Beyond the Box Score
Zambrano peaked at 96.3, Zambrano was strong, just outside the top third of his peak range. His average fastball speed (93.8, with or without sinkers) was 7th out of 73 starts in average fastball speed (two- and four-seam combined). It was also he best average fastball velocity of 2009. So, there was probably nothing "in the air" that night pushing The Freak's speed numbers down. Lincecum topped out at 94.3 - that's his lowest peak on record. He averaged 91.4 mph. Throw out the two-seamers and he's at 91.6. Out of Lincecum's 77 PITCHf/x starts, that's dead last.

Lincecum's Cy Young campaign had one more stop on October 1. Hardly a stop, seeing how each of his final two starts were in AT&T Park. Another thing that didn't stop was that decline in velocity.

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What Can Be Learned From the AL MVP Voting?

by Jeff Zimmerman (TucsonRoyal) on Nov 21, 2009 10:40 AM EST in Awards & Honors Comment 28 comments

More photos » by Reinhold Matay - AP

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On Monday afternoon, I fully expect Joe Mauer to win his first MVP award after finishing sixth in 2006 and fourth last year. Joe led the AL in batting average while hitting for respectable power (28 HRs) in only 138 games, most of which were as a catcher. He led the Twins into the postseason after they trailed by three games with only four games left, thereby forcing and winning a playoff game with Detroit.

Other than Mauer winning, I expect Mark Teixeria to finish high in the voting after leading the league in HRs and RBIs (categories that have traditionally been important to voters). I also expect Derek Jeter to finish high even though he doesn't have great traditional stats this season (.334 AVG, 18 HR and 107 runs scored). He did have one of his best years with a 7.4 WAR value, his highest since Fangraphs began keeping track and his third-highest total when compared to Rally's WAR ranking.

Truthfully, I have no problem giving the award to Mauer. He had a great season and helped the Twins to the playoffs. The real question with today's vote, to me anyway, is where do Zack Greinke and Ben Zobrist end up in the rankings?

Using WAR values as a guide, both Zack (9.4 WAR) and Ben (8.6 WAR) had a better season than Joe (8.4 WAR). The problem is that the mainstream media is barely touting if at all Greinke or Zobrist. Going to MLB.com, Zack gets an honorable mention while Ben gets no mention (though four of Ben's teammates got mentioned: Evan Longoria, Jason Bartlett, Carl Crawford and Carlos Pena). At cbssportsline.com and USAToday.com they have no mention of either Greinke or Zobrist.

Two groups of internet voters have released their results. SBN, our parent website, had a vote and Zack came in sixth overall, while Ben came in second. When the Internet Baseball Awards released their results, Zack came in fourth and Ben came in sixth. I really don't expect either of these players to finish as that high in the final votes with the BBWAA, even though no two players in the AL did more to help their team win games this last season.

Let's look at how Zack and Ben final voting placement can say something about the makeup and thought process of the BBWAA.

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Assorted Links

by Tommy Bennett on Nov 20, 2009 12:22 PM EST Comment 0 comments

Dave Cameron on the value of depth, or how to minimize risk while adding wins. Of course, there is the difficulty of knowing whether a player whose production falls in the right-tail of the distribution is relying on luck versus skill, which makes the manager's decision difficult.

The Olympia Olympian has an interview with Mariners' head statistical analyst Tony Blengino. He discusses the free agent market and player valuation.

Tommy Rancel has an interview with new Rays' Director of Pro Scouting Matt Arnold. He discusses, among other things, how his economics background influences his scouting.

San Antonio College's The Ranger has an interview with economics professor and BtB alum Cyril Morong. He discusses what got him interested in sabermetrics. You can, of course, find his blog here.

Sky Andrecheck has a column at Sports Illustrated on why the free agent valuation system is an effective tax on Type A free agents. That'll teach those relievers not to rack up meaningless saves.

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Cubs Trade Aaron Heilman To Diamondbacks; Also Re-Sign John Grabow

by Tommy Rancel on Nov 19, 2009 9:42 PM EST Comment 2 comments

More photos » by Frank Franklin II - AP

The Cubs handed a $7 million dollar contract to John Grabow, who has been worth $5.3 million dollars over his career. They later traded Aaron Heilman to Arizona for a pair of prospects.

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On the eve of Free Agency, the Cubs made a pair of moves involving relief pitchers.

First, the Cubs re-signed LHP John Grabow to a two-year contract reportedly worth $7-7.5 million dollars. If you're asking yourself why they would spend that much money on a player who has accumulated -0.1 WAR over the past three seasons, then you're in the right place.

Grabow is a serviceable relief pitcher, but he is nothing special. His fastball sits in the low 90s, and like a lot of other relievers, he mixes in sliders and change-ups. His change-up has proven to be a plus pitch, but overall he doesn't generate a lot of swings and misses (8.1 swstr% in 2009).

Results wise, Grabow has benefited from a shiny ERA, and that's probably why he got the contract he did. In 2008, he posted an ERA of 2.84 for the Pirates and followed that up with a combined 3.36 for Pittsburgh and Chicago in 2009. Advanced metrics, however, see past the ERA screen and rate Grabow about average. His FIP in 2008 was 4.54 and only slightly better in 2009 at 4.20. That's not terrible, but I'm not giving him $7 million dollars over two seasons to basically be replacement level--especially not the day before the market is flooded with cheaper, and in many cases better, options.

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Zack Greinke and Tim Lincecum by LOWESS

by Tommy Bennett on Nov 19, 2009 6:51 PM EST in Graph of the Day Comment 15 comments

Today it was announced that Tim Lincecum would join Zack Greinke as this year's second Cy Young award winner. Both had excellent seasons. While Greinke likely has the edge due to Lincecum's more favorable league and park, both exhibited no real weakness. Both struck out more than a batter per inning, both walked fewer than three batters per nine innings, and both allowed fewer than a dozen home runs.

After Greinke's furious start, there was some concern that his superlative season might be lost as he bumped slightly in the middle of the season. Lincecum, by comparison, appeared to be more consistent: he had no string of dominance as convincing as Greinke's April, but neither did he have any periods in which he struggled.

I decided to calculate each pitcher's single-game FIP and xFIP (based on batted ball data from FanGraphs) and run it through the R CLI. I then applied a LOWESS regression to each pitcher's season to give an idea of how each pitcher's fortunes changed from month to month. Here they are, by FIP (click to enlarge):

xFIP comparison below the jump.

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Assorted Links

by Tommy Bennett on Nov 19, 2009 5:04 PM EST Comment 0 comments

Jeremy Greenhouse's Visual Scouting Report 1.0: Bay vs. Holliday. The heat is on!

A Wrigley mystery contained in a photo. If you'd like to take a crack at it without seeing the answer, the question is: "of which game was this picture taken?"

Was Zack Greinke's 2009 more like Ben Sheets' 2004 or Mark Prior's 2003? Note that both Prior and Sheets gave up more home runs than everyone's new favorite sabermetrician.

J.C. Bradbury compares methods for evaluating player aging. This is his most even-handed blog piece on the subject to date.

The free agency market officially opens tonight at midnight. Who's ready to overpay a weak class?

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