Brewers (Strider) vs Cubs (Rea): 9/1/25, 3:05pm

[squally1313]

I'm going to laugh at someone's post, write opinion statements but make them sound like facts, and then say that I don't want to talk about it any further. Solid contributions.

[CubinNY]

1 minute ago, squally1313 said:

I'm going to laugh at someone's post, write opinion statements but make them sound like facts, and then say that I don't want to talk about it any further. Solid contributions.

No, you're merely going to be an ass thread cop, that is your want. Enjoy yourself. 

[mul21]

Just now, CubinNY said:

No, you're merely going to be an ass thread cop, that is your want. Enjoy yourself. 

And you're going to continue to make specious claims with zero backup.

[CubinNY]

1 minute ago, mul21 said:

And you're going to continue to make specious claims with zero backup.

I’m not the one claiming Happ has bad luck all year.

 

Saddle up, I guess, he might need backup 

Edited September 2, 2025 by CubinNY

[mul21]

1 minute ago, CubinNY said:

I’m not the one claiming Happ has bad luck all year.

 

Saddle up, I guess, he might need backup 

You're refuting actual data with a bucket of nothing.  You're the one who needs to back up your claim dingus.  Jason Ross has repeatedly shown this using verified data and you have absolutely nothing to contradict that other than your typical baseless claims.

[squally1313]

8 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

No, you're merely going to be an ass thread cop, that is your want. Enjoy yourself. 

Do you understand that I was calling you out for doing the exact same thing you accuse me of doing all the time? Or are we, in your mind, allowed to laugh at people using advanced statistics but not at people doing meatball takes.

[Jason Ross]

7 minutes ago, mul21 said:

You're refuting actual data with a bucket of nothing.  You're the one who needs to back up your claim dingus.  Jason Ross has repeatedly shown this using verified data and you have absolutely nothing to contradict that other than your typical baseless claims.

Ian Happ season wOBA: 328
Ian Happ season xwOBA: .361
Ian Happ post ASB wOBA: .372 

Ian Happ season BABIP: .278
Ian Happ post-ASB BABIP: .298
Ian Happ career BABIP: 307

Things have a tendency to be what they should given large enough samples. You are 100% correct, that his positive behavior at the plate is now being rewarded in a way that it was not for much of the year.

 

[CubinNY]

1 minute ago, Jason Ross said:

Ian Happ season wOBA: 328
Ian Happ season xwOBA: .361
Ian Happ post ASB: .372 wOBA
 

Ian Happ season BABIP: .278
Ian Happ post-ASB BABIP: .298
Ian Happ career BABIP: 307

 

Are you making the claim that Happ has had bad luck all year?

[squally1313]

To avoid some dumb semantic thing because you keep phrasing it that way, no one is claiming that Ian Happ has had bad luck every single day for 5 months. The BABIP swings, to use a maybe simpler example, show that (.311, .348, .200, .196, .303 per month).

They're claiming that on the whole his results have not been as good as you would expect based on a vast sample size of hitters who have hit the ball (and struck out, and walked, etc etc) like he has this year. The results are the results, no one is saying they should like, award him extra batting average points or something. But there's really nothing in the overall data set that says he's lost a step as a hitter, and we should expect diminished production going forward. 

[Jason Ross]

7 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

Are you making the claim that Happ has had bad luck all year?

Ian Happ was performing at or career levels of batted ball data for much of the season, his expected data all suggested his batted ball data should have resulted in one of his best seasons of his career. He was always posting career normal approach data. Despite all of this, his BABIP was incredibly low, From June 1st through the ASB, he had the fourth lowest BABIP in all of baseball.

Had he been doing some odds things under the hood, such as not pulling the baseball (pulling the ball vs not pulling the ball can skew expected data) or hitting a lot of ground balls (more ground balls can inflate EV and hard hit but not be a good thing overall) than we could say that there was data in there that was creating a lot of bad data going into his expected data creating a situation where his bad variance wasn't necessarily bad variance. He did not have that. 

Because of all of that, the safest conclusion is that Ian Happ was experiencing bad variance for a large portion of the year. Not every single at bat was bad luck, no, but the general flow of his season was that the outcomes he was deserving were not occurring as often as they should be. That can be called "bad luck" in other words. He wouldn't be the first baseball player to have bad variance stretch multiple months, this happens to MLB literally every year. 

[CubinNY]

xwOBA measures the quality of contact, taking out defense and ballparks. Because he's not at the exact point doesn't mean he was unlucky, it means 1) there is measurement error (there is always measurement error), and/or 2) there are other factors not accounted for in the statistic that account for the discrepancy. 

Once again, and for the last time, reality is never wrong. It's reality. When a measurement model does not reflect reality, it's the model that is off (not necessarily wrong, but inaccurate), not reality. People underperform and overperform their xwOBA year after year.  Does that mean their entire career is unlucky or lucky. 

IT DOESN'T MEAN IAN IS UNLUCKY. Ian Happ isn't Charlie Brown, and life doesn't work that way. 

[squally1313]

xwOBA is designed to be a predictive statistic, why are you consistently so dense about this

[mul21]

You don't actually understand anything.  It's really kinda funny at this point.

[CubinNY]

5 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

TBut there's really nothing in the overall data set that says he's lost a step as a hitter, and we should expect diminished production going forward. 

Yes, I'm not saying that either. This entire tanget started when the dude jumped saying I said Happ sucked. I was not commenting on Happ. I was commenting on the absurd notion that Happ has been unlucky all year. Luck, if you want to call it that, is fleeting. By its nature, it is not reproducible or a skill. So if you want to say Happ has been unlucky all year, that's one helluva a skillset. 

[CubinNY]

5 minutes ago, squally1313 said:

xwOBA is designed to be a predictive statistic, why are you consistently so dense about this

It's not a predictive stat. What is it predicting? Something that didn't happen? Or what would happen in a perfect world of lolly pops and sugar mountains? It describes the most likely outcome given exit velocity and launch angle, excluding defense and park factors.  

[CubinNY]

1 minute ago, CubinNY said:

It's not a predictive stat. What is it predicting? Something that didn't happen? Or what would happen in a perfect world of lolly pops and sugar mountains? It describes the most likely outcome given exit velocity and launch angle, excluding defense and park factors.  

One could make a prediction that player x will be better or worse based on it, but that prediction is uncertain to a degree that Ian Happ has been unlucky for 5 of the six months of a baseball season. 

[Rcal10]

6 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

Yes, I'm not saying that either. This entire tanget started when the dude jumped saying I said Happ sucked. I was not commenting on Happ. I was commenting on the absurd notion that Happ has been unlucky all year. Luck, if you want to call it that, is fleeting. By its nature, it is not reproducible or a skill. So if you want to say Happ has been unlucky all year, that's one helluva a skillset. 

What dude said you said Happ sucked? I asked why lol. Unless you are referring to someone else, I don’t know where you got the idea that I accused you of thinking Happ sucked. 

[Jason Ross]

9 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

xwOBA measures the quality of contact, taking out defense and ballparks. Because he's not at the exact point doesn't mean he was unlucky, it means 1) there is measurement error (there is always measurement error), and/or 2) there are other factors not accounted for in the statistic that account for the discrepancy. 

Once again, and for the last time, reality is never wrong. It's reality. When a measurement model does not reflect reality, it's the model that is off (not necessarily wrong, but inaccurate), not reality. People underperform and overperform their xwOBA year after year.  Does that mean their entire career is unlucky or lucky. 

IT DOESN'T MEAN IAN IS UNLUCKY. Ian Happ isn't Charlie Brown, and life doesn't work that way. 

If I flip a coin 10 times, and 8 times it comes up heads, does that mean I have an 80% chance of flipping heads again?  What if I flip a coin 20 times and I get 16 heads? Both are certainly plausible outcomes, but neither reflects reality when it comes to coin flips. that the outcome should be very close to 50-50 (unless I am doing something untowards during the flip). It would be thus unlucky it didn't come up near 50-50 to heads and tails.

Yes, the reality is in that small sample size, I flipped 80% (or whatever) one side. But we also know that this is not predictive and we also know that if I flip the coin 100 more times, the most likely out come is that over that 100 times, the amount of heads and tails I get will be close to 50-50. 

The same principals can be applied here. Ian Happ was doing things that should have resulted in one thing even though they weren't happening. All of our predictive data suggests that if Ian Happ kept doing what he was doing, it would eventually head in another direction; in fact, this is what is happening right now; Ian Happ is doing largely what he was doing at the plate and now what we expected would happen is happening. 

[CubinNY]

14 minutes ago, mul21 said:

You don't actually understand anything.  It's really kinda funny at this point.

lol

[CubinNY]

3 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

If I flip a coin 10 times, and 8 times it comes up heads, does that mean I have an 80% chance of flipping heads again?  What if I flip a coin 20 times and I get 16 heads? Both are certainly plausible outcomes, but neither reflects reality when it comes to coin flips. that the outcome should be very close to 50-50 (unless I am doing something untowards during the flip). It would be thus unlucky it didn't come up near 50-50 to heads and tails.

Yes, the reality is in that small sample size, I flipped 80% (or whatever) one side. But we also know that this is not predictive and we also know that if I flip the coin 100 more times, the most likely out come is that over that 100 times, the amount of heads and tails I get will be close to 50-50. 

The same principals can be applied here. Ian Happ was doing things that should have resulted in one thing even though they weren't happening. All of our predictive data suggests that if Ian Happ kept doing what he was doing, it would eventually head in another direction; in fact, this is what is happening right now; Ian Happ is doing largely what he was doing at the plate and now what we expected would happen is happening. 

I understand the point you are making, but you are making it badly. How many plate appearances has Ian had this season? Unless we really want to go down the reality is wrong well, don't you think his luck would normalize at some point closer to the start of the season than the last 30 or so games? If not, I'm not sure anything means anything. 

[chibears55]

4 hours ago, Rcal10 said:

Nice to come here and not see all the Happ hate. Once again, his numbers are stabilizing to what they usually are. Shocking to some, who apparently don’t follow the team yearly. But to those who do, not a great surprise. 

Problem with Happ this season is that he disappeared for close to 2 plus months, he might get close to his average numbers if he goes off in September, but he was dead when they needed him in June, July and into August.   Hopefully hes back on track for September and into the playoffs because hes a big part of this offense. 

 

 

[squally1313]

2 minutes ago, chibears55 said:

that he disappeared for close to 2 plus months,

He had like a .200 BABIP for June and July.

 

2 minutes ago, chibears55 said:

he was dead when they needed him in June, July and into August.

The Cubs have the fourth best record in baseball and are a mathematical certainty to make the playoffs. Ian Happ playing like 2002 Barry Bonds for two months wasn't going to make up the gap between them and the Brewers. 

The nice thing about this process vs results thing is that, yes, his results individually weren't up to his standard, but the team results were, on the whole, fine. The data says his statistics going forward should be better than his results thus far, which is encouraging because September/October baseball is certainly a results driven thing. 

[Jason Ross]

11 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

I understand the point you are making, but you are making it badly. How many plate appearances has Ian had this season? Unless we really want to go down the reality is wrong well, don't you think his luck would normalize at some point closer to the start of the season than the last 30 or so games? If not, I'm not sure anything means anything. 

The issue you seem to have with this is at the end; mentally, you're struggling with how long poor (or good!) variance at the MLB level can happen. Bad batted ball data can last for hundreds of plate appearances; it seems impossible, but it happens every year. Players can have a few months of bad "luck" (or good luck!). 

Let's put it this way. There are 369 hitters who have 150 PA's (or more) on the season. That's a lot! It really isn't shocking that like, 20 of those guys are having some really bad luck for a vast majority of their PA's. 20/369 is 5%. If we had 369 guys flipping a quarter 100 times, don't you think like 10-15 of them would have some really weird data? So why not in baseball, too?

To put it another way; have you ever seen a guy have a career year that stands out above all the rest of his career? When that happens, many times, it's just a player who put together enough good variance over 400 PA's that he looked really good. Same principle is at work here. Happ was doing what he should at the plate, and the baseball just wasn't finding space very often. Eventually things work out if you keep doing them enough. 

[Transmogrified Tiger]

The answer to “Could there possibly be a statistical outlier after 5 months of baseball games” is unequivocally yes, what are we doing here

[mul21]

4 minutes ago, Transmogrified Tiger said:

The answer to “Could there possibly be a statistical outlier after 5 months of baseball games” is unequivocally yes, what are we doing here

Right?  It's like we haven't been here for 20 years talking about guys having outlier weeks, months and years who immediately turn into a pumpkin after signing a huge contract when they ran a BABIP 30 points higher than their career norms in a contract year.