Mephistopheles

Kenji Johjima was a star in Japan. In fact he was probably the best player in 04.

uh god so thick... the AL comment may not be the point this time, but here's a hint. The national league average ERA for a pitcher in 2006 was 4.49. The national league average ERA for a starting pitcher was 4.65. The league average run factor for MMP has been a little above average but we can ignore it for now. Andy Pettitte posted a 4.20 ERA last season - about half a run better than a league average starting pitcher, yet he's just pretty average... And the league average #2 starter last season was 4.04, and the league average #3 was 4.57. Keep in mind this was probably the worst season he's had since 1999 and it was a flukey one (higher HR rate allowed than anticipated, probably becaose of the Crawford Boxes). To call him league average is foolish. He's in the top 30 percent of major league starters, maybe top 20 percent.

Of course I read your response. YOU STILL COMPARED EVERYTHING TO LEAGUE AVERAGE FOR ALL PITCHERS. You did the exact same thing again.

read again 1.) Pettitte has been lower than the average MLB ERA every season except for one. 2.) That's the MLB average - meaning all that time he spent in New York against DH's and facing good lineups with regularity are NOT accounted for. 3.) That's the MLB average - meaning it's NOT the average ERA for a starting pitcher in the league which is probably another quarter of a run higher.

It's not just ERA+ that goes into the equation. Check out his other graphs. He's right around league average and has been for a couple of years now. Yet, he's compensated quite well. Here is a compairson to Maddux http://www.fangraphs.com/comparison.aspx?playerid=840&playerid2=104&playerid3=&position=P&page=0&type=full You are making the EXACT SAME MISTAKES again.

he also spent nearly half of his career in the bullpen where he compiled an ERA+ well over 150. Pettitte has slight advantages in DERA and NRA, and a significant higher stuff score. The last three seasons Pettitte's FIPs have been 3.34, 3.03 and 4.08. Lowe's have been 4.33, 4.10, and 3.72. In a nuetral setting with health assured it's Pettitte without a question. Of course Pettitte's a greater risk and Lowe gets ground balls at a very good rate which is good in Chicago - although Pettitte is no slouch in the groundball department either.

You go ahead and do that. Keep in mind that's he's allowed 61 unearned runs the last three seasons.

The story of the game. Walks by Cubs pitchers: ZERO Walks by Cubs hitters: THREE Strikeouts by Cubs hitters: ONE

He's right around league average because of this? http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs/840_P_season_full_0_20061001.png Three things of note: 1.) Pettitte has been lower than the average MLB ERA every season except for one. 2.) That's the MLB average - meaning all that time he spent in New York against DH's and facing good lineups with regularity are NOT accounted for. 3.) That's the MLB average - meaning it's NOT the average ERA for a starting pitcher in the league which is probably another quarter of a run higher. All of those three remove the "right around league average" label completely. I mean after all he has a 119 ERA+ which still doesn't make the SP adjustment. He may not be a top 10 pitcher but to belittle him to average status is unjust.

gammons would be good since hes well-respected by all fans

well they could put rob neyer on bbtn, but he'd just scream about ops. keith law is a bp product. he'd be alright.

i asked two questions: 1. Comparing Huseby and Betances 2. How close were other Cubs

This thread has become waaay to much reading. :lol: sorry, i can be very loquacious

i bet you would find a decent sized correlation between health and BABIP for pitchers, but trying to look at this would involve a lot of anecdotal evidence. But that was with Johnsons back. Peavy ought to have been not lucky. My guess is that BABIP bad luck is more or less more mistakes getting hit

ive always used 2OPB+SLG, not because its better but because i can do that math in my head on the fly. the accuracy of 1.7 is not needed when you can get EqA quicker.

Anyways, the only component of WARP I like is EqA. I don't give a darn about PRAR and FRAR. Give me say pitcher's K:BB, FIP, xFIP, etc and UZR please.

This is probably going to be more than you ever wanted to know about RP level, but here goes nothing, Replacement level differs by each stat. Even though VORP and WARP stand for value over replacement player and wins over replacement player, the replacement player is not the same in each statistic. VORP is based off of marginal value lineup rate (MLVr). MLVr is an extension of runs created but uses team runs created and calculates the change in OBP, SLG, SB and CS (and a few other small things) when the player is insterted in the lineup, compared to just an average player. There are three key things to notice here. First, it's how many runs his OBP and SLG etc add to a league average lineup and it's the difference in runs over a league average player. Secondly, MLVr is not runs added over a player at your position and finally MLVr is none other than runs added per game played. Then MLVr is of course weighted for park, league, etc. Then it is converted to PMLVr which is runs per game added over an average hitter at the position played. Then it's converted to VORPr which is runs per game over a replacement level player at the players' position. A replacement level is described as about 70 points of OPS (35 each for SLG and OBP) lower than a league average player at that position. Finally VORPr is multiplied by games (which is actually figured out using PA% not games, duh) to find VORP. Of course they may physically calculate the differences in a different order, addition and subtraction are of course associative. In practice VORP's replacement level player is basically a AAA player - which is justified by the concept of replacement player which should be defined something like: A player who is freely available at the position for a low cost. WARP is quite a ways different. First, it's calculated based off of Equivalent Average, which put in simple terms is based roughly on total bases per plate appearance. Where total bases include SBs. It's a bit different, but for an informal definition that's fine. It's then scaled and adjusted for play into EqA on a scale of .260. This stuff is on their site I believe (it was like 2 years ago). I can go deeper if you want into how and the methodology behind it. EqA's scale is basically the same as BA. .260 is always average. .300 is good, .200 is bad and .400 is a top fifteen offense season. WARP basically has three different components: BRAR, FRAR and PRAR. BRAR is batting runs over a replacement level hitter. BRAR is calculated the same for EVERY position, pitchers included. This actually causes AL pitchers to have higher WARPs than their NL counterpart because most pitcher's EqA's are well below a RP level hitter's level. A replacement level hitter has an EqA of .230 by definition. EqA when it's in its adjusted state is basically value per out. BRAR is calculated by 5*Outs*(EqA^2.5-.230^2.5). It's not too tough. FRAR and PRAR are a lot different. As I said there's no position adjustement for BRAR. Their methodology runs that all hitters are hitters and should be compared to all hitters. The value so to speak of doing it at a harder position is factored in FRAR. The starting runs over a replacement player varies with position. It's based off of the James Defensive Spectrum: C, SS, 2B, CF, 3B, CO, 1B, DH. Notice there's nothing for pitchers. This is probably wrong. I hate WARP for pitchers. It's useless, but as bad as it has been for them, it gets worse. The runs per 162 games are set at 36, 32, 29, 24, 22, 14, 0 if my memory doesn't fail me. It's on their site somewhere. Then for each player they use Rate2 for the actual defensive component. Rate2 is something I am not familiar with the actual calculations other than that I know it's based off box scores and is easily one of the more terrible "new age" baseball defensive stats. Anyways Rate2 is based off 100 being average and is scaled to 100 games. If a player has a 109 Rate2 and plays 162 adjusted games at catcher (this is based on innings, not games played) then he's going to have a FRAR of 51. PRAR is pitching runs over a replacement pitcher, where a replacement pitcher's ERA is roughly 6.10 in a league average park (think Jason Marquis and what we got out of our 4-5 spots last year). However, PRAR has a lot of more adjustments. First the ERA/RA used is based off of NRA, not RA/ERA. To compute this there's an adjustment for the team's defense and the resulting RA is scaled to have the same winning power against average 4.50 R/G or RA which ever you want to call it. You can find this using your favorite pythagorean win formula. So for NRA, league average is 4.50. Then it's (6.10-NRA)*XIP. What's XIP? It's based of IP for the player, but this is another part of the formula I hate. They try to synthetically inject leverage into the WARP calculations for pitchers (but not for hitters hypocrites). This is done by redistributing innings pitched based on things like Ws, Ls and SVs. I don't know if they include holds or not. So yes, having an extra loss can actually improve your EqA. They formulized this somewhere on their site, but when I tried to do what they did it never worked for me, but some of the things they do made me laugh. It's really absurd. Anyways once you have your XIP, PRAR is pretty fair. Finally to compute WARP we have to add all of PRAR, BRAR and FRAR into one RAR stat, let's just call it total runs over replacement player (TRAR idk what, if anything, they call it). Someone earlier in this thread (or another?) mentioned that Rs --> Ws is roughly 10 per. While that's true, WARP takes it a step further. There's a diminishing marginal runs per win effect. So each successive run added is not worth as much as the one previous. WARP for ALL players is wins added starting at a replacement level team. This team is not as good as the 2003 Tigers. Think the immortal Cleveland Spiders. A RP team for WARP is good for about 20 wins. Yeah that's low. Anyways so the WARP column you see is not a good indicator of how many wins the player added, so at the point, what's the point? No pun intended. In practice a replacement level player for WARP is about a AA player. A lot of people think this is way too low. And they're probably right. Wow, that was long. I hope this clears it up and doesn't confuse you even more.

Can someone (CCP or someone else) explain why the gap would be getting wider? Why would OBP be getting less predictive and OPS more predictive over the years? I can explain this. There are several reasons. The chart you guys looked at should be thrown down the drain. It's only four seasons looking at fourteen teams each season. To jump to any correlation conclusions with n=14 for 4 sets is a bit premature. Of course you guys are right, the relative correlation coefficients have indeed been spacing out a bit. There are reasons for this, but here's the graph since 1900 which each season (both leagues, with the exception of 1900). Generally speaking the standard deviation for the league in OBP and OPS have both gone down over the last one hundred years, but it's been more vital for OBP as it has gone down quicker. The standard deviation is included in the correlation coefficient. Secondly, comparing the change in this to the change in the standard deviation of OPS isn't smart. You should use SLG, because slugging has a much higher rate and over the last thirty seasons it has obviously had a greater impact on scoring runs. So it's driven out some of the correlation so to speak for OBP. eh i dont mean SLG as much as I mean IsoP. http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/6530/charts1yx2.gif

1) Do you prefer traditional statistics (AVG, RBI, ERA) or newer statistics (OBP, SLG, ERA+)? Why? No, because they're flawed. 1a) If you prefer traditional statistics, do the newer statistics draw your interest? If not, why? Not Applicable 2) What particular statistics are you comfortable with using and interpreting? Anything from WSAB, EqA, WARP3, VORP, MORP to UZR, LD% and PrOPS 3) What particular statistics might as well be a completely different language to you? Um, nothing really.

vandys been having the games online for free.

Meh, trying to get more guys out early in counts also means more guys getting hits.

Uncalled for. Perhaps, I guess I should have said "there's a fairly obvious reason when you grasp the concept of what those projections are."

With their payroll if the Cubs fail to contend in a league this crummy then Hendry should be shot out of a cannon Do you honestly believe every single one of those predictions and believe there will not be one single 90-win team in the whole darn league? good job showing your completely ignorance to what these are. i guess i shouldnt single you out, most people here dont get them either.

Samardzija could get promoted relatively quickly I suppose. Ditto for Gallagher. With Guzman anchoring the I-Cubs they ought to be very tough once again this season.

Sign Barrett to a two year deal to hold catcher warm for budding superstar Matt Wieters, am I right? Unfortunately for the Mariners they said the same thing two years ago with Jeff Clement.