I’ve seen some stories floating around the blogosphere which relate to the choices you have when it comes to your baseball stats. In general, the stories have been directed at the SIERA metric, which was unveiled in great detail last week. Overall, the reception was very positive and we’re really glad Matt Swartz agreed to work with us.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re about expanding baseball knowledge and enjoyment through opinion and analysis. Obviously, we think adding SIERA to the site brought something new to the table and we wouldn’t have added it had we thought otherwise.

That’s not to say that reasonable people can’t disagree. If you think one ERA estimator is too complex and is ruining baseball, that’s fine. You’re welcome to use another of our myriad statistics. I’m sure you’ll find one that works for you. From our perspective, our variety is our strength. Whether you use FIP, xFIP, tERA, SIERA or plain, old ERA to judge pitchers, the whole point of this site is to heighten your knowledge — and enjoyment — of baseball.

For those of you who don’t know how FanGraphs selects its statistics, it should be noted that we don’t develop in-house figures. We look around and edit down the incredibly large selection of metrics being created and then select the ones that have the most relevance. We work closely with those statistics’ creators to make sure things are calculated and displayed properly.

Denouncing work by claiming it’s anti-baseball does everyone a diservice. No one is forcing our readers to use these numbers. In fact, I hope you look at them critically and let us know how we can make them better. I’m betting that improvements would mean more — not less — statistical investigation, critical thinking and debate among the thousands of baseball fans who visit our site daily.

Whether you like your baseball full of complex stats or void of stats entirely, there’s a place for you at FanGraphs. And, in my mind, that’s exactly how it should be.

The author’s heart, under the influence of Felipe Paulino’s player page.

This edition of One Night Only contains:

1. Expanded previews for five weekend games: San Diego at Philadelphia on Friday, St. Louis at Pittsburgh and Chicago AL at Cleveland on Saturday, and Tampa Bay at Kansas City and Atlanta at Cincinnati on Sunday.

2. Our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for every one of this weekend’s games.

3. Feelings and/or emotions.

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If it seems as though there are a lot of candidates for Comeback Player of the Year, it’s because there are. I don’t usually get too worked up about awards season, but Comeback Player of the Year always seems so vaguely defined that I thought today we would try to take an objective look at it.

I started by looking at players who compiled less than two WAR last season, and have compiled 2.0 or more WAR this season. Then I cross-referenced to find matches, and then looked at the differences between the two seasons, setting the cut off for the difference at 2.0 WAR or greater. Doing so leaves off a few noteworthy candidates that may garner attention — Bartolo Colon (1.8 WAR better so far this year), Josh Beckett (1.7), Pablo Sandoval (1.6), and Ryan Vogelsong (1.5). That leaves me with the following list:

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Sometimes money can buy you happiness. For instance, I’m sure the Cubs would be happy to be rid of Alfonso Soriano and the remainder of the eight-year, $136 million contract he signed after the 2006 season. According to a recent report from Bruce Levine at ESPN Chicago, they might be aiming for just that. Levine’s source says that the Cubs “would be willing to absorb a high percentage” of the roughly $60 million remaining on his contract, which runs through 2014. That will certainly make him more palatable to other teams, but I still wonder if he’s worth a trade even at a steep discount.

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Omar Vizquel is still plugging along in what seems like his 113th season. He isn’t any good at this point, but it wasn’t all that long ago that he was still a defensive standout at shortstop. He was so good in his prime that some people think he should (and will) eventually be inducted into the Hall of Fame. I disagree. Vizquel’s case is particularly relevant to the issue of “peak value,” something we occasionally discuss with regard to players with shorter careers like Sandy Koufax or Duke Snider. That isn’t to say that a player has to be as good as Koufax or Snider to get in the Hall, it is simply to say that players in the Hall should have a truly great peak. Vizquel does not.

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SIERA is now available at FanGraphs, and several important changes have been made to improve its performance, as discussed in parts one, two, three and four. Still, there were some components that I didn’t adopt. For the sake of completeness — and for those interested in what I learned about pitching along the way — I include these in the final installment of my five-part series.

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Blue Jays 7, Mariners 5

Moving the Needle: Rajai Davis breaks the tie with a two-RBI double in the eighth, +.342 WPA. Up 2-1 in the seventh, the Jays tacked on another three to take a 5-1 lead, which, against the Mariners, is as close to a lock as it gets. But they pulled off the comeback in the eighth when two singles and a walk loaded the bases for Miguel Olivo. On a 1-0 pitch he whaled one over the wall in center, tying the game in one swing. It wouldn’t last long, though. In the next half inning Davis smacked a triple into the gap, bringing home both base runners and giving the Blue Jays a 7-5 lead.

Notables

Mike McCoy: 2 for 2, 2 2B. I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing substantial to say about McCoy. Good game, though.

Jose Bautista: 1 for 3, 1 2B, 1 BB. The walk was intentional. He also picked up an RBI on a sac fly.

Also in this issue: Angels 1, Rangers 0 | Diamondbacks 4, Brewers 0 | Tigers 6, Twins 2 | Braves 9, Rockies 6 | Rays 2, Yankees 1 | Padres 5, Marlins 3 | Cardinals 6, Mets 2

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Few baseball terms are misused as frequently as ‘consistency’ and ‘volatility’. Much like some of the more arcane statistics that have fallen by the wayside — looking at you, W/L records and batting average — the terms are often conflated with overall performance. We thought they told us more about a player than they actually did. Pitchers perceived to be more consistent are often deemed to be more valuable than their volatile counterparts, as long as their numbers aren’t drastically different. While that perception might make sense from a logical standpoint it fails to hold up under the lens of quantification.

Consistency might keep fans and managers from reaching for the Tums jar, but it should not be used as anything other than anecdotal. It certainly should not be used as a performance marker. Why? Well, because consistency itself is inconsistent.

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…since 1974, when our play-by-play database begins.

On Monday, I posted about the three worst double plays ever according to Win Probability Added (WPA). From 1974 through yesterday’s games, there have been 89072 double plays caused by groundouts (I’m leaving out other sorts of double plays as, from the hitter’s perspective at least, they have more to do with dumb luck). Of those, only 51 have a positive WPA. However, it does happen from time to time, and while the shifts aren’t as dramatic in terms of WPA, the circumstances make them more interesting (at least to me) than the negative WPA occasions.

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Of the 30 managers in the major leagues today, eight of them never made the major leagues as players (Manny Acta, Terry Collins, Fredi Gonzalez, Jim Leyland, Joe Maddon, Jack McKeon, Mike Quade, and Buck Showalter). That’s a far higher percentage than was the case a decade ago, in 2000, when it was just three of 30 (McKeon, Showalter, and John Boles), or in 1990, when it was five of 26 (Leyland, McKeon, Nick Leyva, John McNamara, and Tom Trebelhorn). Of all of the things that have been affected by the sabermetric revolution — and by the very existence of the book Moneyball — our understanding of managers and the role they play has been shaken but not particularly enhanced. Still, the tide appears to be slowly changing toward greater acceptance of managers who never played in the majors.

When I wrote about Jim Riggleman three weeks ago, some readers disputed my characterization of him as “a mediocre manager” based on his losing record and the fact that most of his teams finished near the bottom of the division. Wins and team place are the two traditional stats used to describe managers, but as many readers pointed out, much like pitcher wins, they aren’t particularly reliable indicators of a manager’s true talent or effect. In the comment thread I supplemented the analysis with stats from Chris Jaffe’s 2010 book Evaluating Baseball’s Managers, in which Jaffe developed a complicated method of trying to evaluate a manager’s effect on his team by measuring how the team and players did in proximate years without him. Jaffe’s metrics upheld the earlier characterization that Riggleman was mediocre. But it’s hard to know exactly how to quantify what a manager does — even as we instinctively understand that what a manager does is important. (Incidentally, Riggleman never played in the majors either.)

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