Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, are being released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cubs / Diamondbacks / Giants / Mets / Nationals / Phillies / Pirates / Rangers / Reds / Rockies / Royals / White Sox.

Batters
On the one hand, we know that the league-average BABIP generally settles within the .290-.300 range. On the other, we also know that Tigers center fielder Austin Jackson has posted a .370 BABIP over his first three seasons (ca. 2000 plate appearances). On the third hand — this being one of those rare instances in which a third hand is present — we know that true-talent BABIP tends not to exceed about .350.

How does ZiPS handle a situation like this? Szymborski addressed a question along these very same lines on Wednesday, writing: “Short version: even at 1960 PA, you expect a player’s BABIP to regress ~43% toward mean.”

Otherwise, here’s a point of interest: Andy Dirks is likely as productive a major-league corner outfielder as Torii Hunter, whom Detroit signed to a two-year, $26 million contract this offseason — and is likely a full win better than the departed Delmon Young.

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Last week, I took a look at year-to-year correlations for hitting metrics. This post follows up by doing the same thing with pitching metrics. Here, with a bit of commentary, are the results.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Regressed Italian League Stats, For Some Reason
2. Video Footage: The Craig Kimbrel of Italy

Regressed Italian League Stats, For Some Reason
A man does not always know what he’s doing. Perhaps, in fact, he never knows what he’s doing.

Regardless of the precise frequency, what’s clear is that the author of this post — for reasons that have yet to be revealed — spent a considerable portion of Tuesday night first (a) copy-and-pasting Italian baseball league stats into an Excel file, and then (b) formatting and applying a simple regression to those same stats, so’s to produce the leaderboards one finds below — which is to say, SCOUT-type leaderboards for that same Italian baseball league

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Like my work last year around pitcher aging and velocity decline, I am always looking for reliable indicators or signals of change in players. One thing I’ve been interested in trying to better understand are changes in performance that might signal or herald a large droop-off in performance in the following year.

Projection systems do a very good job of predicting performance, but my thought was there must be some way to better predict the 2011 Adam Dunns of the world.

So, one Saturday morning I decided to do some statistical fishing.

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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, are being released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cubs / Giants / Mets / Nationals / Phillies / Pirates / Rangers / Reds / Rockies / Royals / White Sox.

Batters
For Bill James, it was basically a mantra: a club’s shortcomings are frequently attributed to that same club’s best player, despite the fact that he is, by definition, least to blame for those shortcomings. The object of constant trade rumors, outfielder Justin Upton likely remains (according to ZiPS, at least) either the first- or second-best (behind Miguel Montero) field player on the Diamondbacks. Upton enters his age-25 season having produced almost precisely 12 wins above replacement over the last three years. Indeed, since 2002, only 10 other players with significant outfield experience have recorded as many as 10 wins between the ages of 22 and 24.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about pitcher injuries and pitching prospects, hitter BABIPs (specifically Mike Trout’s), and whether they boo baseball players.

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This post is a follow-up to a post from last Friday night, entitled Calling Balls and Strikes Against Catchers. Given the timing, you might have missed that post, so you should read through it for some background. Or you can skip reading through it, since I’m about to give you a quick summary. Within that post, I presented some evidence, based on 2012 PITCHf/x data, that catchers were given more generous strike zones while batting than non-catchers. That is, umpires called fewer strikes on catchers than you’d expect, and the difference in rates for catchers and for non-catchers came out to about one strike per 100 called pitches.

I pursued it off a comment tip, and I found the results to be of some interest. However, there were also some potential sources of error. I looked only at 2012, and I didn’t even look at 2012’s complete picture, limiting myself instead to regulars and semi-regulars. I decided this was worth digging in a little deeper, so I called on Dark Overlord David Appelman to supply me with greater information. What’s presented below is far more thorough, and therefore, far more acceptable.

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Episode 297
FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron analyzes all, or close to all, baseball. Keywords: bias, human; Weaver, Earl; airport car rental, the horrors of.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min play time.)

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