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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Of course they did.

Last week, Jeff wrote about “What Delmon Young Was“, and he closed with these two paragraphs:

I haven’t yet figured out how Delmon Young hit that pitch for a home run. If you watch Young’s highlight videos, you’ll see similar batted balls that come off the bat faster than it seems like they should. That raw talent of Young’s hasn’t deteriorated with time, so it lingers on, a living sign of what Young was, and of what Young was supposed to be. Watch that home run, and only that home run, and you might think “this guy is amazing, he can hit anything out.”

Young, it seems, always believed that to be true, and while it’s never too late to try to make changes, it can get too late to actually make them. Talent alone got Delmon Young to the majors. Young either hasn’t worked hard, or he hasn’t worked smart. Young at 26 was the same as he was at 21. The same, but bigger, and a whole hell of a lot less promising.

When trying to figure out what team would give Young a contract this winter, it basically boiled down to figuring out what organizations didn’t place a high value on the base on balls, favored traditional offensive metrics over the kinds of things we write about here on FanGraphs, and would see Young as still having the potential to be a good player. The Phillies check every box on the list, and were in search of a right-handed corner outfielder. This should have been an obvious match for a while.

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