I was watching the latest episode of Eastbound & Down, the HBO show about the fictional, ex-superstar pitcher Kenny Powers and I was trying to figure out how good a pitcher he actually was. Turns out he has his very own fake website complete with stats:

Season Team   G    IP  W   L  SV   SO  BB  ER    ERA  Value Wins
2001   GWT*  15  23.0  4   0  12   28   0   1   0.39    ----
2002   ATL   62  66.1  7   3  49  106  30  21   2.85    1.75
2003   NYA   64  62.2  7   3  39   79  20  33   4.74    1.13
2004   SFG   52  54.2  3  10  30   44  27  40   6.59   -0.46
2005   BOS   15  12.2  0   6   3    6   9  12   8.57   -0.31

Over the course of his relatively short career he was conservatively 2-some wins over replacement. His home run stats weren’t available so I just set them at 25% of his earned runs. That’s probably a bit high for his peak years, so maybe give him 3 wins if you want to be generous.

He barely made it to arbitration eligibility before he left baseball, so the dollar numbers aren’t too relevant.

In any event, the self proclaimed “greatest pitcher there ever was” didn’t even make it into the top 10 relief pitchers in his best season, but I’m still rooting for a comeback.

Tangotiger on insidethebook.com noted what I thought was a rather comical blog post column by Murray Chass on his outrage that the Red & Green league books will no longer be printed, but instead be available only in PDF format. As Tangotiger points out, you could print your own book from the electronic copy, but I suppose you won’t get any of the gloss of a professional publisher.

In any event, the last paragraph of Chass’ article is quite frankly, bizarre:

Younger writers, more attuned to the use of the Internet than their older colleagues, may not have a problem with the disappearance of the books. But in past years they didn’t have the Internet as an alternative reference site. They apparently just didn’t feel the need for any information the books provided.

That says more about them than it does about baseball’s decision.

I’m not even going to bother mentioning what I think is wrong with the above quote, but as a younger person who uses the Internet (and sometimes even writes about baseball), I actually do have a Green book from the 1970’s lying around somewhere which I purchased off ebay a few years ago. I can’t find it. It probably ended up in storage when I moved, but I recall there may be some interesting team record stats in it.

If anyone has one of these on hand I’d be interested in hearing from you if there is anything worthwhile in these books which can’t be found easily on the Internet.

Sean Smith’s CHONE projection system has been updated to the latest and greatest!

One of the really cool things that Baseball Info Solutions keeps track of is when there is a shift and it effects the outcome of the play. If it doesn’t effect the outcome of the play, it’s not recorded as a shift, even if one was employed.

In 2008, the top 5 players that were most effected by shifts (positively or negatively) were:

Carlos Delgado
Ryan Howard
Jim Thome
David Ortiz
Adam Dunn

Delgado’s BABIP on shift effected plays was at the .191 mark, compared to his .284 BABIP on every play. This is entirely different from say, Ortiz’s BABIP on shift effected plays which was .299, compared to his overall .273 BABIP. Makes you wonder if shifting on Ortiz is a good idea, though it would definitely take a deeper dive into the numbers to know for sure.

Anyway, this was really just a quick preliminary look at the data, but with everyone talking about shifts and BABIP lately, I thought this might be of some interest.

I was feeling the player comments was a bit of a false start, so in an effort to try out some new features, it’s been replaced by the Player Links section, which I think could be particularly useful for both our readers and writers.

For any player you can enter in a link to a particular article that is relevant to that player along with a brief description of the article or short quote from the article. Feel free to submit links to your own work as well as links to whatever news, analysis, or commentary you feel would be useful to FanGraphs visitors for that particular player.

You may have noticed that the look of FanGraphs has changed slightly. It is now 200 pixels wider, in some places. The homepage for instance takes advantage of this space, while most pages don’t quite take advantage of the space yet.

I’ll be working hard to fill in this space with hopefully useful sidebar boxes that give extra information about the player. In some spots, the data tables with be widened instead to allow for more stats and easier viewing. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in that space, now is the time to speak up.

However, it’d be disingenuous of me to say that the only reason I’ve widened the page is to just add more content. I’ve been reluctant to put real ads up on the site for some time, but unfortunately there will have to be some advertisements to help pay for the site’s expenses.

With that said, I’m not going to clutter up the entire page with ads or anything and will attempt to keep them to a minimum with tasteful placement that doesn’t disrupt any of the site’s content.

All the UZR stats on the site have been updated thanks to Mitchel Lichtman’s outfield arm and double play ratings!

– UZR now inlcudes outfield ARM runs and Double Play runs.
– ARM and DPR (Double Play runs) are broken out separately in the fielding sections.
– All player Win Values have been updated to include these additions.
– There have also been some slight changes to UZR that adjust for how fielder’s choice plays were being calculated.

The changes are available in all sections of the site including the player pages, leaderboards, team pages and my team pages.

For the sake of transparency, there was a bug on the team totals page for pitchers values only where some pitchers who switched teams mid-season were not being included in the team totals.

This did not effect any of the individual pitcher values, only the team totals.

Update: There’s been one additional change made where relievers are now not as highly influenced by leveraged. This change was made to properly align positional player win values with pitcher win values. Only pitchers who pitched in extremely low leverage, or extremely high leverage situations will be effected, and at most by about 1 win.

The Oliver projection system for batters is now available in the player pages, projections pages, and you can get a customized player list using the my projections feature.

Huge thanks to Brian Cartwright for allowing us to use his projections and you can read all about them at Statistically Speaking.

Pitcher Win Values are now available in the leaderboards, team pages, and the MyTeam section.

Two fun facts:

After the park, league and replacement adjustments for 2008, it looks like Roy Halladay was ever so slightly more valuable than C.C. Sabathia by our calculations. Though for all practical purposes they were equally valuable. Neither of them the Cy Young award, though Sabathia did change leagues making it particularly difficult for him to win. (C.C Sabathia 7.68 wins vs. Roy Halladay 7.71 wins)

Remember when Eric Seidman wrote about how awful Brandon Backe was and how he couldn’t understand why he was still allowed to pitch in the majors? Well, of all the qualified starting pitchers in 2008, Backe finished dead last in wins, with -0.8 of them.