Jeff Sackmann of MinorLeagueSplits.com fame created his own set of projections for use in John Burnson’s Graphical Player 2008. He was kind enough to offer them for use on FanGraphs and now they’re available in the player pages and in their own sortable stats page.

His MINER projections are based off of the Marcel projections, but take into account batted ball data and minor league stats, including minor league batted ball data.

Still working on getting a link for a downloadable spreadsheet of the projections, but that should soon be available for those of you who want to play with them.

I know I usually don’t talk about baseball video games, but I can’t hold back my rage any longer.

The other day I picked up a copy of MLB 08: The Show for Playstation 3. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, the standout feature is you can create a player and take him all the way up from the minors to the majors, while increasing his skills along the way. It’s a fun idea since you only control your created player instead of the usual baseball sim where you control everyone.

Overall, “The Show” feature is executed pretty well, yet the main problem is the annoyance factor of the actual baseball game. Sure the graphics are great, but there are a number of glaring problems.

First off, the fielders are idiots. Nothing is more annoying than seeing the shortstop field an easy grounder, leisurely take his time throwing to first, and watch the base runner be safe by half a step. If the fielder had even an inkling of urgency, the runner would have been out by a mile. Instances like this happen all the time in all sorts of situations.

The other problem with fielders is that there is no collision detection. My player can run through any other fielder like he’s not even there, making for a very unpolished game experience.

The strike zone is a problem too. The designers thought it would be fun to have incredibly inconsistent umpires. If a ball is thrown to the edge of the strike zone, it might sometimes be a strike, or sometimes a ball. While this may emulate real life in some ways, (let’s leave that discussion for another time) it makes my head hurt when a ball is so blatantly a strike and it gets called a ball. I think we call all agree that typically umpires do not try and make the strike zone size random. The game designers did.

I also feel that pitching in general is a bit unrealistic. I never get a sense that I’m expanding the strike zone when I get ahead in the count. Batters seem to keep the same strike zone regardless of the count. There’s also way too many foul balls. In baseball there are about .6 foul balls hit per batter faced. Rarely is there an at-bat in the game where I don’t have at least one foul ball.

I could go on with my gripes about the actual game, but my biggest problem of all is that it’s not nearly as good as EA Sports’ MVP Baseball 2005, which in my opinion is the greatest baseball video game of all time. That game was made 3 years ago and since EA lost their rights to create an MLB licensed product, baseball video games have taken a huge step backwards.

MVP 2005 had extremely responsive fielding controls, a great pitching system, a simple batting system and it really felt like you were in control of all 9 players on the field. For all the pretty graphics the new games have, you never really feel like you’re in control of the players and that is where they ultimately fail.

I just wonder how many more years I’ll have to wait before a baseball sim as good as MVP 2005 comes along again.

I made a few updates to FanGraphs this afternoon:

– Clutch is now calculated as: “WPA / pLI – WPA/LI”. You can read the discussion on why it should be this way here: Baseball Fever Forum

– Pitchers now have WPA/LI (context neutral WPA) and Clutch. These are now available in the player pages and leaderboards in the same locations they would be for batters.

– 2007 WPA and all WPA related stats have been slightly adjusted to reflect the correct 2007 run environment in each league.

Today on NPR’s All Things Considered, R.A. Dickey was interviewed about his transformation into a knuckleball pitcher and how he’s mysteriously missing his ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing arm. At least he’ll never need Tommy John surgery.

Links:
Listen to the All Things Considered interview
Read the New York Times article

First off: Welcome back baseball! Today is the first day of the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues which means we get our first taste of tangible 2008 baseball stats, sort of.

I’m a big proponent of taking spring training stats with a grain of salt. Spring training is the time to examine opening day position battles and try and get a glimpse of which players are healthy. But can you gain any insight into how a player’s regular season will be based on how he performs in spring training?

For this particular exercise, let’s look at pitcher’s strikeout rates (K/9). If you look at the correlation between K/9 in 2006 and 2007, you get an R^2 of about .58, which is pretty strong correlation. When you look at the correlation between spring training 2007 and the 2007 regular season, the R^2 drops to .32. So as a whole, 2006 is a much better indicator of a player’s 2007 strikeout rate than spring training.

The most innings a pitcher will pitch in spring training is roughly 25, so we’re looking at a fairly small sample size which is problematic. But what if a pitcher during spring training has shown extraordinary improvement in his strikeout ability?

For instance, Rafael Betancourt’s K/9 in 2006 was 7.6 and in spring training it jumped to an impressive 12.5. His was the biggest jump from 2006 to spring training and he did indeed show improvement during the 2007 regular season with a K/9 of 9.1.

Of the 161 pitchers sampled, whichever direction their K/9 moved in during spring training when compared with the 2006 season, 63% of them had their K/9 move in that same direction when comparing 2006 with the 2007 season. The correlation of the difference between 2006 and spring training and the difference between 2006 and 2007 had an R^2 of .19.

So there is something there, but it’s not anything you want to bet the bank on. By no means would I suggest looking at a player’s huge K/9 jump in spring training and thinking that it would definitely translate into 2008 success. Oh, and while I’m at it, spring training ERA should not just be taken with a grain of salt; it should be ignored completely.

As a side note, we’ll be carrying 2008 spring training stats starting soon for your own amusement.

Finally the ZiPS Projections are now available on FanGraphs; just in time for spring training. Huge thanks to Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory for letting us post them again this year. Enjoy!

I made a few highly requested changes to the leaderboards.

– You can now view the entire dataset on one page. This is on a page by page basis at the moment. When you’re done viewing the entire dataset and change your query parameters, it defaults back to 50 records per page. Of course, you can always change it back to full view when you’re ready to export data.

– Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) is now in the batted ball section.

– You are now able to select the minimum plate appearances (PA) or innings pitched (IP). You can still select only qualified players and all players.

The 2008 CHONE and Marcel projections are now available in the stats pages and the projections board.

Big thanks to Chone Smith for his 2008 CHONE projections and Tangotiger for this year’s Marcels.

If you are looking for downloadable versions you can find them here: CHONE download ; Marcel download.

As of now, the 2008 Bill James Handbook projections are available on the player pages.

On a side note, all the minor league players have been synced with the major league players, so there will no longer be duplicate entries for minor league players that were called up last season.

After last night’s Red Sox game 7 victory, I was rather curious to see who would win the ALCS Most Valuable Player award. Without looking at the numbers, I thought it should go to Kevin Youkilis. I thought there was a chance it would go to Manny Ramirez and also a chance it could go to Josh Beckett. When Beckett was announced the winner, I was a little surprised and went to check the numbers.

It turns out that Josh Beckett did lead all players in Win Probability Add (WPA) in the ALCS. In two starts his WPA was .516 wins compared to Youkilis’ .203 wins. Manny Ramirez’s WPA was just slightly below Beckett’s at .483 wins. Jon Papelbon and Hideki Okajima also were also contenders for the WPA title with .467 and .286 wins respectively.

If you look at things just in terms of run production taking the context out of the situation. Youkilis was indeed the most productive player with a Batting Runs Above Average (BRAA) of 9.3 runs. Ramirez came in second with 6.2 runs, while Beckett was the next best with 4.7 runs.