RE24 (runs above average by the 24 base/out states): RE24 is the difference in run expectancy (RE) between the start of the play and the end of the play. That difference is then credited/debited to the batter and the pitcher. Over the course of the season, each players’ RE24 for individual plays is added up to get his season total RE24.

Calculation Example: In game 4 of the 2007 World Series, the RE for the Red Sox to start the inning was .52. When Jacoby Ellsbury doubled off Aaron Cook in the very first at-bat in the game, the Red Sox were then expected to score 1.15 runs for the rest of the inning. The difference or RE24 was .63 runs. Ellsbury was credited +.63 runs and Aaron Cook credited with -.63 runs.

Why you should care: RE24 tells you how many runs a player contributed to his team. It’s similar to WPA (except in runs), but unlike WPA it does not take into account the inning or score of the game. Therefore, it is a more context neutral statistic. It does however take into account how many runners are on base and how many outs are left in the inning.

Variations: REW (run expectancy wins) is RE24 converted to wins.

Links and Resources:

Run Expectancy by Run Environment
The Book Wiki: Run Expectancy

I put up something new today which I think is very cool. Under each pitcher page, in the very bottom table, you can now see the percentage of each type of pitch a player threw and its average velocity. These stats are available from 2005-2007 and will be updated daily when the season starts.

Some quick things to note:

-The average velocity is in parenthesis next to the % of the pitch thrown.

-The percent of any known pitch type is a percentage of only known pitch types thrown. XX is an unidentified pitch type and is taken as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

-PO are pickoff attempts and are calculated as a percentage of all pitches thrown.

A huge thanks goes out to Baseball Info Solutions for allowing me to do this. This is a work in progress and there’s more that can be done with stats like these so feel free to chime in with suggestions.

Update: I’ve removed SW (Screwball), FO (Forkball), and SI (Sinker) and moved them into SF (Split-fingered Fastball). There were just so few pitches categorized as those three, it didn’t make sense for them to have their own bucket.

FB: Fastball, CT: Cutter, CB: Curveball, SL: Slider, CH: Changeup, SF: Split-fingered Fastball, KN: Knuckleball, XX: Unidentified, PO: Pickoff Attempt

WPA (win probability added): WPA is the difference in win expectancy (WE) between the start of the play and the end of the play. That difference is then credited/debited to the batter and the pitcher. Over the course of the season, each players’ WPA for individual plays is added up to get his season total WPA.

Calculation Example: In game 4 of the 2007 World Series, the WE for the Rockies started out at 50%. When Jacoby Ellsbury doubled off Aaron Cook in the very first at-bat in the game, the Rockies WE declined to 44.2%. The difference or WPA was .058 wins (5.8%). Ellsbury was credited +.058 wins and Aaron Cook credited with -.058 wins.

Why you should care: WPA takes into account the importance of each situation in the game. A walk off home run is going to be weighted more than a home run in a game that has already gotten out of hand. This makes it a great tool for determining how valuable a player was to his team’s win total.

When not to use it: WPA is more of a descriptive statistic and not that great of a predictive statistic. There are better statistics to use in raw player evaluations than WPA.

Links and Resources:

The Hardball Times: The One About Win Probability
The Book Wiki: Win Probability Added
Wikipedia: Win Probability Added
WPA is… WPA is not…

K/9 (strikeouts per 9 innings): The average of how many batters a pitcher strikes out per 9 innings pitched.

Calculated as: (SO * 9) / IP

Why you should care: K/9 is a perfectly suitable way to evaluate a player’s ability to strike batters out.

Current Baselines (2002-2007): The average K/9 for starting pitchers is 6.17 and 7.21 for relievers. For starting pitchers the top and bottom 20th percentile are a K/9 above 7.56 and below 4.89. Relievers top and bottom 20th percentiles are a K/9 above 8.94 and below 5.54.

Variations: Some people prefer to use strikeouts per batter faced (K% or K/G) to express a player’s ability to strike batters out. The difference is minimal and the argument for using K% is that K/9 excludes walked batters and K% does not, suggesting that K/9 may either overstate or understate a pitcher’s overall effectiveness (not pure strikeout ability).

Links and Resources:

Wikipedia: Strikeouts per 9 innings pitched
U.S.S. Mariner: Evaluating Pitcher Talent

Because the FanGraphs glossary sucks so much, I’ve decided to update the glossary by posting one article each day on a particular statistic.

They’ll be easily accessible through the blog and eventually the glossary tab once all the stats are completed. Until then the old glossary will remain intact. Overall, I’m trying to make them fairly thorough, but feel free to comment and add new links and information if you feel what I post is incomplete or inadequate.

Just as the title says, they’ve been updated to the latest and greatest. There are a few players not in the database yet and here are their projections:

Alexei Ramirez: .282/.347/.455 (220 AB)
Kosuke Fukudome .289/.368/.476 (557 AB)

Hiroki Kuroda: 10-10, 0 SV, 175 IP, 115/52 K/BB, 4.01 ERA
Kazuo Fukumori: 3-4, 2 SV, 60 IP, 41/35 K/BB, 5.25 ERA
Masa Kobayashi: 4-4, 0 SV, 68 IP, 50/19 K/BB, 4.24 ERA
Yasuhiko Yabuta: 4-4, 0 SV, 75 IP, 61/28 K/BB, 4.08 ERA

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