When projections begin to be released, everyone seems to have there own opinions on how the projections are wrong. With Tom Tango just releasing his 2011 Marcel Projections, here is a look back at how some various players performed compared to their 2010 projections.
With several recent discussions (here and here and here and here) on home team advantage (HTA) – which began with Tobias Moskowitz’s and L. Jon Wertheim’s new book Scorecasting – I decided to see if I could find any reasonable causes for the advantage. I decided to look into areas that I thought home teams may have an advantage, namely errors (not much – about 2 wins league wide) and base running (some), but the number that caught my eye was the differences in batting average on balls in play from the home and away team. Here are the differences in BABIP for the home and away teams over the last few years:
After analyzing all of the preceding numbers (here and here), I bucketed various players into different bins according to their age, BMI and if they attended college.
The main problem I’ve run into with my analysis is that, as I divide the data, the sample sizes get smaller. With only 947 samples with which to work, the numbers get scattered quickly. For this chart, I’m only looking at the player’s age and his BMI.
With the general overall numbers available from yesterday’s article, here’s each variable:
Age
I divided the data into several buckets, according to individual pitchers’ ages. Here are the results:
This is the first in what will be a series on the disabled list. Here’s a link to the data.
I recently posted a projection formula (here and here) that estimated the chance of a starting pitcher spending time on the disabled list. To say the least, it generated several questions.
So I’m going to take a step back and show historic DL numbers for starting pitchers. For the purpose of this post, I’m only looking at pitchers with 20-plus starts and more than 120 innings from the previous season.
Teams lose players to the disabled list every year, but which teams had the most money tied up with these injured players in 2010? The following list ranks the teams that had the most dollars spent on players on the disabled list and the percentage of total payroll allocated to these days lost:
Zack Greinke and Yuniesky Betancourt have been traded to the Brewers for Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, Jake Odorizzi, and Jeremy Jeffress. Royals fans have been bracing for a trade since Friday when Dayton Moore went on a local Kansas City radio station and stated that Zack was not happy and the Royals were looking to trade him. In the same interview, Dayton stated that he was looking for right handed center fielder. He looks like he got his man in Lorenzo Cain.
Yesterday, I went through the formula used for predicting which starting pitchers have the greatest chances of going on the DL in a given year. Now here are the projections for 2011. Besides revealing the list, a few other points and possible improvements to the process will be discussed.
First, here are the five most and least likely starting pitchers (>20 GS and >120 innings in 2010) to go onto the DL in 2011 (creating these projections is still a work in progress, so no one should take too much stock in them right now):
This study is a start at looking at injury projections. It is far from perfect, but I hope to get the ball rolling to help to get some initial numbers for people to mull over. I am just looking at the chances of a starting pitcher going on the DL and will look at projected time lost later.
Negative WAR and the DL
A while back I ran articles on the amount of negative WAR generated by each team and team DL information.
Dan and BN in the comments of the negative WAR article wondered if trips to the DL and negative WAR were related at the team level. As a team has more trips to the DL, they are forced to use below replacement level talent. I went back and looked to see if there was any correlation between the two.