The following is the first and behemoth installment of a three-part (or more) series concerning baseball’s next great market inefficiencies.

The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

—Official MLB Rulebook, Page 22

On Tuesday, in the sixth round of the MLB Draft, the San Diego Padres selected outfielder Kyle Gaedele (who the Tampa Bay Rays had previously drafted in the 32nd round of the 2008 draft). Gaedele plays center field and shows good signs of hitting for power, but what most writers, sports fans, and guys named Bradley talk about is Gaedele’s great uncle.

Casual fans probably do not know about Kyle’s great uncle, Eddie Gaedel (who removed the e off his last name for show-business purposes). We nerds can forgive the casual fan for forgetting a player who outdid, in his career, only the great Otto Neu. Gaedel took a single at-bat, walked to first, and then left for a pinch runner.

What makes Eddie Gaedel a unique and important part of baseball history, however, is not his statistics, per se, but his stature. Gaedel stood 3’7″ tall, almost half the height of his great nephew. Gaedel was the first and last little person to play in Major League Baseball, and the time has come for that to change.

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I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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It’s time for interleague play, again. Even moreso than the interminable disputes about which “style of play” is aesthetically superior, complaining about fairness of the presence/lack of the DH in away games, perhaps the most contentious debate among many fans (contentious despite the overwhelming evidence on one side) is that interleague play proves that the American League has been significantly stronger than the National League for at least a decade, no matter what this fine representative of the Best Fans in Baseball believes:

The American League’s domination of interleague for an extended period of time is good evidence for its superiority, whatever the causes of that superiority might be. However, some will point to individual players as being independent demonstrations. For example, Matt Holliday was a great hitter with the Rockies through 2008. He started the 2009 season in Oakland and “struggled” relative to what he’d done before. Some people attributed that simply to him being a product of Coors Field (sigh), but when he was traded to St. Louis, he started raking at almost the same level. It must be the league, right?

Or how about Pat Burrell, who came off a number of successful seasons in Philadelphia, signed with Tampa Bay, then bombed so badly for a season-and-a-half the Rays let him go for nothing in 2010. He then signed with San Francisco and tore the cover off the ball to help the Giants on their way to a World Series Championship.

Naturally, it is silly to argue from individual cases to a league-wide issue. However, I wondered if taking all the cases like Holliday’s and Burrell’s and putting them together might show us something about the relative strength of leagues, both now and in the past.

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We’re pleased to republish this often referenced article by Pizza Cutter that originally appeared in StatSpeak.net on November 14th 2007.

What does a year really tell you about a player? Seriously. If I gave you the seasonal stats for any player last year (or the year before), how much could you really tell me about him? If I told you he hit .300 last year, are you confident that deep down, he’s really a .300 hitter? How do you measure a year in the life?

Like a lot of things that happen out here in the Sabersphere, I take my inspiration for this (series of?) article(s?) from a conversation that went on at the Inside the Book blog. A few folks were discussing an article that I wrote here at StatSpeak on productive outs and as these things are wont to do, the conversation wandered. Inside the Book co-author MGL asked me a fair question: when I talked about productive outs, what sample size I was dealing with. Not so much how many player-years were in my data set, but for each of those player years, how many PA’s did each player have. It’s a much more important question than you might think.

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Troy Tulowitzki’s been on a tear this season. But this isn’t some small-sample, month-long streak. He’s been raking since last July, after he returned from a wrist injury that sidelined him for nearly five weeks.

Usually when a hitter returns from these types of injuries it takes awhile to hit at pre-injury levels. It’s pretty obvious to understand why: Batters use their wrists to swing through the ball. In Tulo’s case, though, it’s almost as if he never suffered the injury.

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Click here for part one and here for part two.

In the previous analyses we saw that while a player increases his expected bonus by going to college, players who sign straight out of high school get to their free-agent seasons more quickly.

So are players better off by signing straight out of high school or going to college?

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If you haven’t read part one of the study, you can get caught up here.

If you have, you’ll remember that the previous analysis suggests that, for almost every round in the draft, the mean bonus a player receives after going to college is greater than what they were offered out of high school. At first glance, this finding may seem to suggest that players are better off financially by going to college. But there is more to consider than just the signing bonus a player receives.

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With the advent of the August 15th signing deadline, an increasing amount of attention each summer is devoted to which players choose to sign professional contracts and which high school players decide to go to college. With hundreds of thousands of dollars- and sometimes millions- hanging in the balance, the decision of whether to sign or go to college is a monumental one for players and their families. Not only do players have to choose between realizing the dream of playing professional baseball or going to college- two good options to be sure- there is also a pressure to get the best deal possible. The stark reality is that for many players the bonus they receive after signing is the most money they will ever get from playing the game of baseball, so it’s important to get the best deal possible.

In this study, I tried to answer whether players are better off financially by signing out of high school or going to college. In trying to answer this question, I was forced to make several assumptions, and, in some cases, engage in some flat-out guesswork. Therefore, the findings that follow need to be taken with the methodological shortcomings in mind. In this post and the ones to follow, I’ll provide an outline of my methodology along with the results. I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not there is simply too much guesswork to draw a meaningful conclusion. If nothing else, the study should provide a solid groundwork for the types of issues that need to be dealt with in the future.

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A number of months ago I rolled out “the most popular player feature”. It’s basically which players were viewed the most on FanGraphs in the past 24 hour period. Over our spring training trip, it was mentioned to me several times that Rafael Soriano is always in the top five and that the list must be broken.

It’s certainly possible that the list is broken, but after combing through the code, I couldn’t find anything particularly egregious. I’m inclined to believe one of the following: the system is being gamed (maybe it can be if you do something like this), there’s a group of people who everyday can’t help but fawn over Rafael Soriano’s stats (there are a lot of Yankees fans), or he really is just that popular (I’m skeptical).

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An umpire is not supposed to have any influence on any game, but many times they do, especially the home plate umpire calling balls and strikes. Even though the strike zone is supposed to uniform across the league, each umpire has their own unique strike zone. I have gone back over the past 3 years and projected how pitcher or hitter friendly each umpire will be for the up coming season.

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