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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Right around this time last year we looked at how the FAN projections projected the 2010 standings, so now seems to be as good a time as any to take a look at what the 2011 fans have projected the standings to look like based on their individual player projections thus far.

Red Sox       98
Yankees       94
Rays          87
Baltimore     81
Blue Jays     79

Twins         87
Tigers        83
White Sox     79
Cleveland     73
Royals        68

Rangers       85
Angels        79
Athletics     78
Mariners      76

Phillies      90
Marlins       85
Mets          84
Braves        82
Nationals     74

Brewers       84
Cardinals     83
Cubs          82
Reds          80
Pirates       71
Astros        60

Rockies       90
Giants        84
Padres        80
Dodgers       79
Diamondbacks  75

Once again, the fan ballots were a bit optimistic and needed to be scaled back a bit to make the win totals look realistic.

The Braves look obviously low to me (maybe there’s something weird going on there) and the fans really have their hopes up for the Rockies, but I’m pretty pleased with how these came out.

With two of the game’s better players, Justin Morneau and Jason Bay, spending considerable time on the DL last year because of concussions, I decided to take a look at how concussions have been reported and the possible effects head injuries might have on player performance. Thanks to the hard work of Matthew Grosdidier, who compiled most of the data, we have some interesting numbers to look at on head-related trauma.

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