Calculations!

Every year, some players start hot, others start cold. In the past, when a player had a high BABIP to start the season, we said, “Oh, well he’s lucky. His numbers will come down.” But now we can say with greater certainty, using Fielding Independent wOBA (or FI wOBA), what a player’s wOBA would actually regress to, given their performance in other areas.

Let’s look at the top five BABIPs in the league with FI wOBA regressed to career BABIP rates (or CaB-FIw for Career BABIP FI wOBA).

David Wright: .536 BABIP, .503 wOBA, .424 CaB-FIw

Even if/when Wright’s BABIP comes back to his career .342 BABIP, his peripherals are off the charts. He is on pace for 30 homers, which is nothing miraculous for Wright, but he is also walking and striking out at a 12.5% rate.

Will that kind of patience continue? Eh, probably not to that extreme, but it certainly means Wright is seeing the ball well right now and could be poised for a really good year.

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Yesterday, the Dodgers and Padres played for the seventh time on the season. Just like they had done in five of the first six match-ups, the Dodgers ended up victorious. However, unlike the previous games, they got some significant assistance in coming out on top. Here’s the Win Expectancy graph of yesterday’s SD/LA match-up:

Source: FanGraphs

You’ll immediately notice a giant spike in the Dodgers’ Win Expectancy in the ninth inning, as they went from having just a 30.1% chance of winning to a 62.2% chance of winning on one play. This is how that play is described in the play log:

Jesus Guzman hit into a triple play to catcher (Grounder). Yonder Alonso out at third. Chase Headley out at second.

And this is what that play actually looked like:

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This isn’t one of those articles where the headline is written as a question and then I attempt to answer the question in the post. This time, I really am asking a question that I don’t think I know the answer to, and I’d love to see a good discussion in the comments about the $2.15 billion price that Magic Johnson’s group just paid for the Dodgers.

Here’s what we know.

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A collective sigh of relief spread across the baseball community last night, as Frank McCourt officially sold the Los Angeles Dodgers to the partnership group headlined by former Laker great Magic Johnson.

The deal is historic for many reasons. It marks the end of the McCourt era in Los Angeles, in which he ran one of the most storied franchises into the ground and transformed it into a laughingstock across the league (and, unfortunately, still made a healthy profit in the end). The final sale price of $2.15 billion also is the most any U.S. sports franchise has ever commanded.

For more information about the details of the sale, be sure to read this article written by Mike Axisa.

This transition of ownership should not only translate into a more professional baseball franchise, but it also should signify the end of thriftiness in Los Angeles. Ned Colletti should no longer be cash-strapped when attempting to accumulate talent to build a winning team. No longer sitting on the sidelines while other big-market organizations acquire talent such as Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder, and Jose Reyes. Starting next winter, the Los Angeles Dodgers project to be serious players in the free agent market once again.

But which players could the Dodgers target next offseason?

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The Frank McCourt chapter in Dodgers history came to an end Tuesday night. The team announced that it reached an agreement to sell the club to the bidding group led by Magic Johnson, Stan Kasten and the Guggenheim Partners. Give MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick credit for the original scoop. The price is $2.15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Matt Futterman.

Unsurprisingly, the sale price is the largest ever paid for a North American sports franchise. It is more than double the previous MLB record, which belonged to Tom Ricketts, who paid roughly $845 million for the Cubs in 2009. Previous Dodgers owner Frank McCourt bought the team from NewsCorp for $430 million in 2004. His debt has been estimated at $1.1 billion, so despite running the team into the ground, he’ll still walk away with close to $1 billion in profit.

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What do these fellow batsmen have in common?

• Adrian Gonzalez
• Matt Kemp
• Emilio Bonifacio
• Michael Bourn
• Michael Young

Well, probably a lot, seeing as how they all share a profession, but today let us examine a particularly unique distinction: The fact that they collectively represent the top five BABIPs of the 2011 MLB season.

Let’s find out how much was luck and how much was repeatable.

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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For a catcher, the “tools of ignorance” is an endearing term used to sum up the challenges of the position in a neat and tidy phrase. Over the past three seasons, scouting well over 100 games and a few hundred prospects has led me to develop my own “tools of magnificence” as a handful of players have displayed 80-grade tools which are now seared into my scouting conscious.

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Prospects have never been trendier amongst baseball fans than they are right now. The MLB Draft is now televised, most baseball blogs and online publications now publish at least a Top 10 Prospects list for each organization, and struggling fan bases such as that of the Kansas City Royals have begun to see their attendance rise as their prized minor leaguers begin to reach the majors.

The same can be said for their popularity within major league organizations, too.

Teams have begun pouring so much money into the draft that the new CBA contains specific limitations to curb the spending spree. Teams now often value control years more than overall talent and have become extremely cautious in parting with top prospects to acquire proven talent. This generalization goes for both big-market and small-market franchises, too, which is something that was not often said in previous years.

Which teams have benefited most from homegrown talent in recent years? Which teams have drafted amateur players and developed them into major league talent the best?

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It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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