Daily Notes, With an Expected wOBA Experiment

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Expected wOBA Leaderboards
2. Notable MLB Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Expected wOBA Leaderboards
A Note on What Is Expected wOBA
In the not very distant past, I experimented in the Notes with something called “Expected wRC+.” Expected wRC+ (or, xRC+) was essentially a version of Bradley Woodrum’s Should Hit formula (itself more or less a FIP for hitters with BABIP included) but with regressed (as opposed to raw) home-run, walk, and strikeout rates as the inputs. Also, for xRC+, BABIP was replaced by expected BABIP (xBABIP), per the formula (adjusted for 2012 league averages) proposed by user slash12 at Beyond the Boxscore in 2009.

The idea behind xRC+ was to estimate something like a player’s true talent over the course of X plate appearances. Of course, the methodology wasn’t flawless: wRC+ is a park-adjusted stat, for example, while the inputs for xRC+ were all expressly not park-adjusted. Also, while I’d adjusted the xBABIP formula to produce a league-average figure equivalent to the league-average for BABIP in 2012, it’s also the case that the I had not addressed the way in which the different inputs were weighted against each other. (Because I don’t know how to do that, is why.)

Fortunately, since my initial clumsy experiments with xRC+, Woodrum has made some new and useful contributions apropos fielding-independent offense — not only producing a formula to express a fielding-independent offensive stat in terms of wOBA (as opposed to wRC+), but also revisiting slash12’s xBABIP formula to best represent the current offensive (and, of course, defensive) environment.

For the leaderboards which follow, I’ve used a methodology quite similar to the one I utilized for xRC+. Expected wOBA (like xRC+) draws heavily from Woodrum’s work on fielding-independent offense — except, in addition to using regressed (as opposed to raw) home-run, walk, and strikeout rates as the inputs, I’ve also used a regressed xBABIP. As xBABIP is essentially a product of the distribution of different sorts of batted balls, and the last of the relevant batted-ball types to become reliable (in terms of sample) is fly-ball rate (at 250 plate appearances), I’ve decided to regress xBABIP to that 250 PA figure.

Is this methodology flawed? The contingency is probable, reader. However, it’s not very flawed, and the seductive power of the internet tables below — internet tables full of numbers that purport to reveal a player’s True Talent — renders the experience mostly pleasant, at worst.

Expected wOBA Leaders, 2012
Here are the leaders in Expected wOBA (xWOBA, in this case) among all batters in 2012. Note that anything beginning with an -x- has been regressed. Note also that when Expected Expected Expected BABIP is finally discovered inside a computer, it will be the sexiest metric available.

Expected wOBA Laggards, 2012
Here are the bottom-10 hitters this season by Expected wOBA:

Potential wOBA Risers, Maybe
Here are the 10 players whose Expected wOBAs most greatly exceed their actual wOBAs (minimum 100 PA):

Potential wOBA Fallers, Maybe
Here are the 10 players whose Expected wOBAs are most greatly exceeded by their actual wOBAs (minimum 100 PA):

Complete Expected wOBA Leaderboard
Click this hyperlinked text to see the full Expected wOBA leaderboard for 2012 (minimum 50 PA).

Notable MLB Games
New York NL at Washington | 12:35 ET
Surprising Cy Young candidate R.A. Dickey (125.0 IP, 76 xFIP-, 3.3 WAR) faces other surpising Cy Young candidate Gio Gonzalez (107.2 IP, 76 xFIP-, 3.5 WAR).

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

Los Angeles AL at Detroit | 13:05 ET
The enigmatic Max Scherzer? The very inscrutable Max Scherzer? The Max Scherzer of Mystery? These are all appropriate epithets for Max Scherzer, who (a) starts this afternoon for Detroit and (b) has posted these figures in 102.1 innings this season: 4.84 ERA, 3.16 SIERA.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Detroit Radio.

Seattle at Kansas City | 14:10 ET ***MLB.TV Free Game***
After (probably warranted) concerns about his early season performances, Felix Hernandez, who starts tonight for Seattle, has actually proceeded to post a line on par with, if not slightly better than, his previous career bests. Line: 132.2 IP, 25.9% K, 6.5% BB, 45.4% GB, 3.12 SIERA, 75 xFIP-, 3.8 WAR.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Seattle or Kansas City Radio.

Today’s Complete Schedule
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 4.8.

Note: the following Game Scores include the poorly conceived playoff-odds adjustment discussed in a recent edition of Daily Notes. Also note: the following table is entirely sortable.

Away		SP	Tm.	Gm.	Tm.	SP		Home	Time
Ubaldo Jimenez	CLE	0	4	5	4	9	TB	David Price	12:10
M. Bumgarner	SF	8	4	6	8	5	ATL	Tim Hudson	12:10
Joe Saunders	AZ	2	6	4	4	7	CIN	Mike Leake	12:35
R.A. Dickey	NYN	10	2	8	7	9	WAS	Gio Gonzalez	12:35
Jerome Williams	LAA	5	6	8	4	10	DET	Max Scherzer	13:05
Wei-Yin Chen	BAL	4	1	1	3	3	MIN	Cole DeVries	13:10
Felix Hernandez	SEA	9	4	5	7	6	KC	Will Smith*	14:10
Mark Buehrle	MIA	5	3	2	1	3	CHN	Paul Maholm	14:20
Jose Quintana	CHA	7	5	6	5	4	BOS	Clay Buchholz	19:10
Lucas Harrell	HOU	5	4	3	5	4	SD	Edinson Volquez	22:05
Freddy Garcia	NYA	4	7	5	4	5	OAK	A.J. Griffin	22:05

To learn more about Pitcher and Team NERD scores click here.
To learn how Game NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
* = Fewer than 20 IP, NERD at discretion of very handsome author.