Other ballots: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago (AL) Home / Chicago (AL) Away / Chicago (NL) / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston.

A couple days ago, the present author began the process of process of reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.

Below are six more ballots to the end of producing a new collection of these broadcasters scores.

For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.

Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, if so compelled.

Kansas City Royals

Some relevant information regarding Kansas City’s broadcast:

• Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Ryan Lefebvre.
• Color analysis is typically provided by Rex Hudler.
• Steve Physioc and maybe Jeff Montgomery both appear for select games.

Click here to grade Kansas City’s television broadcast team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Other ballots: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago (AL) Home / Chicago (AL) Away.

Yesterday, the present author began the process of process of reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.

Below are six more ballots to the end of producing a new collection of these broadcasters scores.

For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.

Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, if so compelled.

Chicago Cubs

Some relevant information regarding Chicago’s broadcast:

• Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Len Kasper.
• Color analysis is typically provided by Jim Deshaies.
• No one else really appears for select games, according to the internet.

Click here to grade Chicago’s television broadcast team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, the present author announced his intentions of revisiting the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.

Today, we begin the balloting process to produce a new collection of scores.

For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.

Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, if so compelled.

Arizona Diamondbacks

Some relevant information regarding Arizona’s broadcast:

• Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Steve Berthiaume.
• Color analysis is typically provided by Bob Brenly.
• Luis Gonzalez appears for select games.

Click here to grade Arizona’s television broadcast team.

Read the rest of this entry »

John Farrell received the wrong result from the right move today. The Red Sox manager used his closer in a high-leverage, non-save situation, in the eighth inning. With the bases filled with Blue Jays and one out in a tie game, Farrell lifted Koji Uehara and brought in Craig Kimbrel.

Kimbrel fanned Edwin Encarnacion for the second out, but proceeded to walk Troy Tulowitzki to force in a run. Russell Martin followed with a two-run single.

After the game, I asked Farrell — prefacing my question by saying I agreed with the move — if it was something we can anticipate seeing more of this season.

“We’ve got roles established,” responded Farrell. “The seventh, eighth and ninth have been efficient. They’ve been successful. I think this was a little bit of a blip with Koji today. That bullpen group knows that they’re there to pick one another up in certain situations. The highest-leverage inning was clearly the eighth, and hopefully we don’t find ourselves in that spot too often.”

I hoped for a more definitive answer. What Farrell said about established roles, not to mention his “hopefully not,” suggested that this might be the rare case. At the same time, he did seem to leave a window open.

It’s a breath of fresh air when a manager cites high-leverage and does more than play lip service to the term. Farrell brought in his best reliever with the game on the line — results be damned — and if he’s smart, we’ll see more of it in the future.

It both seems like and also actually was just last week that the present author announced his intentions of revisiting the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, those results have become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

Last week’s post represented the first step towards a new set of broadcaster rankings — namely, to assemble an actual list of all baseball’s main television broadcast teams. The current post is the natural complement: an attempt to identify all the relevant members of baseball’s radio broadcasts. The information here is taken from a combination of Wikipedia and MLB.com, but would benefit from readers who possess a more intimate knowledge of how each club’s broadcasts are executed.

Again, the idea is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth in 2016. While many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more efficient, if perhaps slightly less nuanced.

Below is the preliminary list. Teams marked with a “(?)” are the ones about which I’m least sure.

Arizona: Greg Schulte, Tom Candiotti

Atlanta: Jim Powell, Don Sutton

Baltimore: Joe Angel, Jim Hunter

Boston: Joe Castiglione, Tim Neverett

Chicago (AL): Ed Farmer, Darrin Jackson

Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Toronto Blue Jays Manager of Baseball Analytics

Location: Toronto

Description:

The primary focus of this position will be to support the Baseball Analytics Department. Incumbent will learn and understand how decisions are made in all areas of Baseball Operations, develop a familiarity with the data required to make those decisions and create tools and systems to display and expedite the access to that data.

Responsibilities:

• Understand and document current database structures, historical design decisions, format, definitions, limitations and content of currently used external and internal data feeds, and establish future requirements.
• Maintain and support the current end to end data warehousing process within Baseball Operations, starting with structured and unstructured data, conceiving and designing appropriate data structures, performing ETL processes to house the data in the data structures and exposing the data structures to end users.
• Design and manage a new data warehouse capable of supporting reporting and analytics to improve the currently deployed systems.
• Develop and maintain data quality assurance processes to ensure database integrity in the future.
• Complete ad-hoc database queries and analysis as dictated by circumstances.
• Oversee the evaluation, selection, implementation and support of new database systems.
• Collaborate with members of the Baseball Operations department to develop best practices for storing and displaying baseball data.
• Recommend new data sources for purchase and/or new techniques to gather data.
• Develop and maintain conceptual, logical and physical data models.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent professional experience required. Master’s degree a plus.
• 5-8 years of related work experience is required, including demonstrated knowledge about data management best practices, long-term maintainability of code and ability to effectively solve problems pertaining to data infrastructure and integrity.
• Must have demonstrated some ability to complete baseball-specific statistical analysis.
• Previous experience with baseball-specific data, either publically available or otherwise (i.e. Pitch F/X, TrackMan, Statcast, etc.).
• Proven background in the ability to relate to and communicate effectively with people of varied backgrounds (programmers, analysts, outside data vendors, other front office members, and Major and Minor League coaches, possibly players).
• Demonstrated ability to successfully design and execute data warehousing projects.
• Expertise with SQL and relational databases is required.
• Experience with at least one of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++ and/or other programming languages’ is required.
• Experience processing large amounts of JSON formatted data strongly preferred.
• Represent the Blue Jays in a positive fashion to all business partners and the general public.
• Ability to work evening, weekend and holiday hours as dictated by the baseball calendar.
• Willing and able to relocate to Toronto.

To Apply:
Interested applicants must do the following:

• Complete this online application.
• Send an email to BaseballResumes@bluejays.com with your resume and the answer to the following three questions:

1. Why do you want to work in baseball?
2. Describe a time when you either built a production-level database from scratch or added a new data source to an existing production-level database and explain the steps you took to make sure the process went smoothly.
3. Please describe any work you’ve done with any publicly available baseball databases.

Last week, the Astros’ Dallas Keuchel and the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka faced off on Opening Day in New York. The first Opening Day was pushed back a day because of wintry weather. This day was no different, with a 36-degree first-pitch temperature and 18 mph wind. The next day, I ran my daily velocity report and both of the above names were on the list of starters who’d exhibited huge velocity drops. Keuchel was down 2.5 mph and Tanaka was down 2.3 mph. By running a quick study, I found that colder weather does have a fairly dramatic effect on pitcher velocity.

To find the data, I ran a query using the PITCHf/x database. For the years 2008 to 2015, I compared average velocity from a game which started at 40 degrees or less and the average from the rest of their games. The average change in velocity was -0.95 mph, with a median value of -0.92 mph. A pitcher throwing in a cold game should expect some velocity decline.

Note: Reader yaboynate quickly pointed out that the drop because it is early in the season. I change the query around a bit, and found the average and median change to -0.58 mph. Now the rest of April would be colder and the whole month is lower to start with.

Here are how the velocity changes were distributed.

Cold-Weather Effects, 2008-15

Velocity Change	# of Pitchers	% Change
> 2 mph	3	0.7%
1 to 2 mph	17	3.7%
-1 to 1 mph	221	48.3%
-2 to -1 mph	136	30.0%
< -2 mph	81	17.7%
Total	458	100%

Well, the cold weather definitely limits any upside and almost half the pitchers in the sample experienced a 1 mph loss — with one in every eight experiencing a 2 mph loss relative to the rest of the season. The differences shrink as the games warm up. From 40 to 50 degrees, the gap is around -0.6 mph; from 50 to 60 degrees, around -0.4 mph.

So, it’s simple: when looking at early season velocity declines, look at game temperatures. Part of the reason for the decline could be attributed to the cold weather.

Note: it’s quite possible that the player depicted in this video — identified by the Cubs broadcast team as Eugenio Suarez — is actually Ivan DeJesus. It’s also quite possible that the precise identity of the player is totally immaterial to how life is both hopeless and without hope.

For much of Monday evening, the Cincinnati Reds led the Chicago Cubs at the latter’s home park in the city of broad shoulders. Reds left-handed starter Brandon Finnegan didn’t concede his first hit until the seventh inning — and, even after a series of unconvincing appearances by a collection of Cincinnati relievers, that club still held a 3-2 lead heading into the bottom of the eighth.

With one out and men on first and second in that same inning, very large Cincinnati right-hander Jumbo Diaz entered the game — with the intent, one assumes, of preserving the Reds’ slim lead. What he did instead was to allow a first-pitch home run to Cubs shortstop Addison Russell.

What this post doesn’t include is footage of Russell himself recording that home run against Cincinnati’s Diaz. Imagine any of the myriad home runs you’ve ever witnessed in your life and you get the idea. What it does include, however, is video footage of Reds third baseman Eugenio Suarez observing Russell’s home run — and providing, at the same time, a dramatic interpretation of the entire human experience, beginning (at first) with hope and ending (at last) with the certain knowledge that all things end horribly.

Should this video constitute required reading for all America’s youth? Logic dictates that it certainly shouldn’t not be that.

Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site. Consider: the average telecast of a major-league game offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how they consume a telecast.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

As such, what this post represents is the start of another of those crowdsourcing efforts. The first step: to arrive at some understanding of whom, exactly, we’re grading. The names below are intended to represent the main television broadcast teams for each of the league’s 30 clubs. (The radio broadcast teams will be addressed in a future post.) The information here is taken from a combination of Wikipedia and MLB.com, but would benefit from readers who possess a more intimate knowledge of how each club’s broadcasts are executed.

Again, the idea here is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth. Many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, but isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more efficient, if slightly less nuanced.

Note that, where a slash (/) divides multiple names, the suggestion is that the relevant announcers are participating in a fairly even timeshare. Note also that — incorrectly or not — both the Chicago White Sox’ and Los Angeles Dodgers’ broadcasters have been split into home and away teams, creating 32 total entries.

Please offer any relevant clarifications or corrections in the comment section.

Arizona: Steve Berthiaume, Bob Brenly

Atlanta: Chip Caray, Joe Simpson

Baltimore: Gary Thorne, Jim Palmer

Boston: Dave O’Brien, Jerry Remy

Chicago (AL) Home: Jason Benetti, Steve Stone

Read the rest of this entry »

A new version of Game Score, (Game Score version 2.0) is now available on the pitcher game log pages. It is listed under the heading GSv2 and is baselined to both season and league.

Thirty years ago, Bill James introduced us to Game Score, which he described as:

…a kind of garbage stat that I present not because it helps us understand anything in particular but because it is fun to play around with

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When you look at the original point system Bill devised, it all seemed reasonable enough. Give positive points for outs (innings) and a bonus for strikeouts, and negative points for hits, runs, and walks, with hits having more impact than walks. And start everyone at 50, since on a scale of 0 to 100, 50 is average.

A sidebar to the strikeout: also around thirty years ago, Bill introduced DER, defensive efficiency record, which is outs per ball in play, or the flip side of hits per ball in play, which is the foundation of DIPS. Bill therefore (almost) discovered the concept of DIPS but he didn’t realize it. It took Voros for the saber-world to notice, and for Bill to thank Voros publicly for the discovery. You can see in Game Score how the idea of DIPS was in Bill’s head, by the giving of the bonus point for the strikeout, over and above the regular out. We’ll get back to this in a second.

I think the reason that Bill considered this a “garbage” stat is that it wasn’t developed with a question in mind. It’s a way to organize a pitcher’s stat line so we can list things in an easy to list and understand manner. From that standpoint, it was likely an underdeveloped concept, a presentation that satisfied Bill’s needs at the time.

Adopting Orphans

If you try to use Game Score and understand its components, you will see it breaks down in a few cases. Not enough to throw Game Score into the scrap heap, but just enough that for the stat to graduate from the garbage to the toolshed, it should be refined.

A few years ago, Bill emailed me that when he publishes his ideas, they are now orphans. It’s up to the rest of the world to adopt them… or not. Whether it’s David Smyth using Runs Created as an inspiration to launch Base Runs, or Bill’s one article discussion on comparing Clemens to Mattingly and Rice to Guidry that formed the eventual basis of WAR, Bill has given the world plenty of ideas that have been essentially Open Sourced.

Fixing the Gaps

That’s where I come in. Game Score has never been modified. I love the basic concept of Game Score, its simple presentation, and powerful message. We just need to make sure that it can hold up to scrutiny. Bill used Game Score for an article a couple of years back where he realized he needed to make adjustments for his particular research. You can read more about it in this piece I wrote, but the basic idea that starting everyone at 50 doesn’t work for starting pitchers who get knocked out early in the game for reasons of non-performance. Bill kept the core of Game Score but added adjustments which ended up making it messy. I offered a very clean and simple solution. And its genesis is replacement level: rather than starting everyone at 50, we start everyone at 40. You can read the article to learn more.

The other gap relates to the walk. I noted earlier how Bill gave a bonus point to strikeouts relative to the out, which is actually in keeping with DIPS. But the flip side of that is the walk, and how its value should actually not be half the value of a hit, but equal to the value of a non-HR hit. Now, to be fair, this idea only works if we consider the third gap: the non-use of a HR.

Bill’s original idea was based on using the traditional pitcher line. But if we deviate that in the slightest, and just include the HR, this allows us to better compare the walk and the non-HR hit.

Game Score 2.0

The end result is this simple formula:

40
+2 outs
+1 K
-2 walks
-2 hits
-3 runs
-6 HR

(Note: The K is double-counted, 2 points for the out, and 1 extra. The HR is double-counted, 2 for the hit, and the 6 extra.)

It’s pretty straightforward, owing a great deal to Bill James, but shaped by Pete Palmer and Voros McCracken. You can read the link for more background. The three main areas of improvement is how it starts off each start at 40, not 50, how it better handles the walk, and that it uses the HR.

You can also align it to exactly 50 as league average by setting the constant for each year. In 2015, you’d use 38 instead of 40. Here are therefore the 10 best starts of 2015:

109 Max Scherzer 2015-10-03
104 Max Scherzer 2015-06-14
103 Chris Heston 2015-06-09
102 Max Scherzer 2015-06-20
102 Jake Arrieta 2015-08-30
102 Corey Kluber 2015-05-13
101 Clayton Kershaw 2015-09-29
101 Carlos Carrasco 2015-09-25
101 Cole Hamels 2015-07-25
99 Madison Bumgarner 2015-09-12

Game Scores actually have a fairly linear relationship to wins. Obviously, at the most extreme it’ll breakdown, but it does a pretty good job overall to represent a pitcher that averages a Game Score of 65 will win 65% of the time.

David has implemented Game Score on the individual pitcher pages, which is a terrific addition to the site.