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.

Over the past few weeks, we have received a number of complaints about the site being slow or unresponsive, mainly due to various ads that appear on the site.

This is of course, not intentional. At FanGraphs we rely on a combination of advertising, and now membership to support our efforts. It is our goal to have ads that do not hamper the user experience, and may even be of interest to you.

We use a number of advertising networks to provide us with our advertisements, and when there is a rogue ad, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to track down. Ads do not always impact all machines, operating systems, browsers, etc… in the same way, so reproducing errors, and even finding the offending ad can be very tricky.

When we hear about problem ads, we always try and be proactive in getting rid of them. We struggled to track down iOS (iPhone / iPad) App Store redirects for quite a long time (along with much of the publishing industry). This past month, we believe to have finally solved the problem and hope these should no longer be an issue for FanGraphs visitors.

With the current issue, we are going to toggle some advertising switches and we’d like you to tell us if things improved. Generally we only hear if things are broken, but in this case we would like to hear if things are either still broken, or if they have improved.

If today you are still experiencing major issues with FanGraphs on your desktop browser, please post a comment with the browser, how old your machine is, your operating system, and exactly what the problem is. If things have improved, please do the same. You can also fill out the below poll.

Thanks for your help on this!