FanGraphs Baseball

The Baseball Writers’ Association (BBWAA) voted to elect Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio to the Hall of Fame today. Full results are up on the BBWAA website currently.

For the pitchers, it was their first time on the ballot. For the first time in history, three first-ballot pitchers made it on the same ballot. That may say something about how voters are struggling with the steroid era — there are some great hitters still remaining on the ballot who have struggled to make the required 75% because of the taint of drugs in their numbers (some even without a tangible report attached to their names).

Our leaderboards love the new inductees. Randy Johnson shows up as fifth all-time in Wins Above Replacement, with Pedro Martinez coming in at 16th. The two also rank one-two in strikeout percentage among pitchers with at least 2000 innings. That Pedro did it at his stature makes it all the more remarkable, but listen to him talk about pitching and it all makes sense.

The John Smoltz argument is a tricky one, but once you give him credit for both starting and relieving — as Jay Jaffe did in a well-thought-out article — he does much better. As it was on our leaderboards, Smoltz is top 15 in strikeout percentage all time among pitchers with 2000 innings. And if you add wins to saves (strange, but the Hall voting often takes strange turns), Smoltz is a top-ten pitcher in that category among those with 2000 innings.

Craig Biggio is a unique entrant into the Hall of Fame himself. While there will be some debate about which hats certain entrants will wear, the debate for the former Astro might surround which glove he’d wear. With over 300 games played at catcher, second, and in the outfield, he’d have a healthy decision on his hands. All that positional versatility added up to a modest WAR total (84th overall), but with 3060 hits on his ledger and 285 hit by pitches (second overall), Biggio met some great benchmarks.

Congratulations to the new entrants to the Hall of Fame!

Often times there is a fine line between framing a piece of information as analysis and framing it as a “fun fact.” If I were to point out, for example, that Clayton Kershaw’s ages 24-26 seasons rank 12th all time in WAR and that names like Cy Young, Pedro Martinez, Johan Santana, and Roy Halladay are in the same range, you could construe that as analysis. I am putting a player’s performance in historical context and implying that he’s on his way to a plaque in Cooperstown.

I could even point out that Tim Lincecum appears slightly below Kershaw on the list to warn the reader that this information about Kershaw is not a guarantee about his future. All of that is useful analytical information.

If, on the other hand, I pointed out that control-pitchers Adam Wainwright and Rick Porcello were in the top 12 in intentional walks in 2014, I’m just calling attention to something that is interesting rather than particularly useful. If we’re being precise, there’s probably no such thing as meaningless data, but there’s a big gap between something like comparing Kershaw’s same age seasons to others in history and calling out a tidbit of information that we might find noteworthy.

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Because I’m a baseball weblogger and because certain members of my family and community are aware that I’m a baseball weblogger, some of them have asked me — and others will likely ask me at some point this week — “Hey Carson Harrington Cistulli, what do you think about the Hall of Fame voting?”

Why they continue to refer to me by my full name remains a mystery. With regard to their question, however, my answer is generally something along the lines of “Hmph.” Not particularly satisfying, I recognize. So far as takes go, it is decidedly frigid.

As a member of the BBWAA, I’ll theoretically be invited to answer this question in an official capacity about eight years from now. (I don’t think that will actually happen, as all signs indicate that my admission to the Association was the product of a clerical error. For the moment, however, I’ll proceed as if it weren’t.) If and when I receive a ballot for the Hall of Fame, I’ll dedicate sufficiently careful scrutiny to such an endeavor.

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The results of this year’s Hall of Fame voting will be announced at 2pm ET. What this post isn’t is a manifesto on who ought and ought not enter the Hall of Fame. What it is is a survey of four useful tools for understanding which players on this year’s ballot are most likely to enter — or most deserving of entry — into the Hall.

Ballot-tracking estimates are current as of this morning.

Name
JAWS (Link)

Explanation
Designed by former Baseball Prospectus and current SI.com writer Jay Jaffe to “improve the Hall of Fame’s standards, or at least to maintain them rather than erode them,” a Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score (or, JAWS) is calculated by taking the average of a player’s career WAR and his seven-year peak WAR (not necessarily in consecutive years).

The players listed below are merely those who’ve produced a higher JAWS score than the average such total at the relevant position (denoted by Avg at Pos). By definition, a number of extant Hall of Famers possess JAWS scores below that particular threshold. Even using this higher standard, however, one finds that 12 players are technically “qualified,” according to JAWS — or, two more than a voter can include on his ballot.

Who’s In (JAWS, Avg at Pos)
Jeff Bagwell (63.9, 54.2)
Barry Bonds (117.6, 53.3)
Roger Clemens (103.3, 61.8)
Randy Johnson (82.0, 61.8)
Edgar Martinez (56.0, 55.0)
Pedro Martinez (71.1, 61.8)
Mike Mussina (63.8, 61.8)
Mike Piazza (51.2, 43.1)
Tim Raines (55.6, 53.3)
Curt Schilling (64.5, 61.8)
Alan Trammell (57.5, 54.7)
Larry Walker (58.6, 58.1)

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Hello again! This is the National League version of the American League post from a little earlier. In case said American League post contained certain calculation errors, those same calculation errors will be repeated in this very post, as both posts have been written back-to-back and pre-scheduled. In case no such errors are present, you’re welcome, for the absence of errors. This is a link to the NL voting post from last Monday. I don’t know why that would be of use to you now, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.

So, in this post, a data review, in the same format as the AL post. The same caveats apply: I might’ve biased some of the voters. The pool of voters isn’t identical across the board in identity or size, and about those sizes — the sample sizes don’t number in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. Still, the information will be analyzed, because if the information were not analyzed, what would have been the point of the posts last week? Let’s tie up loose ends, together.

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Hello! Early last week, in part out of curiosity and in part because I had things to do, I asked you to do a bunch of voting related to the site’s Steamer team projections. I put up two posts, and here’s the one about the American League. Basically, we lean on the projections a lot, but we seldom ask for feedback, and I wanted to know how the community felt about projected team records, based on where things stood last Monday. Now, some things have changed since Monday, but nothing important has changed since Monday — excepting, say, Seth Smith — so circumstances remain mostly identical.

At the time, I promised I’d eventually review the data. Here now, the data shall be reviewed, and in this post, I’ll consider the results from the AL polls. I know it’s not perfect science. Different people voted in different team polls. Different numbers of people voted in each team poll. I probably to some extent biased the voters by offering commentary before each poll was embedded. Nevertheless, information is information, and, let’s see what we generated! With which projections do people agree the most? With which projections do people agree the least?

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Like the draft year, the baseball offseason has a feel to it once you’ve been around the game for awhile. Like some draft years, some offseasons are just different, and we are currently living through one of them. The 2005 draft was different; if you had scouting director or national crosschecker-level responsibilities, you stood a good chance of seeing a future major-league All Star on any given day, and you knew it. This offseason, after what seemed to be a few years of relative winter calm, all hell has seemingly broken loose, especially with regard to position-player movement. Today, let’s take a look at team position-player turnover in the divisional era, to get a sense for the historical norms to which 2015 will someday be compared. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been in love with contact rate from the beginning. Admittedly, it doesn’t provide a lot of information you can’t already figure out from strikeout rate, but I like contact rate for its granularity. It’s one of the first stats I look at for pitchers, and it seems like a pretty pure indicator of domination over opponents. What could be better, after all, than a pitch a batter can’t hit? An out on a ball in play, I suppose, but balls in play are dangerous. Nothing dangerous about a swing and miss.

As much as I like contact rate, though, I’ve never thought to try to break it down. Most analysis with contact rate is performed using overall contact rate. Sometimes, it’s using in-zone contact rate, or out-of-zone contact rate. But what I found myself in the mood to do is try to break the numbers down a little bit by count. A thank you, as usual, is extended to Baseball Savant. Because I haven’t spent much time with this data, I can’t really tell you what it means yet, but, you’re here because you want to further your understanding of baseball. I think exploration’s justifiable for exploration’s sake.

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