Rafael Soriano: Research Darling
A number of months ago I rolled out “the most popular player feature”. It’s basically which players were viewed the most on FanGraphs in the past 24 hour period. Over our spring training trip, it was mentioned to me several times that Rafael Soriano is always in the top five and that the list must be broken.
It’s certainly possible that the list is broken, but after combing through the code, I couldn’t find anything particularly egregious. I’m inclined to believe one of the following: the system is being gamed (maybe it can be if you do something like this), there’s a group of people who everyday can’t help but fawn over Rafael Soriano’s stats (there are a lot of Yankees fans), or he really is just that popular (I’m skeptical).
To put things into better context, this whole player popularity system was launched in November and the most popular player over that time period is Albert Pujols, followed closely by Derek Jeter. These are not shocking revelations. Then comes Rafael Soriano.
Soriano has made the top five for the day 49 times out of 151 days and is only topped by Albert Pujols 60 times. Derek Jeter’s managed to make the top five 34 times and then there’s a big drop off to Ichiro Suzuki’s 17 times.
Since Soriano signed with the Yankees he’s made the list 39 times, showing up on the top five list 48% of the time. Prior to signing with the Yankees, he made the top five 10 times, good for only 14% of the time. Being a Yankee has clearly helped him, but that 14% is still the fifth most appearances in the top five prior to his signing. In the past 30 days, he’s made the top five list 17 times, the most of anyone.
Whatever the reason is for the incessant need to look up Soriano’s stats (hey, I’m not complaining), it would seem that you should get used to him being a semi-permanent fixture in the popular players list.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
not sure how the code might look, but perchance you should Adcock?
Where is Sergio Mitre on this fabled list?
Some factors:
He was the premier free agent reliever. There was a lot of speculation on where he’d sign and how much he’d cost. He signed rather late in the offseason (i.e., a longer window of offseason interest in him). He signed in NY, so he got a lot of attention. There was a lot of NY media discussion of how much better he made the Yankees, and whether they had matched Boston’s offseason moves. There was a lot of discussion from the sabermetric folks about the inefficiency of investing heavily in relievers, and their inherent unreliability. Also, he’s definitely a regression candidate.
Don’t forget Cashman basically saying he was forced into signing Soriano (or whatever the true story was). That likely garnered some page views for his stats.
He’s more than a regression candidate. He’s a candidate to make the Jeter contract look smart by comparison. they guy is a ticking time bomb with that arm and ‘tude
It was just one outing. Don’t overreact.
8/19/09 Missed 2 games (right shoulder injury).
9/29/08 Missed 52 games (right elbow inflammation)
7/21/08 Missed 37 games (right elbow injury).
5/28/08 Missed 46 games (elbow injury).
9/20/07 Suspended by MLB for 4 games.
10/2/06 Missed 30 games (concussion).
8/4/06 Missed 12 games (right shoulder injury).
7/4/06 Missed 5 games (right shoulder injury).
9/5/05 Missed 136 games (Tommy John surgery).
10/4/04 Missed 131 games(right elbow injury).
8/2/02 Missed 26 games (strained right shoulder)
For some reason CBSSports (or one of the big boys) falls in love with Latin American players.
See if you can filter out the searches by USER AGENT to see if it’s some random interwebz bot.
The trend will definitely continue now that FG posted two articles about him in a row 🙂
Yeah, great timing on my part, right?
Hmmm. Maybe if FANGRAPHS didn’t CONTINUALLY have NUMEROUS POSTS about RAFAEL SORIANO – two of the current posts, including this one, concern Soriano – there wouldn’t be SO MANY PEOPLE researching his stats!
Just a thought.
This is weird. I can’t tell if you’re serious.
In case you are: There have been six articles about Rafael Soriano this year on FanGraphs. The data this article is talking about obviously occurred after only four. That’s hardly a lot. There were two in March and two in January.
So do you think if they write back-to-back articles about, say, Tony Gwynn Jr., that he will become one of the most researched players before they’re published?
“There have been six articles about Rafael Soriano this year on FanGraphs.”
That’s quite a lot of articles about a closer/set-up man. Many other baseball-related sites talked about Soriano a lot during the offseason, as Soriano was one of the more prominent names on the free-agent market.
Additionally, Alfonso Soriano is another prominent MLB player, so it’s possible people were just typing in “Soriano,” which could lead to more hits on Rafael Soriano.
The essential point is this: who cares? Discussing what players are generating hits on this site, and the possible psychological explanations as to why users are searching for their stats is not that interesting a discussion.
wayne,
If this isn’t an interesting discussion, why have you posted two comments about it?
Maybe Rafael Soriano just really, really likes checking his own stats.
Yankee Fans like Soriano!??!?!?… maybe I am crazy, he can be good but hated that signing, but maybe i just see a huge regression to the mean for him in this terrible contract combined with the draft picks the yanks lost….
The Yanks only lost 1 draft pick.
I do check my stats every 2 or 3 hours just to remind myself of how great I am. Overall, I do think I’m more popular than Jeter and Pujols, but not quite as popular as Chris Denorfia and his fantastic ‘stache