Remember last week? That was pretty cool, huh? I haven’t even been paying all that much attention to the playoffs due to a combination of busyness and the knowledge that nothing will top last Wednesday night. The simultaneous collapses of the Red Sox and Braves, along with the all-but-impossible comeback by the Rays, have been discussed endlessly already, and I feel like most people (other than Red Sox and Braves fans) have moved on. So while the framework of this post will be the events of the end of the regular season, it’s really just about how freaking awesome baseball fans are. I guess “people with the same interests as me are the coolest” could also work.

Baseball lends itself to absolute obsession. Something like football — or even soccer over in Europe, from what I know about the schedule — is more compatible with, you know, having a life. Football allows you to set one day of the week away (and ok, Monday night, too) to turn into a worthless slob on the couch and watch either your local games or the Red Zone channel if you an ADD-addled fantasy player. Baseball is there almost every night you come home from work and on the weekends, too.

Please direct your eyes to the chart on the right. Look at that time commitment. So try to imagine what it’s like if a person is a baseball fan in the sense of attempting to follow all 30 teams — usually for fantasy knowledge purposes. I know that I became a better and more intelligent fan once I delved into fantasy baseball head-first a few years back. The result is being able to talk to any other baseball fan for practically an infinite amount of time. Not that I wasn’t able to do that already, but now I can do it with fans of any team almost as well as with Mets fans. I would joke about the Astros possibly being an exception, but past Tuesday night is evidence against this.

After a Sunday where I had a great time hanging out with fellow Mets fans during a Fangraphs (and River Avenue Blues and Amazin’ Avenue) meetup that turned into a middle school dance where girls and boys were replaced with Yankees and Mets fans, my hunger for real life baseball discussion had been whetted. While our Mets fan contingent did talk a bit about the depressing topic of our chosen team, there was also plenty of discussion about the on-going football games and good television shows. If I truly wanted to immerse myself in baseball, I would have to watch teams that still actually mattered, so Tuesday night on my home after a late class, I decided I should go to Foley’s NY to check out the four games that would help decide whether the Red Sox and Braves would provide schadenfreude for the rest of the country.

I had already been there before and knew that it is baseball fan heaven, with every television showing a baseball game, signed balls lining the walls, and a Don Zimmer fathead in the bathroom watching you piss into the urinals. I sat down at the bar and saw that the four televisions situated along its length were showing the four relevant games. There was probably no place on earth I would have rather been. Oh, I’m sure the MLB FanCave had all the games on, but fuck that place.

The night didn’t get really good until an older Astros fan sat down next to me and started berating the Cardinals fans sitting a few stools down on the other side of me. I just laughed and told him that I was with those “pussy Cardinals fans” for tonight, considering I wanted the Braves to miss the playoffs. From then on, we talked about 1986 (even though I was born during that season), Roger Clemens being an asshole, Nolan Ryan being a steroid user, Carlos Beltran being a clutch player, “Harvard turds” ruining baseball with stats, and how much the Cardinals suck. All right, it was mostly him talking, but it was immensely entertaining. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to turn away at some point to talk more to the attractive girl with an Irish accent who had sat down next to me, but the Texan would not stop talking. He had now moved on to other things, like his brother who had written for SNL and had made some YouTube videos. By the time the siege on my attention had been lifted, it was too late to stick around any longer, unless I wanted to get home on the LIRR as the sun was coming up. I wasn’t upset though, as I was able to have a conversation with a fan of the terrible organization that is the Astros for the sole reason that we shared love for baseball. Sure, his opinions might have been all over the place, but sometimes you have to hear from people outside of the saber-twitter-blogsphere, right?

Sometime during the night, I overheard a girl ask about a Cardinals fan meetup at Foley’s. It explained the Cardinals fans strewn around the bar, and also made me think of God Save The Fan, which I had recently read (and I’ve been meaning to write a review of along with the book I bought it with on Amazon, The Postmortal). In it, Will Leitch talks about finding a bar in Manhattan to watch the 2006 NLCS with other Cardinals fans (this is where I stopped reading the book). I told myself I’d ask him on Twitter whether he was talking about Foley’s. But not before I was at Foley’s again the very next night to watch the same eight teams play four games on the last night of the regular season.

The bar was a bit more packed on Wednesday night, though. When I managed to find a seat at the bar after a little while, it was pretty much in the same spot as before. This time, I was situated next to a Cards fan. This might have had to do with pretty much everyone at the bar being a Cards fan. There were a few Red Sox fans, too. If you magically appeared in the bar, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have guessed it was in NYC. This Cards fan was surprised that I was rooting for his team, considering 2006; I told him that the Braves were like a sadistic bully that beat on Mets fans for most of their childhood. Comparatively, I still remember thinking the 2006 NLCS would just be a bump in the road. Sigh.

We sat there talking about the state of the Mets, how much money Albert Pujols will get this offseason (and from which team), the young pitching staff of the Rays, the embarrassment that is Carl Crawford, among other things. Meanwhile, the Rays had spotted a huge lead to the Yankees, the Cards had crushed the Astros in the first inning, and the Phillies-Braves and Red Sox-Orioles matchups were tight games. I downed beer and beer, sharing a bucket of bottles with the Cards fan, while watching the drama unfold with hardcore baseball fans all around me. To be a Cards fan out to watch the game in a NYC midtown bar on a weeknight means you are most likely dedicated. And at one point, I turned around to see the very guy who I wanted to ask about his Cards fan NYC bar story.

As Leitch seemed involved with a conversation with a lady, I struck up a conversation with his buddy (who looked vaguely familiar and whose name I cannot remember now). But once I mentioned that I wanted to ask Leitch something, he introduced me as awkwardly as possible to embarrass me. I probably deserved it. The minute I mentioned God Save The Fan, Leitch apologized for it being out-of-date already. Even when I said the only reasons I bought his book were its bargain price and Amazon recommending it when I bought The Postmortal, Leitch was suitably self-deprecating. I guess that should probably be expected from a guy whose first book was titled Life as a Loser. Leitch was also surprised to hear I was rooting for the Cards, but I told him how I want Braves fans to feel my pain. I bet some Braves fans think they’ll be back in the playoffs next year and for years to come (like I felt about the Mets in 2006), but maybe Jason Heyward won’t become a Hall of Famer and maybe Tommy Hanson will have injury issues. Or maybe the Mets will become the best te. . . nevermind.

But once again, I was able to effortlessly strike up a baseball conversation with another person, albeit a much shorter one, before I returned to my seat and my original Cards fan companion for the night. Leitch really did seem like a nice guy (he even offered me a beer!), which makes sense considering the transformation Deadspin has made since he gave up his editing duties. Despite Buzz Bissinger ripping him on Costas Live years ago for lack of integrity, the site has only gotten progressively more grimy under A.J. Daulerio. But I know Leitch and other people support him, so whatever, I won’t make this about how Deadspin was better with Leitch was editor. I mean, it was, but let’s get back on topic. Is there a topic here?

Oh yeah, despite Evan Longoria going into beast mode, the Rays were still trailing the Yankees; the Phillies-Braves game had gone into extras; and the Red Sox were looking like they were going to win their game against the Orioles. Then the timeline of madness that I can’t remember nor be bothered to look up broke out, starting with the Phillies beating the Braves to knock the latter out of the playoffs, making the Cardinals fans go crazy. Then a little while later, Dan Johnson hit a 9th-inning, game-tying home run with two outs and two strikes. Then a beer later, the Red Sox choked away a 9th-inning lead for the first time all year. Then only a few sips later, Longoria hit another home run to send the Rays to the playoffs and Red Sox home. It was a blurry night of cheers and high-fives by then, as I guess everyone not from Boston was happy to see Red Sox fans suffer again. It’s like order was restored in the baseball universe, and I was in the NYC nexus of it.

According to the media, Mariano Rivera “officially” became the greatest closer ever a few days ago when he broke the all-time saves record. The assumption that Rivera needed to save one more game than Trevor Hoffman to be considered the greatest one-inning pitcher in history is laughable, but here we are. But the more heated discussion has been about whether Rivera or Derek Jeter has been more indispensible over the Yankees’ reign of dominance.

Rivera’s 602 saves (wait, the number is already up to 603) have all occurred during the regular season, which might as well be warm-up games for the modern New York Yankees. Since the 1994 strike, they have missed the playoffs just once. The 2008 season notwithstanding, has there really ever been any doubt of the Yankees making the postseason? Their payroll is consistently enormous, and if there’s a chance they might not make the playoffs, Brian Cashman makes sure to reload at the trade deadline. Making the playoffs is as routine for the Yankees as sub-.500 seasons are for the Pirates.*

*This reminds me of when I lashed out against a Yankee fan who said “preseason football > regular season baseball” on Twitter. This is because he prefers football and also because regular season baseball translates to preseason baseball in Yankeeland.

I don’t think it’s disingenuous, then, to focus on postseason performance. But I want to be clear here: there’s a difference between claiming a player has been a brilliant playoff performer and claiming he has been innately clutch (or, in contrast, a choke artist). Does Mariano Rivera’s superhuman performance in the postseason mean he’s going to continue having an ERA under 1? Almost definitely not, but his entire body of work as a closer does make him better suited for the role than anyone else. On the other side of the spectrum, Alex Rodriguez did kinda suck in a few postseasons with the Yankees, but that didn’t make him a “choker,” and he didn’t magically become “clutch” in 2009. This is the distinction between the actual value of past performance and the predictive value of said performance.

Mariano Rivera’s career postseason stats are absolutely disgusting: A 0.77 ERA and 0.766 WHIP, with 42 saves and 5 blown saves.* The number of blown saves might be shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising that two of them occurred during the most famous collapse in baseball postseason history – the 2004 ALCS.** In fact, the only time the Yankees won a series where Rivera blew only one save was the preceding series against the Twins. The Yankees ended up winning that game anyway, though, because the Twins are fucking worthless against the Yankees in the playoffs. In October, as Rivera goes, so go the Yankees.

*I wish Fangraphs’ postseason shutdown and meltdown stats went back further than 2002. Since then, Rivera has had 19 shutdowns and 2 meltdowns. By comparison: Brad Lidge, 18-4; Jonathan Papelbon, 11-1 (wow); Joe Nathan, 2-5 (lol); Brian Wilson, 6-1.

**One of the blown saves was extremely unfair, as Rivera entered with runners at 1st and 3rd with no out and managed to allow only one run; he actually increased the Yankees’ chance of winning in that outing.

I’m a big proponent of FIP and xFIP, especially when it comes to closers, but the disparity between Rivera’s 0.77 ERA and 2.24 FIP and 3.21 xFIP over 139.2 IP definitely tests my faith in the metrics. Such a large disparity cannot be seen with some of the best individual seasons by other closers, who pitched in only half as many innings. For example, Dennis Eckersley’s 0.61 ERA in 1990 was backed up by a 1.34 FIP. I’m sure you could probably find seasons that disprove my general notion (Eric O’Flaherty this year is a candidate), but I think Rivera’s postseason tERA of 1.86 is probably closer to telling the true story of broken bat grounders, since it incorporates batted-ball data. He has managed to keep his career BABIP at .262, after all. The .216 mark in the postseason is definitely indicative of some luck, but it’s impossible to say how much. I think any way you slice it, it’s tough to envision a closer doing better over 16 seasons of postseason play.
In contrast to Rivera, Jeter’s postseason performance has been unremarkable when compared to his career. His postseason batting line of .309/.377/.472 is nearly identical to his regular season line of .313/.383/.449. It should be noted that these stats are still pretty great for a shortstop. And we’ve all seen the crazy plays he’s made in the field, and his clutch November home runs. He’s basically a great player in every situation. Yet Win Probability Added (WPA) tells me the craziest thing: Derek Jeter has hurt the Yankees overall chances when he’s been at the plate in the postseason (-0.58 WPA). Go ahead, look it up. Look at that clutch rating (-1.14)! Derek Jeter is a “choke artist”! But if you want to take leverage out of the equation with WPA/LI, Jeter manages to get into positive territory (0.56). I guess he’s ok.

I think you know where I’m going with this. Mariano Rivera’s postseason WPA is a whopping 4.86. Even if we strip out leverage (in the form of LI), which is going to heavily favor a closer, his WPA/LI is still 2.73. That’s over five times higher than Jeter’s. But there is an important point here, as WPA and WPA/LI do not factor in defense at all. Jeter playing shortstop is worth something — quite a bit actually. This is evident when you look at both players’ regular season Wins Above Replacement (WAR) total and see how far ahead Jeter is, despite Rivera being slightly ahead in WPA/LI. This is why for any other team I would emphatically say that Jeter is the more important and valuable player. But Rivera has been the perfect man for the perfect time and place in baseball history. He has arguably been better at his position than anyone other player, for the team that needed it most. Rivera has been used basically twice as much in the postseason as in meaningless April-September games.

I’m going to play fast and loose with some metrics here, but looking at the value of Rivera’s ~2.00 FIP seasons, he has probably been worth around 6 WAR in the postseason; Jeter, depending on defensive metrics, has been worth anywhere from 5-6 WAR. But WAR is context-neutral, and, as I’ve tried to show, Rivera has, in the aggregate, outperformed Jeter at the crucial moments. This is not to say that in an alternate universe, Jeter wouldn’t have performed better and Rivera would have seemed more human. Given a choice in 1995, knowing both of their true talent levels going forward and their career regular season performances, you would take Jeter. But looking back, Rivera has been more integral to the Yankees’ postseason success, and for them that’s literally all that matters.

Now watch Rivera blow up this October against the Red Sox.

In their first attempt at MLB organizational rankings — a sort of all-encompassing, forward-looking version of power rankings — Fangraphs named the Mariners the sixth-best organization in baseball, above teams like the Braves, Phillies, and Cardinals. Even with the reasoning behind the ranking, the writers were accused of bias by readers (many of the writers who created the rankings are fans of the Mariners). But the bastion of sabermetrics on the internet wasn’t the only place to buy into the defense-first philosophy, as Sports Illustrated wrote an article about the Mariners explaining the shift towards run prevention.* Even random baseball fans on the internet predicted the M’s to win 86 games and take the AL West title.

*Theo Epstein, the Red Sox’s young star GM, also believes in the power of the glove, considering his signings of Mike Cameron and Carl Crawford the past two years. He is also talked about in the article.

But as the 2010 season unfolded, it was clear that the Mariners were not going anywhere. Chone Figgins, their big offseason signing, was not hitting at all–neither was Casey Kotchman, or Jose Lopez, or anyone else on the entire team. If they wanted to win, the duo of Felix Hernandez and Cliff Lee had the impossible task of throwing shutouts practically every time they took the mound. Somewhere along the way, the Twitter tag #6org became the chosen method of mocking the entire situation. I suspect either @samtpage or @willDavidian (correct me if I’m wrong here) was the snarky bastard behind it, and it was glorious. You couldn’t go a day without seeing a pathetic Figgins AVG/OBP/SLG slash line or a hard-luck losing pitching line from Hernandez followed by #6org.

The #6org 2010 Seattle Mariners ended up dead-last in the AL West with a record of 61-101 and scored only 513 runs the entire season. Such offensive ineptitude had not been seen since the inception of the DH. By comparison, the Yankees led the majors with 859 runs scored.

Naturally, when it came time for another go-around with the organizational rankings before this season, Fangraphs revamped their methodology and the Mariners ended up 17th. The team that ranked 6th? The 15-30 Minnesota Twins, who are currently scoring 3.43 runs per game. It’s not quite as horrendous as the 3.17 runs per game the Mariners put up last year, but it’s the worst in baseball.

Is the #6org curse more powerful than the Madden curse or SI jinx? Joe Mauer is battling knee issues and will probably be moved away from catcher sooner rather than later, destroying his positional value, and making his massive contract look much worse. Francisco Liriano may have thrown a no-hitter, but his ERA is 5.73. I guess it doesn’t help that the Twins traded away a competent shortstop in J.J. Hardy just to pay for a set-up man. At least Justin Morneau is finally hitting like a man whose brain isn’t totally concussed.

So which team will be doomed to a shitty season in 2012? Braves? Rockies? Blue Jays? I could see the Rangers dropping from 5th to 6th. If that happened, Josh Hamilton would fall off the wagon and into the coke pile, Neftali Feliz would be stupidly left in the closer role, and Adrian Beltre would hit like he was back in Safeco. At least the Mets have no chance of being named #6org any time soon.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This is the book that alerted regular fans to the idea of sabermetrics. Joe Morgan famously railed against it; nerds in their basements embraced it; Hollywood decided to make a movie out of it. This is not a stat-filled textbook, but a well-written, entertaining story about the Oakland Athletics of the late 90s and early 00s, featuring Billy Beane as the protagonist.

It starts off telling the tale of a can’t-miss prospect who ended up flaming out in the minors even though he possessed all the tools baseball scouts dream of — a cannon for an arm, a beautiful swing, blinding speed, and the body of a Greek god (he even dated all the prettiest girls in high school!). As a prep prospect, he was even more highly touted than Darryl Strawberry. The name of this player was Billy Beane. Yes, the guy that made it cool to look at stats in your mother’s basement was also the prototypical high school alpha male.

Beane wasn’t just a tremendous athlete; he was also an extremely bright kid, but one who didn’t quite put as much effort into school as he should have. Yet he still almost went to college instead of taking the money to play baseball. He regretted the decision later, but he still managed to work himself up to the top of the A’s organization as their GM. Once there, he decided he would change how things were run.

Moneyball delves into how Beane maximized his resources by selecting college players with great stats instead of high school players with great bodies. It harps on the importance of on-base percentage. It chronicles disagreements between Beane — and his sidekick Paul DePodesta with laptop in tow — and his scouts. It’s about a front office trying its best to discover inefficiencies in the market for baseball players, not about glorifying Billy Beane or a particular type of unathletic player. And while naysayers like to point at the playoff failures of those A’s teams as proof that it doesn’t work, winning 100 games isn’t an easy feat, and the baseball playoffs are as close to a crapshoot as sports come. Although, the next book in this post does shed some light on why “Moneyball” didn’t lead to a World Series title.

It’s been a few years since I read it, but Amazin’ Avenue has created a book club around it and I’m trying to keep up through online means, since I gave my copy to my cousin a year or so ago (I wonder if he ever read it). I would recommend following their posts if you want to pick up the book anytime soon. It’s where anyone interested in the “stathead” movement should begin their reading.

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong

This book from Baseball Prospectus is for anyone who wants to look the baseball with a more critical eye. Most of the stats that populate the book are not very popular in the sabersphere nowadays, but the research and reasoning behind each chapter are still as relevant as ever. There’s the idea of a replacement player and how that is important to assessing a player’s true value, a method of comparing the competitiveness of different leagues (including the minors), a takedown of the perceived importance of the RBI, and plenty of other essential knowledge for any intelligent baseball fan.

There’s also a comparison of Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth and a look at how overpaid Alex Rodriguez is. There’s an argument for a return to the four-man rotation, something I’d love to see make a comeback. There’s a dismantling of the notion that managers actually make a significant difference. There’s even a section which slights how much Rickey Henderson’s stolen-base prowess increased his value as a player. Too much good stuff to lay out in this blog post.

My favorite chapter title has to be “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s Shit Work in the Playoffs?”, and it’s definitely one of the more enlightening chapters as well. It shows how the prevailing idea that pitching wins championships is actually somewhat true, that a great rotation has a positive correlation with success in the playoffs. For an example, look at how the Giants won the World Series this year. I guess this is where people who hate “Moneyball” would start reading the book.

Baseball Between the Numbers is just a perfect combination of good writing and good analysis. It doesn’t get too heavy with the stats, providing easy-to-understand charts when needed, and focusing more on the seemingly obvious conclusions which are arrived at after looking at the data, rather than the methodology. Yet everything is still explained enough so you know they are not just making things up nor manipulating the data to fit their agenda. It’s probably my favorite book out of the three which comprise this post.

The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball

This is the graduate course in sabermetrics. Do not read this book unless you like — or at the very least, understand — math. There are win expectancy matrices that take up multiple pages. All you have to do is look at Tom Tango’s website for The Book to realize that this is just pure analysis with little regard for enjoyable writing. The Book has, in addition to the usual Table of Contents, a list of the 140 tables in the textbook. That’s what The Book is — a textbook for managing a baseball game. The preface even says this is an attempt to rewrite “the [unwritten] book”.

The Book delves into platooning, the use of starters and relievers, pinch-hitting, sacrifice bunting, stealing bases, the intentional walk, lineup construction, and pretty much anything else that can be quantified. The authors use empirical data from multiple major league seasons to create their probability matrices and averages. If a math-averse person wanted to, they could just read the little boxes at the end of each section to see what “The Book” says on a specific topic without reading the details. An example would be:

Your three best hitters should bat somewhere in the #1, #2, and #4 slots. Your fourth- and fifth-best hitters should occupy the #3 and #5 slots. The #1 and #2 slots will have players with more walks than those in the #4 and #5 slots. From slot #6 through #9 put players in descending order of quality.

This flies in the face of the accepted wisdom of batting your best “overall” hitter 3rd, a fact which was gospel to me growing up.

As I said earlier, the stats mentioned in Baseball Between the Numbers aren’t exactly the darlings of the sabermetrics fan revolution nowadays. While the second book in this list talks about VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) and WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player), The Book uses WAR (Wins Above Replacement). The Book also goes into the creation and derivation of wOBA (weighted On-Base Average), which is an attempt to quantify each contribution from a hitter as accurately as possible. A stat like OPS (On-base Plus Slugging) weighs OBP (On-Base Percentage) and SLG (Slugging) equally, when OBP is about twice as important.

You must be getting the sense that this book is filled with acronyms and numbers and math. Not that Baseball Between the Numbers doesn’t have its hilarious acronyms, but it’s just not as heavy on the mathematical analysis. Or perhaps I just ignored many of the acronyms in Baseball Between the Numbers since no one uses them, even though the ideas behind them are sound.

The Book also explains the idea of WPA (Win Probability Added), which is tied to the probability matrices I mentioned earlier. Basically, this book is what spawned Fangraphs, which is why this is the book that has the popular acronyms. Baseball Prospectus is just not the sabermetric darling of the moment. While their analysis is better than Fangraphs’, most of it is behind a paywall which even I’ve never paid for (but I’ve been thinking about it lately).

So that’s what a degree in sabermetrics looks like. And once you take it, you won’t be able to stay away from websites like Beyond the Box Score, Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference (well, EVERY baseball fan knows this site), and The Book Blog. In addition to reading The Hardball Times website, you’ll order their Annual each year. Maybe you’ll even love the saber-tinted fantasy analysis at Roto Hardball.

Fangraphs — namely Dave Cameron — ranked the Seattle Mariners as the 6th best organization in MLB during this past offseason. In hilariously inept fashion, the Mariners have gone 45-71, spawning the Twitter hashtag “#6org” along the way.

Although this has been a running joke for weeks, if not months, I bring attention to it now because of an increasing focus on defensive metrics and their apparent limitations (moreover, I recently attended the Fangraphs NYC event this past Saturday). Just yesterday, I came across three blog posts attacking the methodology behind defensive statistics. It’s as if bloggers were waiting to see whether the Red Sox would make a late-season push and the Mariners would do ANYTHING before totally jumping on UZR and Plus/Minus and Total Zone.

But before I delve into that, I’ll say that the Fangraphs event and its subsequent afterparty was a damn good time. Almost nothing is better than intelligent baseball discussion while drinking awesome, albeit overpriced, beer. The official Fangraphs event might have had quite a few interesting speakers and some amusing moments, but it was naturally nothing I couldn’t get from just listening to the recording of it — outside of the Bloomberg Sports presentation, which was probably the coolest part of the event. It was also responsible the best #6org moment: as the presenters pulled up video of Justin Smoak’s one HR (Dave Cameron made sure to yell out that he actually had two), someone else yelled out, “Do you have video of him getting sent to the minors?” Sadly, I doubt anyone reading this blog post will comprehend the full scope of this #6org burn. The rest of the event is covered about as comprehensively as possible by this…chick?

The “live” event was just the precursor to the good stuff for me. The meeting down at a bar in the Village wasn’t for a few hours later, so I went go see Inception again in this theater. Perhaps I should have walked around Central Park since it was such a nice day, but I couldn’t resist the pull of the Ziegfeld only 5 blocks away, alright?

There’s not much point in me relaying my baseball conversations with random people, but I did get to mess around with the Bloomberg Sports application that had been showcased at the event. It was fucking glorious. I want a job working for a Major League club just to look up shit all day with it. I would watch video of every 2-0 count of David Wright’s 2010 season for minimum wage. I could see every single sequence a pitcher has thrown in fancy multi-layered pie charts. I could see every ball in the dirt Jeff Francouer has swung at. It’s an absolutely incredible tool.

Besides that, I believe I kept harping on why many Mets fans hate Wright, Reyes, and Beltran. I never even thought of it this way before, but in my drunkenness, I couldn’t help realize that with no one around them for support, the failures of the only good players on the team are magnified greatly. When they suck, the team sucks. And then the natural tendency is to think the team sucks because they suck. SOMETHING needs to be done with the #15org, but it’s not trading Wright or Reyes, even if I’ve almost reached my wit’s end in defending them (mostly against my own dad).

Yet I didn’t take the chance to ask Cameron how he felt about #6org or the apparently failure of focusing on defense this past season. I wish PaulNoonan from Brewed Sports was there to talk to him about thoughts like these:

1. The Zero Bound

You cannot hold a team to fewer than 0 runs. Think about a team made up of average pitchers, 5 Ozzie Smiths (assuming that Ozzie would be brilliant defensively at every position. And let’s leave catcher out of this for now.) and 4 average defenders. Say Ozzie plays 3rd, SS, 2b, CF, and RF, and Mr. Average plays 1st, LF, Catcher, and DH (say we’re in the AL). Already this is a brilliant defensive team. Ozzie in center will cover for most of the deficiencies of the LF, and 1B just isn’t that important a position to defend. Maybe this team gives up 2 runs a game where your normal defensive team gives up 3. Maybe a bit better than that, and maybe a bit worse. Now add another Ozzie. Put him in LF.

How much better did you make the team? The CF Ozzie was already helping Mr. Average LF a lot. Most of the field was covered by brilliant defenders. Most bloop hits were caught. Most plays deep in the hole were being made. Now add another Ozzie at 1st base. How this arguably helps even less. On defense, I would argue that except for catcher each additional investment you make helps you less and less. You are in a situation where you are realizing diminishing returns.

It’s a good point, and one that I’d love to see someone like MGL, the creator of UZR, expound upon. The other points I have some problems with, but this one just seems like common sense. And his last point segues into the biggest problem people have with fielding metrics: there are too many of them.

Tim Marchman over at SI had a good write-up on why defensive stats don’t carry much weight with many fans due to the disparate numbers they supply, even thought they’re attempting to measure the same thing.

This can’t be done with defense because we lack statistics that we can rely on to describe what happens on the field. Colin Wyers of Baseball Prospectus wrote an excellent piece about the problem recently, and it might fairly be summed up “garbage in, garbage out.” The underlying data that feeds systems like Plus/Minus is subjective, not objective, and prone to varying kinds of bias. This does a lot to explain why they arrive at different results.

He also mentions sample size issues and how UZR doesn’t have a strong correlation with team winning percentage. I admit it’s bizarre to see guys go from -10 to +5 from year to year in one fielding statistic, while he might go down over the same two years in another — it just seems WRONG.

Joe Posnanski, while writing about the actual process behind the Plus/Minus system, points out that it’s still better than anything we had before at evaluating performance.

Here’s the main point for me, though: Whatever subjectivity they have in their intensive and painstaking and methodical approach to studying defense seems to me to be NOTHING compared to the subjectivity that you and I get watching baseball even night after night after night. They look at every single play. More than look, they CHART every single play. More than chart, they CONCENTRATE on the defense for every single play. You and I don’t do that. Scouts don’t do that. Announcers, sportswriters, managers, general managers, nobody else does this. We may watch every single play (probably not), but we’re watching those plays in the larger context. We’re watching the pitcher, the hitter, the base runner, the umpires, the fans, the game. They are not. They are watching only defense. It’s a different thing.

Man, I love Joe Pos.

I originally ended this post with that sentence, but that seemed abrupt, no? I haven’t said why I think the Mariners suck (defense at the total cost of offense) or why the Red Sox won’t make the playoffs (injuries and an insane division). I do not believe those two cases have anything to do with defensive stats being wrong or overrated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQsTZc4WIL8

Accidental Penis – No, this is not a blog of “penis slips”, but pictures of stuff that look like penises. Much more Safe for Work.

The Fangraphs UZR Primer – This is just about all one could ever want to know about the now ubiquitous fielding metric that is a component of Fangraphs’ WAR calculation. I can’t believe I read it all.

A Few More Predictions – Joe Posnanski goes off and writes another few thousand words about baseball — words that you should read.

Shit My Kids Ruined – A tumblr blog of shit…ruined…by kids. I got nothing. Just click for schadenfreude.

Gateways to Geekery: Spaghetti Westerns – I’ve already seen The Good, The Bad And The Ugly; now I need to follow the rest of this guide to awesome westerns made over in Europe.

Harmful Drinks in America – I thought about not including this, because I feel like some of the comparisons are either wrong or just retarded, but they do emphasize the fact that most of the food (or drink, in this case) out there is slowly killing you.

I love Johan. He’s been one of the few guys on this Mets team that I’ve never been truly disappointed in. And I’ll never forget that gem he threw in the second-to-last game of the 2008 season.

But: he’s signed to a massive contact through at least 2013, with a club option for 2014. Roy Halladay will be making less over the same period and at this point looks like he will easily be the superior pitcher over the next few years. I can’t get on Omar for the contract, but I really hope Johan can stop his decline and at least maintain his performance of the past two years. I’m just not sure that’s going to happen. Pedro Martinez was all but done being Pedro at 33. I see Johan as basically Pedro-lite, and he turns 33 in two years.

If you want to see pretty graphs detailing Johan’s decline since his epic 2004 season, hit the jump.

Striking out guys at a progressively lower rate is never good.

Walking guys at a progressively HIGHER rate is never good, either.

Combine the two and you get:

Well, that’s just bad. Shit.

Of course, when you strike out less guys, that means more guys are making contact. Hopefully those guys making contact aren’t making good contact.

I guess not. Now, pitchers don’t have much control over their BABIP, but they do have a bit. Johan is fooling batters just a tiny bit less each year.

So more guys are making contact, and that contact is apparently getting better (or the Mets’ fielding is just worse than the Twins’, which is very possible). That equals:

So far this 2010 — no thanks to that debacle on Sunday — batters are hitting him like he’s an average pitcher. Fuck.

So guys are hitting for a higher average off of him and also walking more. That can only mean one thing:

More and more baserunners.

Now, I don’t get why Fangraphs doesn’t have graphs for FIP and xFIP, and I could easily make graphs for them myself, but instead I’m just going to post his SIERA for the past 7 seasons in big bold digits. (SIERA being a superior metric for measuring future performance than xFIP.)

2004 – 2.38
2005 – 2.73
2006 – 2.74
2007 – 2.76
2008 – 3.61
2009 – 3.55
2010 – 3.80

He hasn’t been the same pitcher since he came to the Mets (and you can argue it started his last year with the Twins), but he’s done a damn good job of hiding that fact most of the time. It’s just the times where he gives up a grand slam to Felix Hernandez, or walks 71-year-old Jamie Moyer, that one can plainly see he’s past his peak.

All graphs courtesy of Fangraphs.

I arrived at my aunt’s house shortly after 1 to help her figure out why the Spanish speech projects her students had put on flash drives wouldn’t play for her. That turned out to be an easy enough fix — she had to open the flash drives to look at the contents, so she could manually select the Audacity project files. She was probably clicking “Play” when autoplay came up, and it would try to play the Audacity file with WMP or some shit. Just a guess. What’s important here is that in the middle of this activity, I noticed an unopened iPod Touch sitting next to the laptop. How could that not catch someone’s eye? Apparently she received it free two months earlier when she bought a MacBook for her son (my cousin). Not a bad deal.

I continued cleaning up the messy computer: deleting programs, and telling others not to automatically begin their retarded processes on startup. Meanwhile, I continued to eye the iPod Touch, as I can’t help but be mesmerized by a shiny new piece of hardware. Apple products may be overpriced, but no one can deny that they’re almost all striking pieces of hardware. The Touch is half the thickness of my 2.5 year old 80GB iPod and has a screen double the size. It’s impressive before you even turn it on.

As I waited for the installation of Vista Service Pack 1 to finish (yes, I really helped my aunt out!), I mentioned how curious I was about the iPod Touch. I admittedly have been somewhat interested in the iPhone, but the monthly price would naturally keep any unemployed person away. I didn’t realize how easily that curious comment would be construed as wanting the iPod Touch. My aunt immediately replied with saying I could have it, and I was fairly shocked. The natural reaction to protest such a gift was somewhat weighed down by the thought of actually being able to mess around with such a gadget. I tried to tell her the various cool things she could do with it, but she wasn’t having any of it. I knew her son already had one, so I asked if her daughter (other cousin) would want it, and she insisted she would not be interested. I can’t say I put up the biggest fight at this point. I was getting an iPod Touch for Geek Squad work!

I didn’t think of the consequences of having such an awesome piece of hardware in my possession. Ignorance is bliss, and now the thought of having all the functionality of this iPod Touch practically all the time is already getting to me. The phone part of it barely fits into the equation. As I have already posted, I could check Fangraphs with the greatest of ease any time! I could watch Mike Tyson talking about stomping on children’s testicles whenever I wish! I could play games and annoyingly post my high score to Twitter every time! The possibilities are endless.

As for right now, I’m still giddy messing around with the few free apps I’ve downloaded. I’ve also uploaded some pictures and a converted episode of Peep Show (thanks, Handbrake) just to see how they’d look. It’s pretty much a technological marvel, but the iPhone is obviously on an entirely higher level, so having an iPod Touch only makes one realize how awesome having an iPhone would be. Goddamn it. Fuck you, Steve Jobs. Let Verizon in on your shit so maybe I could pay less than $75/mo for a reasonable iPhone plan.

Steve Jobs to me: Get a job, douchebag.

- Live win probability and win probability graphs.
- Live box score and play-by-play data.
- Basic/Advanced/Value stats for any baseball player.
- Minor league stats.
- Historical game data going back to 1974.

Fuck me in the ass, holy shit. Just look at this beautiful stuff:

I just came in my nerd pants. How much is an iPhone again? I need 24/7 access to baseball stats in such a pretty and informative package!

I’m sad that Fangraphs already beat me to this post, but I already had the idea in my head when I remembered the article. Yes, it’s only from 10 days ago, fuck you I’m going ahead with it. Albert Pujols might be the most insane hitter on the planet, and also the best player period, but Chase Utley is right there behind him. Utley might not be what you’d refer to as a “five-tool player”, but fuck if he doesn’t do everything you’d ever want a player to do on the baseball field. He even looks like an old-school baseball player while he does it. (a.k.a. white!)

Utley plays second base, a premium defensive position. Maybe it’s not quite catcher or shortstop, but it’s still a “fielder’s position.” Not only does he play such a pivotal position, but he plays it as well as anyone in baseball. At the very least, he’s been a top 3 second baseman over the past 5 years. You want UZR? His UZR/150 for the past five seasons: 17.1, 10.2, 21.0, 21.4, 7.7. And actually, that last one should be higher, because something is not right with Fangraphs’ formula. It should probably be closer to 9.0. But this is besides the point — the point is that Utley plays 2B better than you probably think. Maybe he should jump and twist and shout more, like Roberto Alomar.

Want more evidence? There’s a little site called fieldingbible.com and it utilizes a stat called plus/minus. An explanation straight from the site:

Video Scouts at BIS review video of every play of every major league game and record detailed information on each play, such as the location of each batted ball, the speed, the type of hit, etc.

…

A player gets credit (a “plus” number) if he makes a play that at least one other player at his position missed during the season, and he loses credit (a “minus” number) if he misses a play that at least one player made. The size of the credit is directly related to how often players make the play. Each play is looked at individually, and a score is given for each play. Sum up all the plays for each player at his position and you get his total plus/minus for the season. A total plus/minus score near zero means the player is average. A score above zero is above average and a negative score is below average.

Utley’s score from 2006 to 2008? +85

The next highest score at 2B? +58 from Mark Ellis

(More proof of Albert Pujols being awesome — his score was +82)

Baserunning? Utley has stolen 81 bases in his career while being caught only 11 times. That’s an 88% clip. Not to mention he’s a perfect 21 for 21 this season. Jesus Christ, he is good.

And now of course we come to hitting. We all know it’s the name of the game. It’s what makes an everyday baseball player famous 95% of the time. Either you hit a shitload of home runs or you hit for a really high average. That’s how you get into the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, Utley really doesn’t do either. Sure, he averages 30 HR a year, but that’s not an eye-popping amount, especially in this era. And his career average is just below .300 at .298. He can’t be that good a hitter then, right? Wrong. (I apologize for that.)

Utley is a great hitter who every season hovers around a .400 OBP, hits 30 home runs and 40 doubles, drives in 100 runs, and also scores 100 runs. His OBP is helped by his massive amount of HBPs every season (over 20), but he does it without wearing some huge piece of armor on his arm — unlike Craig Biggio, that fucking pussy. The guy is good. He’s not Pujols or A-Rod, but he can hit. Over the past five years, his OPS+ is at 136. By comparison, the lumbering first baseman next to him who is such a “great slugger” is at 141. And that guy plays a shitty 1B.

Anything I missed? Fielding, baserunning, hitting? Check, check, check. Fucking? Maybe Jeter has him beat there. MVP = Most Vaginas Penetrated. That Deadspin comment killed me. Intangibles? Maybe Captain Intangibles still has him beat, but Utley does have a ring now, and he played though a hip injury for half a season. He also never talks shit or complains about anything, it seems. Admittedly, he did say “World FUCKING Champions” in front of a crowd no doubt including children, but I can gloss over that; the Philly-ness has to come out sometime. He just plays the game the right way, and I can appreciate that. I’m not saying he’s GRITTY or SCRAPPY, but he goes out there and plays the game, and plays it as well as anyone. Pujols does the same for the most part, but he likes admiring his home runs a bit too much. Fuck him.

I’m going to wrap this up with Fangraphs’ WAR evaluations. WAR = Wins Above Replacement, which basically tells you how valuable a player is over some regular scrub from AAA. Let’s just go straight to the numbers.

Over the past 5 seasons, these are the totals for the top six players/pitchers in baseball:

Pujols – 40.3
Utley – 37.9
A-Rod – 33.7
Roy Halladay – 30.2
C.C. Sabathia – 30.1
David Wright – 29.7

Yes, I made it six just so I could include Wright. What are you going to do about it? The WAR evaluation is obviously not an exact science — even Fangraphs acknowledges this — but it’s probably a good approximation.

Basically, Pujols and Utley own the rest of the league. Yet Utley has never finished higher than 7th in MVP voting during the same stretch in which two of his undeserving teammates have each won one. (For the record, Howard is at 20.4 WAR and Rollins is at 22.9.) Fuck sportswriters. If Utley continues on a regular career path, he’s a Hall of Famer. Hopefully all the old dudes who can’t get past batting average and RBIs are dead by the time he is eligible.

P.S. I still can’t believe Fangraphs did this article 10 days ago. FUCK.