Huston Street, meet Jonathan Papelbon.

Well, it didn't go the distance, but it was a thriller nonetheless. And the Phillies' hopes to become the first NL team to repeat since the 1975-76 Reds live on.

So no baseball until Thursday, but here are your next series matchups: Yankees and Angels in the AL; Phillies and Dodgers in the NL.

Until then, here is a League Championship Series you can read about.

Two months ago today, the A's began their season. Two days later, a car crash took the life of Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart and two of the three other passengers in the vehicle. The lone survivor in the car, Jon Wilhite, was a teammate of Kurt Suzuki's at Cal State Fullerton and faces a long, expensive road to recovery - and what "recovery" means is not yet fully known.

AN would like to support the efforts of Kurt Suzuki and his wife Renee, who have set up the Jon Wilhite Recovery Fund to help pay for the significant expenses that lie ahead in what figures to be a long and difficult recovery process for Wilhite. I want to emphasize a focus not on the amount of money raised, but rather in the number of individuals who choose to participate. Not everyone can give $100.00 but everyone can give $5.00 if they wish to participate. If enough of you are generous enough to take the time to participate, we will undoubtedly raise a fair amount anyway.

If you would like to add to the number of ANers participating, and would like to support Jon Wilhite's recovery, what you need to do is simple. Mail a check, payable to John Wilhite Recovery Fund, of any amount, to

Jon Wilhite Recovery Fund c/o
1152 Euclid Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94708

I will total up the number of participants, and the amount raised, before sending the donations on to be deposited in the recovery fund account.

My advice is that if you intend to participate, send your donation now rather than putting it on your "I'll get to it later" list. As daily life gets in the way, it's easy to forget the things you kept being able to put off until tomorrow. I'll report back in a couple weeks when it's time to send the donations on; for now let me thank, in advance, those who will participate and thank Kurt and Renee, Orlando and Katie Cabrera, and many others who have stepped up to help Jon Wilhite in the wake of this tragedy.

Jordin Sparks sings around 10:00pm tonight and word is there also might be a baseball game 4 hours before that. See you then.

 

It Takes a Parking Lot With a Mayor To Laugh, It Takes a Trade To Cry

Well, I ride on a BART train, baby,
Make at least three mill.
Well, I've been up all night, baby,
Warmin' up on the bullpen hill.
Well, if high flies
Are hit off of my pill
And if I don't save it,
You know that Ziggy will.

[Original lyrics here.]

[Full Poetic Interlude after the jump.]

 

Poll

Will Huston Street be traded this off-season?

85%

Yes

371 votes

14%

No

65 votes

436 votes | Poll has closed

Continue reading this post »

Wait, what?  This is "Staturday," not "Wednescout."  Even if you hate Staturdays, you can skip the text and go to the second-to-last paragraph, which contains an important link that I know you'll want to click.

Let me tell you a little something about defensive stats: when it comes to evaluating a player's contributions, they're shaky. You might have already known that.  But the dirty little secret about defensive stats is this: when it comes to judging what a fielder's true fielding skill is, they're almost worthless.  Well, worthless is an exaggeration.  But we have to be very careful when coming to a conclusion about a how good a defender a fielder is. 

And it has nothing to do with how good the defensive metrics we use are.  Why? Regression to the mean.

If you're too lazy to re-read my primer on regression, then I'll give you the Cliff's Notes version: we must always regress to the mean when figuring true player skills, and the amount we regress is based on 1) how much performance data we have and 2) what the spread in skills are among the general MLB population.  This is independent of how good the defensive metric we are using is.

Let's start with the first issue: how much performance data we have for defense.  A full-time shortstop might have 500 opportunties to field a ball in any given year.  A centerfielder might have 400.  Every other fielder will see fewer than that.  Those numbers are smaller than the number of PAs a player gets in a full season.

The difference between the best and worst hitters, over the course of a full season, is something like 100 runs - think Albert Pujols versus Tony Pena.  Imperfect as our defensive metrics are, they give us a pretty decent idea of how many runs the best and worst fielders are worth over the course of a full season.  A guy like Mark Ellis might save 20 runs on defense, and a guy like Manny Ramirez might cost 20 runs.  Let's tack on five runs on either end to get 50, a nice, round number.  The spread in fielding skill is, generally speaking, about half of much as the spread in hitting skill.

So, to recap: smaller sample size than hitting, smaller spread in talent - ergo, more regression to the mean.  Even if you had the perfect defensive metric.

And that's why we need scouts.  But here's the other dirty little secret: you, too, can be a scout.  Why not?  You watch lots of baseball.  So do I.  And if we put our opinions together, we might start getting there.  Two sets of eyes are better than one.  And a thousand sets of eyes are better than two.

And that's what the Fan Scouting Report is all about.  Every year, Tom Tango asks thousands of fun to give their scouting reports by rating fielders in a variety of categories.  Says Tom:

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you've seen play in at least 10 games in 2008, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

And best of all, for you statophobes:

And, most importantly, do not, absolutely do not, look at any numbers. Don't look at his fielding percentage, range factor, zone rating, UZR, or anything else that someone else is telling you. I just want you to rely on your eyes. You are the scout. I need you to rely completely on your own observations.

Tom's been doing this every year for about five years now, so we're starting to get good historical data.  But if you look at the number of ballots cast for each player, you'll find that the Red Sox and Mariners players get tons of evaluations, and the A's players very few. 

That's embarrassing to me, and it should be to you, considering that we have a group of knowledgeable and dedicated fans right here on AN.  So what are you waiting for?  Submit your evaluations of the A's fielders.  Think Mark Ellis is criminally underrated?  Can't stand to see Jack Cust commune with his glove?  Then say so!

But this is important: be honest in your evaluations.  This isn't a ballot-stuffing contest.  We're not trying to beat Blue-Grey Sky.  This is an attempt to use the collective knowledge of the best-informed baseball fans our there to help us identify fielding skill.

Continue reading this post »

“Christ, you don't need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is a curveball! In the show, everyone can hit heat.” –Crash Davis

In the last appearance of Pitch, Blease, we saw that the effectiveness of a pitcher’s fastball is very much dependent on a pitcher’s ability to compliment it with breaking/off speed pitches. Heat only helps if you do not have to throw it all the time.

In this article, we will explore some of these other pitches, the curve, slider and change. Before we get into that, here is the article on the knuckler:
Wakefield throws it. He throws it a lot. He throws it slowly. Small Sample Size warnings apply to any conclusions drawn from that data set.
The splitter is only thrown often by a few guys – too many to summarize that succinctly and to few to write a meaningful article about.

Continue reading this post »

STOP READING – SPOILER ALERT!

This column will project the upcoming season with such frightening precision that playing the games will be little more than a novelty. The only reason to attend a game will be to drink over priced beer, eat garlic fries and enjoy the beats pounded out of the left field bleachers. Fair enough, those are some good reasons.

Read on, if you must, but do not say that I did not warn you.

Warnings aside, these projections, as with all projections, are inexact. They are based on weighted averages of a range of possible outcomes for each player. Many players will exceed these projections. Many others will fail to live up to them. I do my best to account for health, but, again, these are based on what I consider to be the most likely outcome and serious injuries or unexpected health could change playing time projections dramatically.

Offensive projections are based on this formula, drawn exclusively from OPS (as projected by PECOTA) and playing time:

RC = (.3 x OPS - .1) x PA

Pitching projections are based on this formula, drawn exclusively from RA/9 (as projected by PECOTA) and IP:

RA = RA/9 x IP/9

These are both very simple translations. They do not include important considerations, such as defense, leverage, base running, OPS distribution and a number of other factors.

Lineups were taken from MLB.com’s depth charts. Playing time was based on my own estimates.

Poll

Should the A's have gone for it?

12%

Yes, absolutely.

93 votes

15%

Yes, but only if BB believed improved health was on the horizon.

120 votes

63%

No, 85 wins this year isn't worth 65 wins for the foreseeable future.

476 votes

8%

Fire Geren now!!!!!!

64 votes

753 votes | Poll has closed

Continue reading this post »

Inspired by jeffro's idea for getting a bunch of AN'ers together to watch the A's open the season against the Red Sox in Japan, I thought that we should "invite" Billy Beane to have a few loyal friends over—to the Coliseum to watch the games on the StomperTron. Obviously, sure, there'd be a multitude of logistical questions on the A's end—mostly to do with staffing and setup, which is really beyond my purview or concern. And given the early-morning start time for the games, BART wouldn't really be an option for getting to the game (though I have a potential solution for that, which I'll outline below). Most importantly, we know that the A's, as is only right, don't really have any interest in making a massive giveaway of goods and services. So the question is: How many of us would be willing to pay to do this, in order to make it cost-effective for the A's to do it? Billy, consider this an open-source marketing survey more than a request, per se. AN'ers, please read the poll answers carefully before you respond. And chime in with comments about how this could (or couldn't) be made to work to the A's (financial and fan-base) advantage. Personally, I think that with the combination of the uniqueness of the event and the usual capacity crowd associated with a Red Sox visit to the Coliseum (i.e., transplanted Bostonians with cash to burn), the A's could probably pull in a sizable crowd for such an event. They could even work around the problem of BART's last train for the previous evening arriving at 1:00 a.m., by scheduling some sort of promotional or charity on-field event (perhaps as simple as fireworks?) prior to game time.

Poll

Would you be interested in going to the Coliseum to watch the season opener against the Red Sox in Japan?

30%

No, not interested

187 votes

20%

Only interested if it was free admission

127 votes

16%

Yes, I'd be willing to pay up to $5 to attend

101 votes

19%

Yes, I'd be willing to pay up to $10 to attend

118 votes

10%

Yes, I'd be willing to pay up to $20 to attend

65 votes

3%

Yes, I'd be willing to pay up to $50 to attend

21 votes

619 votes | Poll has closed

Maybe I don’t know anything about baseball, or maybe I have missed a very fundamental part of a ‘simple’ statistic, but since Fire Joe Morgan was willing to take apart this article, I strongly suspect it’s not just me.

Maybe I simply expect too much from the official MLB.com site, but in my opinion, there are a few things wrong with a statistic like this.

From the Mets ‘mailbag’:

Is this really where we are in measuring baseball? Are we looking for such a simple answer to ‘how good a player is’ that we now have narrowed it down to how many RBI’s they have in 100 at-bats? Anyone who has ever tried to explain the game of baseball to someone from another country knows how complicated this sport truly is. Why would we expect our analysis of individual players to be any different?

It’s statistics like this that award a pitcher a Cy Young award based solely on their win totals. Are we going to base our MVP now on number of RBI’s? And if you’re going to make up a statistic, can’t you use something like RBI’s in number of RBI chances instead of merely 100 AB’s?

Are RBI’s even that important? Are they a statistic even within a player’s control? What am I missing?