The Great Clutch Project

Tom Tango has officially kicked off his clutch project!

We talked about this last January, and got some initial feedback from folks at RedsZone about who they might select. Basically, the project asks you, the public, to choose the single best clutch hitter on a given team--the guy you most want to be up in an important game situation. The performance of these players will then be compared to the guy who projects to be the best overall hitter on each team, regardless of situation.

In the case of the Reds, the best overall hitter (by projection) will almost certainly be Adam Dunn. But I know there are a lot of Reds fans who would much rather have someone else--anyone else--up in a key game situation. This project will let us track how well the Adam Dunns of the world do in clutch situations against the public-chosen clutch players over the course of an entire season over at fangraphs. If clutch is a real skill, then clutch players should perform better than the non-clutch players! Should be fun!

Here's Tom Tango's introduction

So, you think you know who is the clutch hitter on your team? You think you know who you want at bat with the game on the line? Well, let's find out.

Go through your favorite team's roster, and select the one GREAT clutch hitter, the one guy you want at bat, when the game is on the line. One selection will do. If you like, you can go through each player, and note how good or bad a clutch hitter he is.

I will go through the same list of players, and simply select the best hitter on the team, period. We'll come into conflict in a few places, like with the Cardinals (Pujols), and Angels (Vlad). In that case, we'll go to our number 2 guys.

Then, let's see how each team's clutch hitter, and each team's best hitter does, when the game is on the line. Basically, we're looking at the late and close situations; technically, any game state where the Leverage Index is at least double the average. Fangraphs has agreed to track the performances on a page dedicated for us: a "team" of 30 clutch hitters, one from each MLB team, and similarly a "team" of 30 great hitters. Roughly 10% of all PA are in clutch situations, so we should expect some 1500 PA for each of our "teams". If clutch hitters exist, we should expect the 30 clutch hitters to perform better than the 30 otherwise great hitters.

Note: select the guy you want at bat, when the game is on the line, regardless of how good or bad he is otherwise. So, even if you believe that Darin Erstad or Willie Bloomquist can step it up a notch or two with the game on the line, they'd still be several notches below the other players on your team. Unless of course you really think otherwise.

Who would you most like to have hitting for the Reds in a crucial game situation? Go here and vote!

Friday Links

A few links on a Friday...

Bruce is gone...

As a Reds blogger, I'm morally obligated to comment on the Jay Bruce reassignment to AAA, right? I guess I'm not that upset about it, simply because it's been the expectation since last season. Krivsky is notoriously methodical and conservative when it comes to promoting his prospects. Bruce was not given a September call-up last season, which, to me, indicated that he was not going to make the opening day squad this year no matter what. I still expect to see him mid-season, though.

Still, I'm shocked to see that Cueto is apparently going to be the #3 starter when the season begins. Very out of character...but it sounds like Dusty might have had something to do with that. Hopefully Baker won't break him.

FWIW, I'm very sure that the Reds as an organization will be pretty careful with Cueto, Bailey, and Volquez... They had a good year last season, and I think they understand the importance of avoiding injury. ... at least, that's what I'll be telling myself until we start seeing routinely high pitch counts on those young guys.

A new blog worth reading

Saber-Scouting is a new blog written by a duo who have direct experience working in baseball. One of the two currently works as a part-time scout, in addition to more media-oriented jobs (scout.com). Their stated goal is to provide a place where "where sabermetics and scouting are melted into a gooey mess." Sounds great to me.

Some of their early work seems similar to Carlos Gomez's pitch mechanics stuff from the Hardball Times last year (Gomez has apparently since been hired as a scout, thus no new articles). These things are always interesting to read, though I have no way of knowing how legit they are.

There's also this interesting post today that notes that AB/BB ratio is a fairly good predictor of league quality. I wouldn't have guessed it would be so clear cut, but it seems to work well when comparing leagues across levels. I'd like to see this same thing over MLB history to see if you see a pattern like that seen with pitcher hitting. FWIW, in 2007, the AL ratio was 10.4350, while the NL ratio was 10.4347. So, in that case, at least, it doesn't work very well, as the AL is widely considered a much better league.

Two more new Reds blogs...

Chris Sabo's Glasses - A blog by chatchi, with humorous commentary to go with the great blog name.

Crosley Field Terrace - A well written blog with a general focus on the Reds...and yet another really, really great blog name.

I have to say that I still am woefully embarrassed by the utter lack of creativity that went into the name of my own blog. I think I just never expected the blog to take off like it has, so I didn't put much thought into it. Unfortunately, two years later, I still don't have a better idea! Maybe I should hold a contest...

Pizza Cutter on the Reds

MVN's stats guy Pizza Cutter profiled the Reds today. It's stop 24 on his review of the 2007 teams. He does a great job over there, especially given how big a task he has undertaken! Getting through 24 teams in one offseason is quite an accomplishment--I made it through a grand total of 3 teams when doing my playoff team profiles! And I still haven't really wrapped up the 2007 Reds season!!

Dewan on Norris Hopper

Bluzer at Redleg Stats Blog beat me to the punch, but John Dewan profiled the most successful bunters in baseball on his Stat of the Week e-mail this week. He noted that Norris Hopper was the second most successful bunter in baseball, as measured by bunts for base hits, behind only the incomparable Willy Taveras.

I've talked about this before, but I think at least part of Norris Hopper's unusually high (for his LD%) BABIP last season was due to his ability to bunt for base hits with a high success rate. I'm not sure about the degree to which this is true, but Taveras has done this three straight years in his time in the big leagues. I do expect Hopper to regress this season, but perhaps not as severely as you'd expect given his more traditional diagnostic stats.

Dan Fox did a piece this week on bunting too, which is a subject that he hadn't visited in a while. He shows that there may be some reason to include bunting ability as part of a player projection system, though he also speculates that any effect is highly correlated with something like speed. My guess is that, at least for a few players (e.g. Willy Taveras), incorporating bunt performance into one's player projection model it might result in significantly better projections...but it would probably be restricted to only those few players.

Burton's Spring Struggles

Chris at Seeing Reds is concerned about Burton's rather unattractive 10.80 ERA and 2.400 WHIP in spring training. Here was my response:

By my count, Burton struck out six in those five innings and walked none.

The single biggest problem he had last year was his control–when it improved over the last few months, he was awesome. Looks to me like his control is right where it needs to be, and his strikeouts indicate to me that he’s throwing the ball well.

And we know that hit rates can be extremely misleading in small sample sizes–hell, you can get major random departures in BABIP in 200 innings! So frankly, I’m not feeling concerned about him at all after looking at these data.

Jeff Conine to retire

Scott Hatteberg's former right-handed platoon partner at first base has signed a 1-day contract with the Marlins to play in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees on 28 March. After that, he has announced that he intends to retire.

Conine was arguably the most successful selection in the 1992 expansion draft. Over 17 seasons, he hit 0.285/0.347/0.443, with a 107 OPS+, 1982 hits, 217 home runs, and 671 walks. His best season was probably the late-start season of 1995, when he hit 0.302/0.379/0.520 for the Marlins. He also hit reasonably well in the postseason over his career (0.304/0.365/0.382 in 116 PA's), winning both trips to the world series with the Marlins.

B-Ref's salary compilations estimates that he made approximately $32.6 million as a major league ballplayer. Not a hall of fame career, perhaps, but a darn fine career nonetheless.

On Baseball and the Reds is Two!

I forgot about this, but March 1st was this site's second birthday! Here's a link to the debut post, as well as last year's post.

The site continues to be the source of a tremendous amount of fun and satisfaction for me. I never have time to do as much as I'd like, but I'm pleased with what I have been able to do. Running a blog is a great way to follow and learn about baseball, and it's allowed me to interact with a lot of very interesting, talented, and (thankfully!) friendly people over the past two years. Thanks to everyone who continues to visit!!

Site stats:

I'm a stathead, so I gotta throw out some usage stats:

As of today, the site has had over 100,000 page loads, over 80,000 unique visits, and most importantly to me, over 30,000 visits from returning visitors. Granted, a lot of sites do that much traffic in a few hours, but for an esoteric little blog like mine, that seems pretty darn good.

What's amazing to me is how the site continues to gain traffic: from March-December 2006 (10 months), the site received 21,000 unique visits. This year, from January through mid-March (2.5 months), it's already received 14,000 unique visits.

We also received a modest sponsorship this past winter from Theseats.com, which helps pay for the minor expenses associated with my activities here (subscriptions, books, etc). Please give them a look when you're buying your tickets this year. And I'm half-way to my first check from Google Adsense! Just one more year ought to do it... :)

Here's some other fun, big brother-esque stuff that I can learn from Google analytics. These data only go back to April 2007...

• People
  
• 52% of you use internet explorer, 42% of you use firefox, with Safari coming up a very distant third.
• 90% of you use Windows, 9% of you use a Mac, and 0.5% of you use Linux. And 3 hits have come from someone's Playstation 3. :)
  
• 44% of you use high-speed cable, 17% use DSL, 14% have a T1 connection, and 3% are on dial-up (though 22% of you are "unknown").
• 92% of you are from the USA, 3% from Canada, and 3% are from either Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea.
  
• Traffic
• 47% of my traffic comes from direct links to my site. Of those visitors arriving via links:
• 23% have come from Redleg Nation (thanks Chad and Chris)
  
• 13% have come from Red Reporter (thanks JD)
  
• 5% from Baseball Think Factory (thanks Repoz)
• 4% from The Book Blog (thanks Tango),
  
• 4% from a single link in a sports.yahoo.com article.
  
• 3% from the Hardball Times (thanks Studes),
  
• 2% from RedsZone
  
• 2% from Baseball Musings (thanks David).
  
• Thanks to everyone else who has ever linked to me (the "other" 44%)!
  
• 28% of my traffic comes from search engines, and 93% of all search traffic comes from google. Yahoo comes in at 4%, with AOL at 1.5%, and MSN at just 0.4%.

One thing that becomes clear from all of this is how important Redleg Nation and Red Reporter are to the Reds' blogosphere. I would never have gotten off the ground if it weren't for the traffic delivered by Chad and JD, especially early on. Thanks!

Interviews with Padres' Stats Guy

MB, who runs Friar Forecast (among others) and occasionally has commented here, has scored two really interesting interview pieces with Chris Long, who is the San Diego Padres' Senior Quantitative Analyst. They're good reads, and shed some light on some of the advanced analysis work going on in some major league teams.

Here are the two parts of the interview:

• Part 1
• Part 2

And here's my favorite exchange from the second part of the interview:

FF: Are you involved in integrating what I’ll call scouting data (pitch speeds, mechanics, body size, time running from home to first, etc) and more traditional numbers (hits, home runs, runs allowed, etc)? Or do you work more with the traditional numbers and use the scouting-based data separately?

Chris Long: If you aren’t looking at *all* the information you have, and trying to extract the absolute maximum amount of value from that information, you aren’t doing a good job. Hopefully that answers your question.

FF: I imagine one of the main goals of statistical analysis in an mlb front office is to project a player’s future performance. If so, can you tell us a little about how you analyze a player’s past performance to gain insight about what you expect out of his future?

Chris Long: I can’t go into specifics, but again, you need to integrate *all* the information you have about a player. Not just what he’s done, but where and how. Did something change? Was it luck? A simple projection system that’ll outperform almost every human (on average) is fairly easy to build. Building a system that outperforms those systems is harder, but consequently more interesting.

One of the things I've been talking about more and more (most recently here) is the importance of scouting information as another crucially important set of input data when trying to evaluate players. That's why, for example, I explicitly included the Fans Scouting Report data in my composite fielding estimate from my player value series. Some day, we may also be able to include information derived from pitchf/x (or other "scouting" sources) in evaluations of pitchers...and maybe hitters as well. It's the future, man. :)

....

Also, I went to the Cincinnati Reds' front office page to see if they had anyone listed who might be somewhat comparable to Chris Long. Sam Grossman came up as the Baseball Operations Analyst...anyone know anything about him and what he does? I might try asking some of the beat writers about him.

Lohse Signs with Cards

Kyle Lohse signed with the Cards today for a 1 year, $4.25 million contract. He can earn $500k in performance bonuses, putting his best total contract value at $4.75 million.

Wow.

Here's his recent stats:

Year	Age	Team	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	%GB	BABIP	ERA	FIP	OBPa	SLGa	OPSa	R/G	RAR	FIPRuns
2005	26	MIN	178.7	4.3	2.2	1.1	44.2%	0.311	4.18	4.55	0.344	0.480	0.824	5.2	15.8	19.7
2006	27	MIN/CIN	126.7	6.9	3.1	1.1	38.4%	0.333	5.83	4.34	0.356	0.504	0.860	5.5	11.2	22.1
2007	28	CIN/PHI	192.7	5.7	2.7	1.0	35.5%	0.300	4.62	4.53	0.357	0.495	0.852	4.8	27.7	26.3
3years	---	---	498.1	5.5	2.6	1.1	39.4%	0.305	5.17	4.45	0.352	0.493	0.845	5.1	54.8	68.2

Ok, so if we use a 5/4/3 weighting scheme over the past three years, Lohse has averaged 19.3 RAR and 23.3 FIP-RAR, the latter being my quick'n'dirty DIPS version of RAR. If we suppose he'll "age" (including injuries) a half-win this year, we can therefore forecast that he'll produce somewhere in the range of 14.3-18.3 RAR next season, or 1.4-1.8 WAR.

At $4.4 million/WAR, that would suggest a salary of $6.2-7.9 million this year would be fair. Tom Tango's salary scale suggests that a package somewhere in the range of $14-21 million over three years would be reasonable. Lohse is not an ace, but he's a reasonably valuable pitcher at the back of one's rotation.

By comparison, I have Carlos Silva, who signed a $48 million/4 year deal this offseason, at ~2.1 WAR over the past three seasons, which gives him a projected ~1.6 WAR this season. Lohse gets a very similar projection. And Silva's making $12 million/year?!

So what on earth happened here? Certainly, Silva is earning too much. We knew that. But I have to think that Lohse and his "super agent" Scott Boras must have severely overplayed their hand, or otherwise must have pissed a bunch of people off this offseason.

The Cards got a nice deal on this one.

Seeing Red

Every year around this time, there are a few new Reds blogs. It's always fun to see new perspectives on our team. I recently "discovered" (i.e. was given a link to) this one by Chris called Seeing Red, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Here's a few samples:

• Chris thinks that Homer Bailey might be over-rotating on some of his pitches, resulting in inconsistency in where he plants his feet. I don't have FSN Ohio, so I couldn't see the game in question, but Will Carroll talked about Homer being inconsistent in where he places his feet last year.

• Here's Chris's take on why there tends to be so much animosity between statheads and traditionalists. He brings up a lot of great points. I think that Chris is right that this "debate" is becoming a thing of the past in most MLB organizations, but the recent stuff with Daugherty is evidence that the "battle" is just beginning in the public and in the media. As Chris points out, the future is integration of stats and scouting, not the move from one to the other.
  

• Here's Chris's own examination of Dusty Baker's tendency to (not) use rookies, published before my Hardball Times piece. He seems to come to the same conclusion I did--there's not much reason to think that Baker is particularly unusual in this respect.

Anyway, add him to your RSS reader if you get a chance.

Hardball Times 5 Questions

The good folks at the Hardball Times kindly asked that I write the 5-Questions Season Preview for the Reds, and you can find the result published here.

It's not the most in-depth piece I've ever written, but I think it does a good job of setting up the coming season. As I see it, the Reds' hopes in '08 will come down to how well their young guys pitch. If two of Bailey, Cueto, and Volquez have good seasons in the rotation (regardless of who starts the year where), the Reds could be pretty exciting toward the end of the year. If not... meh.

Also, for a small bit of controversy, I argue that Dusty does not, in fact, have an extreme tendency to favor veterans over youth.

Similar articles have also been published on the Brewers, Cubs, and Cards, with the Pirates and Astros due to be published tomorrow. Good way to get caught up on our division rivals.

....

This is only tangentially related, but I also wanted to highlight Chris's excellent post on Dusty Baker. I have my share of reservations about Dusty, but his ability to handle and motivate players is clearly a strength...and might have quantifiable impacts on player performance.

...

Update: Holy crap! Rob Neyer picked up on the Baker commentary in his blog at ESPN! I need to send stuff to THT more often. :)

Thanks to Joel for the tip, as I don't have a subscription to ESPN.