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Ennder

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Everything posted by Ennder

  1. Ennder
    It is just a big if all around with him. From what I saw last year he isn't going to be a huge upgrade over Hardy defensively right away at least, the defense is probably a wash for 2010. Hardy obviously has the edge in power, so it is going to come down to how high of an OBP Escobar carries. Personally it won't surprise me if he struggles to put up a .320 OBP his first year, I could certainly see him being a downgrade over what Hardy did last year and he is almost certainly a large downgrade over Hardy of 07/08. But maybe he is like Hanley Ramirez who does better in the majors than minors and has no 'growth period'. It is always hard to tell with young players.
  2. Ennder
    Yes I can. This means our offense went cold in the 30 games Wolf pitched and those runs went towards games pitched by other players who will win more than they should. I wish I could be confident that Escobar is an upgrade over Hardy of last year but I just can't be. I think he could put up even weaker offensive numbers and only be a wash defensively, hopefully he explodes onto the scene and I'm wrong about him. I will be happy if Escobar puts up a .700 OPS on the year and I expect lower. I don't see how Gomez can match what Cameron did last year and I have little confidence in McGehee. Starting the year with Weeks penciled in as the starting 2B is a disaster waiting to happen. I think this offense is going to struggle to score runs and be middle of the pack because we have downgraded at half the positions. Luckily I think the pitching should be significantly improved between regression to the mean, an improved bullpen and Wolf replacing Looper.
  3. Ennder
    I was looking at what you said wrong, my bad. I was thinking you were comparing 2010 expectations to 2009 results when you are really comparing 2010 expectations to 2009 expectations. That makes more sense then.
  4. Ennder
    He got old most likely. That park is pretty brutal as well. There is no reason to think he can't rebound but at the same time there is no reason to think a rebound is a no brainer.
  5. Ennder
    But you want to compare 2009 Hardy to 2010 Escobar, not true talent Hardy vs true talent Escobar. I guess that was my point. I personally think Escobar is a downgrade from Hardy but I think we have upgraded at SS over what we got in 2009 since Hardy had such a terrible season. Overall I think this team will be lucky to be 2 wins better than last year. We still have no depth at SP which killed us last year and we potentially have huge holes in the IF and the OF now. While most will say a poor rotation was at fault for 2009 I will personally say poor depth was to blame. If Parra could have stayed in AAA longer it would have helped, if Bush had been put on teh DL faster it would have helped, if Suppan had been given more rehab starts it would have helped. The fact we had zero depth killed any chance of success in the rotation last season. We have a tiny bit more depth but not enough to fix the problems. We also have potential disaster areas at 2B, SS, 3B, RF and CF on offense. We need to get really lucky to be a.500+ team this season.
  6. Ennder
    So in your opinion, Wolf is good and Harden is mediocre? Actually, I feel just the opposite is the case. Going further, I would call the Wolf signing a perfect example of a "mediocre team signing a mediocre player to a mediocre (bad) contract".Wolf has put up 6.7 WAR over the last 3 years and 2.64 per 200 IP Harden has put up 6.6 WAR over the last 3 years and 4.2 per 200 IP So the better pitcher really comes down to health there. Wolf has been as valuable as Harden overall the past 3 years, Harden has been more valuable per IP. Wolf has shown a positive growth in his WAR, Harden a negative growth. To me the real problem is Harden was significantly worse last year than in the past, he lost velocity on his FB and he can no longer throw his slider or splitfinger. He has gone from a 4 pitch guy to a 2 pitch guy. He is mostly at the whim of his change up at this point, he has to setup the fastball with it. Harden is not the same pitcher he was 2 or 3 years ago and Wolf most likely is that pitcher or better.
  7. Ennder
    I'm very confused why you think Bush and Parra are worse than what we had last year. If Dave Cameron says you want to compare 2010 to expectations he is completely 100% wrong, you compare this year to last year when looking at how much this years team has improved over last years. Last years team is already in the bank, we know what they did based on what the results were last year, the talent from last year doesn't really play into the discussion.
  8. Ennder
    I guess, I could see us having the worst 2B/SS/3B combo in baseball this year though so having Lopez wouldn't have been a disaster.
  9. Ennder
    If he improved it wouldn't just be in BABIP though, that is the rub. A player doesn't just improve his BABIP and nothing else, I can't find a single player who has improved like that.
  10. Ennder
    I personally could care less about why it is there because it is variance and not sustainable. I look at stats as a way to judge the talent level and future talent level of a player. If he does something that isn't sustainable it is variance and that data set is 'tainted' as far as looking at his talent level. A mediocre talent player can be hot all year and put up a great season, doesn't change the fact he is mediocre talent. You want to worry about why he was hot, was the BABIP spike a hot streak or luck or whatever. All I care about is it isn't sustainable so it isn't a true reflection of his talent.
  11. Ennder
    The problem with this is the skill of at least 2 and usually as many as 3 or 4 players determines the outcome of every play in baseball. The player rarely has over 50% control of the outcome, 50% of the outcome is largely out of his control by definition. Even the 50% at most control he has is subject to a lot of variance as seen by how erratic hits are in batting practice when they are just grooving balls in for you. Over a huge sample you can mostly ignore this stuff but over a small sample it makes the level of variance way too high to tell pretty much anything about a players skill. Nobody is saying skill isn't a huge part of baseball, they are just saying when you look at a small sample there is a lot of luck too and there are stats out there that can be identified as more variance based than others. BABIP, LOB%, HR/FB%(for pitchers at least) all are heavily influenced by year to year variance.
  12. Ennder
    His power will disappear in that park as well. I know he'll be on my 'avoid' list for fantasy. I don't think it is a bad signing but I won't be terribly surprised if he fails to be worth that contract either.
  13. Ennder
    I would say by definition this is impossible because a perfect pitch would result in the indended result of the pitcher, strikeout or double play ball etc. If the the ball is hit for a HR it was not a perfect pitch obviously. You cant ignore the mental aspect of hitting and the fact that a batter may be looking for a certain pitch in a certain situation. If he guess exactly what you are going to throw then you threw the wrong pitch.That is called results oriented thinking and is exactly the type of thing you want to avoid if you ever want to understand a subject. I don't mean just baseball, pretty much anything you ever study. I have seen a hitter chase a slider in the dirt and still manage to hit it over the fence, there was nothing wrong with the pitch. Sometimes you are going to do the right thing and get a bad result.
  14. Ennder
    If it isn't sustainable then it doesn't really matter whether it was a hot streak, skill or whatever, it ends up being variance. When a hitter puts up a .370 BABIP I don't care why he did it, he isn't going to repeat it and it isn't indicative of his real long term skill level.
  15. Ennder
    We obviously just look at variance in a very different way so this isn't going to go anywhere. Nobody is saying that the game just comes down to random luck, that should be very obvious. Skill plays a huge part in baseball but when a hitter gets 5 hits in a day it doesn't just mean he was seeing the ball great that day, there is most certainly an elemental of variance in there as well. Skill wins out over a huge sample but over a small sample you aren't going to be able to separate the skill from the variance, but you can look at some stats like BABIP that can help you come closer to separating it.
  16. Ennder
    BABIP is pretty heavily influenced by count and by type of results as well. LD% has a higher BABIP than GB% than FB%. Pitching from behind carries a higher BABIP than pitching from ahead. But again none of this suggests it is plausible he can sustain a level as high as last season. For all the 'it's not luck' arguments you hear, the next season after these big statistical outliers universally regress towards expected trends. The closest I could find to a player that kept it up is Sidney Ponson who managed to keep his over .330 over a 600 IP sample from 2004-2009 though it dipped under .330 a few season. He had the perfect skillset for it, low K, too many BB and a high GB% and LD% putting him almost completely at the whim of his infield defense. You can go through the last 36 years of baseball stats at fangraphs including BABIP and you can sort by highest BABIP over 100 IP and you'll see tons of guys who go over a .330 BABIP, sometimes for 2 or 3 year chunks at a time, the pattern will look more or less random with most pitchers but almost none of them keep it up long term and there is no compelling reason to expect Parra to be somehow unique and keep it up either.
  17. Ennder
    This is basically what xFIP does and you may very well be right that after 3 years you are better off using HR/FB, but if that is the case you are probably better off using his real BABIP and LOB% as well and if you are doing all of that you probably are better off just looking at ERA than xFIP or FIP because at that point you are basically saying ERA is telling more of a true story than regressions do. Obviously ERA can never tell the whole story since defense, park, league, opponents etc all play a factor but they play a factor in HR/FB as well as all the others so even at that point I prefer xFIP over FIP. At some point you are going to have to dig deeper into the context of the games played to understand how talented a pitcher is, we haven't developed a stat that is so good to just do it on its own. Heck we haven't even been able to make a useful park factor yet which we would have to do to ever neutralize home stadium to a useful level. So what I usually do is look at xFIP and ERA and then just look at the career and see if there is some compelling reason they should be different in the rare cases that they actually are significantly different. In most cases they end up being very close to each other.
  18. Ennder
    If he hits it over the fence with his eyes closed just 1 out of 1000 times the 1 time he actually does it is going to be variance or luck. Eventually at some point he is going to make that perfect pitch and still give up a HR. The opposite example is probably better though. Pitchers throw meatballs all the time that don't go for hits, you hear the announcer say 'I bet he wishes he could get that swing back', because the pitcher made a clear cut mistake and the hitter did not make him pay. This stuff is going to happen and there is no way it evens out over a single game. You are never going to be able to isolate exactly what is or isn't luck of course, but most of the more advanced stats are trying to regress things to try to give a better picture of talent over a small sample than more traditional stats can hope to show. Just using old fashioned stats you need a good 3+ years of data to really learn much about a player.
  19. Ennder
    I haven't seen any pitcher get a contract that makes the Wolf deal look worse. I think we gave him like $2M more a year than we should have but Harden or Duch or Penny or Marquis aren't deals that would excite me either. Bunch of high risk guys that aren't likely to be worth as much as Wolf and an overachiever. Wolf+Harden or Duch would have been nice but in an either or I'd just as soon take Wolf.
  20. Ennder
    I will gladly make some friendly forum bet that Marquis does not pitch $7.5M better(2 WAR I guess for lack of a better stat) than Suppan on the season assuming both are relatively healthy. The difference in their xFIP will be between 0.25-0.50 as both regress towards 2008 and 2009 proves to be more of an outlier.
  21. Ennder
    Well I said first 2 starts, but in general the first 2 weeks of baseball are a weaker data set than the rest of the year. April generally is the 'goofiest' month for lack of a better word when it comes down to statistics. If someone gets off to a slow start the first week and then plays just like normal the rest of the season I tend to be more aggressive with my regression with him. Regardless the Chone projection doesn't seem to be regressing at all, it is seeing a pattern and assuming it goes 1 step further this year. Because FIP is fixing 2 stats and not the 3rd, it makes no sense. BABIP and LOB% aren't somehow different than HR/FB. If you are going to look at 3 years of stats I'd either look at some combination of xFIP and ERA or just xFIP by itself. FIP is a stat that makes no sense at all, it is correcting for some factors but not others. Why should I change how HR/FB works with 3 year's data but not how LOB% or BABIP works? Am I to assume after 3 years HR/FB has normalized but BABIP and LOB% still haven't, because that is what FIP is telling me isn't it?
  22. Ennder
    Could easily be this years Branyan. Guy who nobody takes seriously until he finally moves to a position where he can stay healthy.
  23. Ennder
    In general stats guys just want to look at how the game works and find better ways to understand it. Anti-stats people seem to try to make up elaborate examples as to why stats don't mean anything from what I can tell. I don't really get it but oh well. A pitcher can make an absolutely perfect pitch in the perfect situation and have it go over the fence, he can throw a total meatball with the bases loaded and get a pop out. When those things hold true how on earth can there not be some luck in the results over a single game. If you make a perfect pitch to Albert Pujols it is still a hit some non 0% of the time. If you make the worst pitch you can throw to him it is still an out some non 0% of the time. When part of the outcome is completely out of your control which is the case here, then there is some elemental of variance or luck or whatever you want to call it. The larger your sample of the results the less the variance or luck involved. A single game just is not a large sample at all. Sometimes you throw the ball good and have a bad game, sometimes you make a lot of mistakes and have a good game. That is baseball.
  24. Ennder
    Yes and if the pitcher grooves these fastballs it means he isn't striking anyone out, gives up more HR, gives up more flyballs and probably only sees a small jump in BABIP. Parra most likely will carry a higher than normal BABIP because his fastball is so bad, that doesn't mean he is going to sustain a .365 either, there is some luck involved in there. If you look at the outliers in the 'luck' based stats every season you most likely are looking at players with bad luck every time. They are probably bad at that skill in the first place but odds are they had bad luck for the season as well.
  25. Ennder
    Over a single game there is a ton of luck in baseball, over time the skill wins out though. It is kind of like Poker, you can lose money over a session to players who are worse than yourself very easily but if you play them long enough they'll eventually end up broke. I don't know that his article proves this but it seems so obvious to me that it always surprises me when someone disagrees with it.
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