Stealofhome

If Chourio gets to 20 HR/20 SB this season, he will very likely become the first rookie to do so and not win Rookie of the Year since Anthony Volpe last year. The only other was Ellis Burks in 1987, who lost to Mark McGwire. All other 13 won it.

Listening to the Braves broadcast and they interviewed their manager (prior to his ejection) and he had good things to say about the Brewers always being a competitive team.

I watched the Braves broadcast tonight and it was quite entertaining with Chipper, Glavine, Smoltz, and Francoeur. No professional broadcaster, just 4 ballplayers talking about the game and messing with each other. It kind of reminded me of Inside the NBA, with Smoltz playing the part of Kenny Smith

5.4 runs per game following a 10-run game, slightly higher than their season average of 4.8.

Really interesting work, thanks for doing this!

Michael Scott at Toby's exit interview - who do you think you are? What gives you the right?

Alright, when does the contract extension happen?

Brailin Rodriguez and Josh Knoth for me. A great month with many great names!

Accounting for the Durocher Theorem that "Nice guys finish last," the transitive property, and the fact that Jurickson Profar had -1.7 WAR in 2023, there is likely a negative deduction of up to 1.5 wins for affable individuals.

Cool, exciting day then!

Is this your first real look at Bitonti in game action, other than highlight reel type stuff?

Cool, thank you. Interesting there are even a couple college picks left too

No news yet this week? Perhaps the front office is a little busy with the trade deadline. The draft signing tracker doesn’t seem to be updated either on the site, unless the rumored signing values are not official enough.

Yeah he had a reaction like woah awesome to something the manager said.

Introducing Speed Unit I previously looked at how aggressive or not the Brewers have been this year at taking the extra base. But that doesn't tell the whole story, as it does not account for stolen bases. And I have a few more questions about some of these baserunning statistics. As mentioned before, the baserunning values listed on Baseball Savant are: More on the stats at Tom Tango's blog. Fangraphs has their own version of baserunning value which is calculated using weighted stolen base runs (wSB), Ultimate Base Running (UBR), and weighted GDP (wGDP). The UBR portion of Fangraphs baserunning, created by Mitchel Lichtman, is most closely related to the Baseball Savant calculation, but it does have a different method. So while Baseball Savant uses Statcast metrics of runner speed, arm strength, and runner position, UBR uses play-by-play information of changes in run expectancy due to the runner advancing. While both of these statistics can be useful for comparing modern baserunners, what is an analyst to do when neither Statcast nor play-by-play data is available? What if you only have basic statistics like PA, 1B, 2B, 3B, HR, SB, and CS? Well fortunately, our ancestors had to deal with such a problem and created a solution. One of those people was Bill James, who invented Speed Score back in 1987. It takes six factors--stolen base percentage, stolen base attempts, triples, runs scored, grounded into double plays, and defensive position and range to calculate an estimate of a players speed. That value can also be found on Fangraphs as "Speed." In 2005, Bill James' Speed Score was revamped by 'Patriot' into Speed Unit. 2024 Brewers We can take all of the various implementations of speed to get a sense of the current Brewers roster: Data from Fangraphs here and here and Baseball Savant. One thing to note is that Fangraphs Base Running Runs are counting stats, while the Bill James and Patriot Speed Scores are rate stats. So where Oliver Dunn has only been worth 0.8 runs on the bases this year, he has performed well when given the opportunity. There is quite a bit of disagreement between UBR and Statcast on Yelich, Frelick, and Perkins. From the previous analysis, there were differences in aggression between these players and perhaps they need to still find a happy medium. They might be good at knowing when to go, but getting caught at the wrong time and taking away win probability from the team on the bases. Three of the young speedsters--Chourio, Frelick, and Perkins--have lower stolen base value than expected. Joey Ortiz has the sprint speed to be a good baserunner (28.3 ft/s, 78th percentile), but none of his numbers are all that great. Comparison If we zoom back out to the entire Major Leagues, how do these stats compare to each other? In particular, how well does Speed Unit estimate a statistic closer to true baserunning value like Fangraphs Base Running? If we look at the statistics for the 395 players with at least 500 PA from from 2021 through 2023, we get this relationship, with a correlation coefficient of 0.84: The obvious discrepancy between the two statistics was already mentioned. Speed Unit is a rate stat and Base Running is a counting stat. Players with fewer plate appearances will have fewer opportunities to add or subtract runs by nature. Another big limitation for Speed Unit comes from extreme pinch runners. For most players, their normal statistics at the plate will balance pinch running appearances out, but there are some outliers. Terrance Gore and Billy Hamilton are recent examples of specialty pinch-runners. The speed unit calculations all compare their stolen base and runs scored values with their hitting numbers, but these players' ratios are off. Still, when setting a high enough value on plate appearances and looking over a large enough sample, the simply calculated Speed Unit can describe upwards of 85% of the variation of Fangraphs Base Running. Not bad for scratches on an ancient tablet. Historical Brewers After finding the value and limitations of an estimator like Speed Unit, we can do the fun stuff. Now that we're no longer limited to the modern Statcast era, play-by-play results, or even the Major Leagues, who are some historical players in the Brewers organization who have had notable speed seasons? Here are the top 10 in the Major Leagues since 1978, led by Scott Podsednik's 70 stolen bases and 7 triples in 2004. But we're not limited to the Major Leagues, how about the best Speed Unit seasons for the Brewers in the Minor Leagues? Finally, we can look at the same two tables but find the top 5 Speed Seasons by decade since 1978 for both the Major and Minor Leagues: What do you think, any interesting names? Any notable seasons missing?

Thank you for the info!

Is it possible to do custom HTML tables in any part of the site (especially blogs)? I would like to put in an interactive, sortable table like the ones shown here. Are there any custom HTML options other than what is shown in the header above the reply text box?

Here it is from the man himself, A 37 year old daughter, two grandkids, a 23 year old in the Padres organization, and a 9 year old and 5 year old. Not sure if they are the ones who join him in the presser or not.

Here's the splits: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=peralfr01&year=2024&t=p#innng

Even as of today, according to Fangraphs, Chourio sits at 1.6 WAR. Worst career with at least that much this young is Rick Manning. Just keep Chourio away from Dennis Eckersley and all should be good.

I wonder if the players on the 40-man are taught or feel more pressure to not use the challenge system, since it doesn't exist in the Major Leagues? I've thought about that with Tyler Black, too. It seems that he uses it well but then struggles with the strike zone in the Majors since he can't challenge any more. It is good to see Weimer hitting, though, with a 1.053 OPS in July, after two straight months of .510 and .570.

I understand that everything is relative in terms of signing bonuses and finances in professional sports, but could you imagine being so good at baseball as a 17-year-old, that someone would give you over 3 million dollars just to work for them?

He definitely seems to be playing with more confidence ever since his game-winning catch in LA. I like to see the growth!

Yep, it does appear that they set the bar a bit higher in terms of percent likelihood to be successful on taking the extra base. From what I gather, the above numbers only include baserunning without stolen bases. But there still might be some room for growth if Ortiz, Turang, and Chourio can be as aggressive as Perkins and as smart as Yelich.

I may be turning into an old man, but all I can think is that our culture is returning to all of the bad music and fashion of the 80s.