JeffSackmann

I should point out, in case anybody is looking at the HWL numbers, that I've suspended daily updates until the end of the winter leagues. The AFL stuff is complete, but HWL numbers are only through 11/19. I'll get the complete numbers up there eventually, but I'm trying to add a bunch of other stuff to the site and make it faster, and daily updates just weren't meshing with all of the other goals.

If you've clicked recently on any of the links in the first post above, you probably figured this out, but I moved the Splits database to the following site: www.MinorLeagueSplits.com There are also a few new features, like complete game logs and cumulative splits for players who have switched teams midseason. I'm also working on adding splits leaderboards and hope to have those happening by the beginning of next week. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I wanted to let you know about a nifty new feature of my site: Minor League splits for every player in every organization. My introductory post about it from today is here: www.brewcrewball.com/stor...111258/506 or you can go straight to the project home page here: www.brewcrewball.com/special/milb+splits There's an obscene amount of data here, so if you just want an example, try this: www.angelfire.com/nb/jms/...ny+Rottino There's also a player listing for each organization, so you can browse your team at your leisure: www.brewcrewball.com/special/Oak (A's list) Enjoy! --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

Duh, you're right--BB has nothing to do with it. Amend the above with HR instead of K, and you've got my point. I just looked at some BABIP variances last night that I'll post one of these days ...the BABIP variance from yr to yr is huge, 1 standard deviation is .037 or something.

BABIP is subject to much more variance than AVG, because BB and K are fairly constant from year to year. Looking at your chart of Jenkins BIP types, you can make an argument on either side of the case. In addition to declining, players tend to regress to their career average in just about everything. If Jenkins returns to his career average, he'll take a hit in both ld% and BABIP. If he returns halfway, it'll still make a noticeable dent. If he has the same sort of decrease he had from 03 to 04, it'll be worse. I'm not (and never have been) saying that Jenkins is going to return to league average in all things. But he will take a step back. At this point in his career, his BABIP may well start slipping as he enters the beginning of a decline phase, as well. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

Given that BABIP is somewhat dependent on what "type" of hitter you are (groundball/flyball, etc), I would imagine (and I think I've read) that it stays somewhat constant through the minor leagues, kind of like walk rate. It may go down, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a decently strong correlation. Once I get all my minor league data and major league data into the same form, I'm going to take a look at that. LD% is line drive percentage -- the percent of batted balls that are, obviously, line drives. I haven't looked at how consistent players are at maintaining their gb%, fb%, or ld%, but I would imagine someone who has a particularly high BABIP and a particularly high LD% is not going to maintain those levels. I would love for Jenkins to maintain his 2005 levels and I certainly won't be at the ball park cheering for regression, but I just don't see Geoff repeating that performance. Eventually I'll harness all the retrosheet data and see about the consistency of LD%, among other things. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

Well said, Ennder. Here's the flip side of what I wrote about yesterday...today I look at those players whose BABIP is very low relative to their career averages, and see what that suggests for their future. Could work out nicely for Carlos Lee... www.brewcrewball.com/stor...17913/6993 --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I hope you're right about Jenks. On the other hand, the stuff I'm going to post tomorrow suggests that H/BIP can decline with age, especially with sluggers. Geoff may not be old enough for that to set in, but...you never know for sure whether a player is declining or just having an offyear until you've seen a few years. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

You may be right, but that doesn't make intuitive sense to me. If Jenks's batting eye really improved, then yes, he's watching balls go by that previously would've been nubbers off the end of the bat, grounders to pitcher, that sort of thing. But I don't think that's what happened. One of these days I'll see if there's much of a correlation between BIP% and H/BIP and we can settle it better. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

While his BIP% was 20% below average, that's mostly because of more walks and strikeouts per at-bat, so it shouldn't have much to do with the result of his batted balls. Aside from the fact that the numerator of BIP% is the same as the denominator of H/BIP, I doubt there's much correlation between the two. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I just did a study to put some of the Brewers 2005 BIP stats in context. The idea is to figure out how well the "lucky" players (like Jenkins and Clark) will do next year ...I looked at some of the lucky guys in 2004 and how they did in 2005. The whole thing is here: www.brewcrewball.com/stor...144938/068 --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I just compiled a table for 2005 Brewers position players (plus Koskie & Gross) that measures the percent of plate appearances that resulted in balls in play, as well as their hit rate on those balls in play, and compares those to their career numbers. Here's the link to the entry, where I go into a fair amount of detail as to how these numbers can be useful, what the league averages are, etc. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I'm VERY torn about Andre. I first got into baseball in '87 and the one cable channel with baseball that I had was WGN ...naturally, I was a Cubs fan and Andre Dawson was my favorite player. Didn't hurt that he's a class act...he remains my all-time favorite. If you had asked me when he retired whether he deserved to go in, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Now, though, I've been educated along with everybody else about more advanced stats, I've learned about park factors and the relatively weakness of his '87 MVP ...about the value of taking a walk... and I'm not so sure. Here's how I see it. If you're a "small HOF" proponent, there's no way he's in. Then again, you want to exclude half the people who are in already. If you're of the inclusive sort, Rice, Dawson, maybe even Murphy go in. Unfortunately most of us fall in the middle somewhere. What makes Andre so hard to judge, as many previous posters have suggested, is how to account for a) his relatively lack of notoriety during his playing days, especially his best ones in Montreal, and b) his injuries. If he was in fact a stellar defensive CF (some metrics dispute that, but I don't know enough to really come down on one side or the other) for all that time in Montreal, along with the power and speed, it seems like that might push him over the top. CF defense is SO important, that the value of somebody like him or Bernie or Jim Edmonds is substantially increased because their production is coming from that spot. (Now, I don't want to open the can of worms on either of those guys' future with HOF voting). Then his injuries come into play. I think it's reasonable to say that if he hadn't had so many problems with turf and had to work so hard just to get out on the field every day, he would've played center for a lot longer. That, more than anything, is how the injuries complicate things for me. If he had put up his career numbers as an average-or-better CF, it'd be a lock. But as a corner OF, it's a different story. Fair? Maybe not. I don't think the notoriety should matter much in making a judgment, but you know it does with many of the voters. I have no doubt that if Dawson had played for a perennial contender AND been a gregarious guy, he would've been ushered in Puckett-style by now. But so many arguments have to come down to this 400 HR / 2500 H, 300 SB thing, which does put him in incredible company. Yep, great, but the other guys who did it were so much better, in so many ways. Ultimately, it shows Dawson is a guy who did a lot of things very well, and his package of talents was rare to all come in one person. But he was never a really great player. Obviously from my comments so far, I'm totally on the fence. If I had a BBWAA vote, I'd probably say yes. The stathead in me has to say no in order to be consistent with all the other guys I know I need to say no to. Tough call all around. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

Jeff Liefer will be a Seibu Lion next year. link --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

via Rotoworld, Wes Obermueller just signed a minor league deal with the Braves --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

My understanding is that the Markov chain gives you the same results as if you just ran a simulation enough times for it to represent an average performance for the given constraints.. Yeah. A markov chain is basically a mathematical expression of the average result of a simulation based on certain probabilities. Sounds really complicated, and it is to do the math rather than running a sim, but it's not. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

I just read the chapter on streakiness in "Curve Ball" by Albert & Bennett (both of whom are professional statisticians). They show that some teams / some players can actually be "streaky" -- that is, streakiness isn't entirely a mirage created by small sample size. They show that Todd Zeile (a notoriously streaky guy) performed much more like a hypothetical "streaky player" than a hypothetical "consistently player." Too much to go into here, and I don't know anything about six sigma, just wanted to point out that you can't entirely write off streakiness. --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

Again, not a happy win probability chart, but a chart nonetheless...you can find it and the accompanying stats here: www.brewcrewball.com/stor...194141/638

I just posted the win probability chart for this game, for those of you who are interested: www.brewcrewball.com/stor...04737/3285 enjoy! (as much as commentary re: this game can be enjoyed...) www.BrewCrewBall.com

For those of you who are interested, I just posted the win probability graph & stats from this game... www.brewcrewball.com/stor...12156/1307

I finally got around to posting the win probability graph from yesterday's game, for those of you who are interested: www.brewcrewball.com/stor...42657/4326 Now that's what I like to see.

Here's the win probability graph for Saturday night's game. It's not as depressing as the game was, because it's just a graph, but it's still pretty depressing. www.brewcrewball.com/stor...31056/4019 --- www.BrewCrewBall.com

seems to me like there just aren't very many good TV guys. The best play-by-play guys, I would imagine, gravitate to radio, where their role is more important. And TV color guys--there's not just enough interesting things to say to fill up an entire broadcast, but they keep talking anyway. Ugh. www.BrewCrewBall.com

Brady hasn't been taking much, but he's been fouling like crazy. The first AB of the Thursday game at Shea, everybody around me was yelling "strike him out already!" I wanted to give a little explanation about "contact hitting" and wearing the opposition down, but figured the new yorkers wouldn't be very amenable to that. www.BrewCrewBall.com

Oh...you said starting. Sorry. Never mind Kiesch then... www.BrewCrewBall.com