rluzinski

I was thinking the same thing but announcers are too budy trying to prove themselves right about everything to report reality.

I disagree heartily. The Crew is getting a 25% discount on his services for 5 years. I'm assuming that the $40+M projection includes risk of injury over 5 years. There must be an average number of missed starts.You are right that the projection should include expected IP/injury risk. Wish he broke it down. You also have to take into account the opportunity cost of not extending Yo. By signing him, we get an extra year or two of him. Yes, but that would be like if the Brewers signed a comparable pitcher NOW, to a guaranteed contract to pitch for them in the 2014 and 2015 season. pitchers just get hurt so often that it just doesn't sound very exciting to me.

A pitcher is more likely to throw Gomez a fastball than Braun when behind in the count, certainty. Since Gomez has no power, a walk and a hit aren't much different in terms of value, compared to Braun. That's true no matter where they are hitting relative to each other. The value of Gomez getting on base goes up with Braun and Fielder behind him. The pitcher is always balancing the risk of throwing out of the zone and walking Gomez vs. throwing in the zone and giving him something decent to hit. Since the relative value of a hit and walk hasn't changed (as far as I can see) by having good hitters behind Gomez, why would the pitcher change his approach? Like I said, I just don't get it.

Where it appears you are actually saying you should use past game data to tell you what to do. I said the aggregate data from thousands of games SUGGESTS it was a wrong decision. I used that word to indicate it isn’t PROVING anything. If I wanted to be more certain, I would have to make all kinds of adjustments to the aggregate data, to apply it to that specific situation. But my larger point in that comment was, whatever you do, don’t use the result of one play to determine if the move was statistically the correct one. So you are supporting a system that says a play which causes a team to go from behind to tied had no effect on the game? Where exactly have I explicitly given my support of Tango/Fangraph’s win probability system for use in making in-game decisions? I’ve explicitly stated the opposite, in fact. It’s an interesting and enlightening metric but it’s calculation of win probability is VERY basic. You don’t need to continually point out this fact because no one is disagreeing with you. I find my self repeating the same thing over and over but when I use the term “win probability” I am NOT referring to that stat. I am simply referring to the general concept of estimating the influence different possible decisions can have on the odds that a team will win or lose. One way or another, managers are making those kinds of estimates every time they make an in game decision. The question we are debating is HOW they should do it. I sure hope they aren’t simply using their Blackberry to surf to Fangraphs.com and then hitting up Tango’s run frequency and expectancy tables at tangotiger.net. A franchise can (and many do) make much better estimates. Which seems to contradict your original statement that you knew that the bunt was wrong. Neither I nor any other mortal will ever know with absolute certainty whether any in-game move was right or wrong. If I gave you the impression that I thought I did, I apologize. We can only estimate (with some uncertainty) whether it was right or wrong. I didn’t make any estimate when I shared my opinion. Please remember, it was someone else who had originally brought up the relative run expectancies; I simply replied to it. The times when a computer may be useful is a play like the Gomez bunt play, but when the computer is applied the result is: inconclusive, make this decision based on your intuition of situation... I would take option C: 1. Use a computer to make the best statistical estimate you can 2. Allow your manager to adjust that estimate based off his knowledge of whatever variables the statistical estimate didn’t and/or couldn’t account for. Basically, use all the information you have at your disposal. That appears to be what Darnell Junior is suggesting as well. If you are suggesting that even the best statistical estimates have no value in making in-game decisions; at least we can finally agree to strongly disagree about something specific. This is very incorrect, as a mean with a high standard deviation is very useless, such as the values of 1,1,9,9. The mean is 5, which is a very poor prediction of the actual sample set and the standard deviation is high. And using only your intuition will result in an estimate with more precision? I think a combination of stats and personal experience will yield the most accurate estimate but precise? Much of the uncertainty of any estimate is a result of the luck of a coin flip. Even intuition is just based off observing many individual “matchups” and noting the results. It sounds like you’ve taken some kind of stats 101 course and if you have, you are fully aware of the limitations of estimates based off samples. That’s baseball. Look, you seem to be suggesting that you can intuitively come up with better estimates for optimal in-game strategy in 30 seconds than the most sophisticated statistical estimates could ever come up with. I do don’t see the utility in continuing to argue against that position. You are entitled to your opinion.

I don't dislike the move but the Brewer sure are assuming a lot of risk to save $10 mil (assuming that's a reasonable estimate). Dispite what Brewer management is saying, I think it's tough to accurately assess injury risk on an individual basis, especially for pitchers. Over the next 5 years, it's not really a question of if Yo gets hurt, but rather how much time he misses when he does.

I know it's the long-standing assumption but I don't believe it's actually true that batters ahead of elite batters will see more fastballs. I'm not even sure why that is the assumption. A pitcher is always going to throw whatever pitch they feel gives them the best chance of eventually getting an out. Why wouldn't they? Someone will need to explain to me what I'm missing. More on topic but I was fine with the trade at the time, since all facts point to Gomez being a tremendous talent, defensively. Whether he has a lot of tools is kind of beside the point to me, though. His speed only means something to me when it can be leveraged into either scoring runs or giving up less runs. His speed is very valuable defensively, a little valuable on offense and least valuable in terms of baserunning. I make all those claims based on typical run values associated with each. He is a very exciting player but unfortunetely, excitement does not correlate very well with value, all too often.

Thus I believe the estimations that you make are not that good/reliable so you should not try to use them for future prediction. The estimates certainly aren’t as precise as calculating the odds of a coin flip. That goes without saying, since we can only estimate the true skill of players, whereas we basically know the exact odds of flipping a coin. There are many other variables we can’t even quantify, which means that they are impossible to account for by any means. They are intangible. The estimates can certainly be reasonably accurate, though. The important thing is to make sure your model isn’t biased one way or another. Or else you lose your accuracy. But I'll ask again, if you don't want to use an accurate but imprecise estimate for the correct strategy to use, what is the alternative? Another example is the IBB on Giambi, I will assume (correct me if I am wrong) that you would basically never support a IBB in any situation (except obvious late game times) because there is no time when adding a player to 1B would decrease the run expectancy. I have my doubts that it was the correct move but I honestly don’t know. It is a very complicated question, which would require a decent amount of work to analyze. But even a rough estimate would be better than using no estimate at all. It clearly worked because the brewers actually got the DP they wanted, even though it was obvious to everyone in the park they did that to try to get the hitter to groundout and he knew it and did it anyways. Some percentage of time even the worst strategies are going to work, so knowing the outcome of this particular situation gets us no closer to figuring out what the best strategy was. Even a terrible strategy can turn out well a third of the time. all of these plays have only a 2% or 1% difference in the game, easily within the margin of error of win%...so all the number crunching on these 3 plays tells us nothing reliable. It just tells us that those plays had little effect on who might win the game (based on a very simple model for calculating win probability). That's it. this system thinks that when a backup catcher ties the game in the bottom of the 6th inning, in a situation where a double play was a possibility and the following hitters are a rookie and Corey Hart, that is a bad thing. No it doesn't. As I’m sure you know, those win probabilities don’t consider strength of teams, batting lineups or anything of the kind. But no one is suggesting managers should use Fangraph’s win probability estimates to make decisions so I have no idea why you keep bringing it up. So instead you need to analyze each play on their own and not put as much weight into the average values you know based on past results, maybe you know a certain hand is playable but the opponent is very strong and most of the other players at the table are weak, so theory would say to play your hand but the better decision is to let it go and wait until you can play against a weaker player. Maybe if you have 2 Aces against who think is the best player at the table you would want to risk all your money because you want to play against him with the best hands, but not so against a weaker player because you know you can outplay them later in the hand so you dont want to risk all your money right away. At the heart of that paragraph, you seem to be saying is that you need to consider all the variable of the particular situation at hand, to come up with optimal strategy. No reasonable person would disagree with that. But even your framework suggests making decisions based on incrementally increasing your win probability. But really, how couldn't it? I honestly am not sure what you are arguing for or against that this point, nor am I sure what are are actually disagreeing with me about. I'm not advocating a manger use tango's/fangrapghs Win Probabilities, nor war run expectency/frequency numbers. I'll repost the first sentence of my first post in this thread:

I have to agree with Robin. Teams are just getting better at estimating the value of players.

I am proposing that the best approach is to either use aggregate stats that best represent your particular scenario and then try to adjust that as best as you or try to simulate it. I'm not sure what the alternative is. I agree that you shouldn't always do just about anything all or none of the time. For example, I think there is a time and a place for bunting, I just think it is used too often and that's based on the studies I've read. They contend that if you always follow this it will cause you to score the most possible runs over the course of the entire season, or maximize your offense. So for example, if you are losing by 1 run in the middle of the game and you think you could score that run by bunting or something you should never try to score that 1 run if a different strategy has a higher run expectancy, because over the long season it will be better for you. That is simply wrong and I tried to explain as much in the in game thread from today. I gave you the obvious example of a tie game in the bottom of the 9th. Why would you try to maximize runs scored when one run ends the game? You are trying to maximize the odds of winning the game, not the odds of scoring the most runs. This is because it is unlikely that that 40% number came from values of 38%, 39%, 43%, 44% etc, but rahter values like 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% etc. So even though 40 is the average it does not have a small spread of values. If I flip a coin 10 times, I can calculate the odds of flipping 0 to 10 heads. That's the binomial uncertainty. We can estimate the same kind of thing with runs scored, probability of winning, etc... although with many additional layers of uncertainty (true skill level of the players involved is a big one). You select the strategy that results in the most wins for all possible results, weighted by their chance of occurring. The uncertainty is huge but what is the alternative? What exactly are you proposing that is diametrically opposed to what I am? You need to adjust for the situation at hand.... agreed. I think you use numbers to help you but you have to go on the feel of the game and your players. If you have additional information that the numbers don't consider, great. You have to consider all information. If a manager is saying, "I know the numbers tell me to do one thing but I have a good feeling about this", I have a problem with that.

Last year in the ML the average runs per game was 4.6 and even lower at 4.4 in the NL. The brewers averaged 4.8 runs/game, so if those are reliable numbers then the brewers record should have been 162-0. Well, thats silly because no statistical model is perfect so Im sure the record was not 162-0, it was something close. Actually, they were 80-82 which is pretty far away, that is weird, that must mean that using the average runs to predict the future outcome is not a good idea. In fact, for the 6 NL central teams last year, the average runs were 4.3/game with a standard deviation of 3.0, and a COV of .70. That is huge and basically means that you should assume that average values are not good representatives of a random event from the sample. So it looks like instead of just trying to score 5 runs every single game it is better to make decisions based on game to game situations to maximize your wins. Obviously, I meant that you should use the average runs/game scored in the majors over the last 10 years for all in game decisions. You wouldn't want to base in game decisions on the expected runs for a particular match up and update that as the game goes on. I can see this is a waste of time.

I already said this, and anytime in any baseball game when you are losing by 1 the value of 1 run is great. I think you still aren't appreciating how the inning of the game influences the relative value of a run. The run differential of the game is only one factor to consider. I hate the added probability stats a lot, they are pointless and meaningless to me on the scale of the team W-L. For individual players it is ok. Seriously, obviously if you are winning 4-0 in the first you have a good chance to win but not amazing, but winning 4-0 in the 9th you have an amazing chance to win, wow, Im so glad someone tracks this for me. Infact, I did not have the intuition to realize that going from a 1 run to a 2 run lead in the 6th inning increases your chances of winning but not by a huge margin, but if you went from a 1 run lead to a 7 run lead in the 6th inning your chances increase a lot...amazing! The fact the people try to claim that they can calcualte these effects to more precisely than single digits is laughable. I tried to answer your question, “Are runs worth less in the early innings?” Why did you ask it if the answer is so obvious? And I was speaking in generalities when I said “win probability”. A manager has to make an educated guess at the win probabilities of the various strategies at his disposal so he can try to select those strategies that will result in a win more often than not. If you think that is "pointless and meaningless" than arguing about baseball at all is as well. And they can calculate the probabilities to the nearest digit, provided every other factor is exactly the same. They obviously aren’t though, so we must do the best that we can to adjust for them. To throw your hands up in the air and say, ”But we can’t possibly adjust for every factor, so the numbers are worthless!” simply isn’t true. The numbers are the best numbers we have. If I have imperfect evidence supporting one strategy and no evidence supporting the other, I know what I’m doing. For the rest of it, I think much of what you said is wrong but I don't want to write anymore in the gameday thread. If you are interested in continuing this discussion, please start a thread in the major league or sabermetric forum.

However, when you're dealing with two pathetic offensive players, a 100 point or so difference over the course of a season is SIGNIFICANTLY less imperative. That simply isn't true. It doesn't even pass the "common sense" test, IMO.

It depends what you are trying to do. R3 1 out has a better chance of scoring 1 run that R1, R2 0 outs and obviously R2 1 out, so if you are playing for run there (when they were down by 1) bunting is the best play because it is much easier to execute than expecting a hit from Gomez. If you are just waiting around for HRs then its not the best play. You'll score 1 run around 13% more often with a runner at 3B and 1 out, vs. a runner at 2B and no out: http://www.tangotiger.net/RE9902score.html It lowers the overall run expectency though, so you have to really pick the spots where the value of 1 run is great. And there are other factors to consider. A sacrifice attempt is not always successful. Sometimes an non-bunt attempt out still results in moving the runner over. Sometimes a bunt results in a hit. And on and on. Anyway, it shouldn't surprise anyone that people have spent thousands of hours studying this stuff. I'm not suggesting that there is never a time and a place to attempt a sacrifice or bunt for a base hit. There is just a heck of a lot of evidence that MLB teams currently utilize it too often. It's why teams who are serious about using statistical analysis to aid in their in-game strategy decisions rarely use small ball strategies. Of course, small ball stategy is admitantly exciting to watch, so fans will always clamer for more of it, regardless if it is optimal strategy. I wish it was a more viable option but at close to 5 runs/game these days, playing for 1 run is often a losing proposition. I am definetly not saying to always go for 1 run, only in situations when you can do so without getting a hit. I am not for bunting a guy to 2nd base in the 3rd inning. I can see why you don't understand why what inning your in should affect in game strategy. To put it as simply as I can: The object is to win games. You do that by scoring more runs than the opposition. Every run you score adds to the probability of winning the game but those odds are dependant on many factors that change every second. The two main factors are going to be current score and current inning. If you are down 5 runs in the 1st, Scoring 1 run barely dents your win probability. Tie game in the bottom of the 9th and that second run adds 0 to your probability of winning, since you already won! So in general terms, a manger is faced with either trying to maximize runs scored or maximize the probability of scoring one run. Small ball strategy MIGHT increase your odds of scoring one run in some situations but it generally decreases overall expected number of runs. The earlier in the game it is, The greater the chance that your opponent scores more runs themselves, lowering the value of the single run you are desperately trying to score with bunts and flyouts.

So because we can never hope to find scenarios that are exactly the same in every way to analyze, we should instead.... well what? Just do what we've been doing for 40 years? 3 runs/game run environment, sacrifice! 5 runs/game run environment... sacrifice! It's easy to sit there and point out what factors might make our estimates less accurate but you are offering nothing more accurate to use instead. No estimate is perfect; we just make our best educated guess.

When discussing optimal game strategy, it's pretty irrelevant how it turned out in one instance. We have thousands of games of data that suggests it is generally a bad move to sacrifice bunt in that kind of situation. If Gomez was on his own and thought he could get a hit, so be it. I can't imagine he caught the corners napping, though.

Is Macha basically being forced to be an NL manager Lemming this year? Give away a third or your outs for an inning because, darn it, the book tells you to! The only real positive I saw of Macha was that he would bring more of an AL style offense. Guess he has gotten it beaten out of him.

It is only my educated guess that Gomez is the worst batter (among the starters) on the team. A reasonable case could be made that it's actually Escobar, though. Other teams would also bat Gomez 2nd because other teams are (IMO, obviously) as ignorant as the Brewers. You can throw out a million valid benefits of having Gomez in the 2nd spot but their sum cannot overcome the cost of giving the worst hitter more ABs than a superior ones. There simply isn't enough hustle or bunt attempts to do it. Batting Gomez 2nd instead of 7th is something like an extra 100 PAs for the season. Gomez is only a starter because of his defense; he should be hidden in the lineup as much as possible. And that Baseballmusings lineup tool is junk; always has been, always will be. I've been saying it for years but unfortunetely, it keeps getting used. The comments in the Fangraph article explains why and Sky supplied an alernative that I presume is decent: http://lineupsimulator.com/ Someone put CHONE projections in there and see what it spits out for the Crew?

That was based on the results of hundreds of previous AB, not two games.

I find bunts and hustling and making things happening and all that, as exciting as the next guy. At the end of the day, though, an out is an out. Gomez and everyone else needs to get on base, not make exciting outs.

They'd have no wisdom to share if they didn't.

I hope teams walk Prince every AB.

Watching that Gomez at bat was tough, not a single pitch in the zone, yet he swung at 3 of them. One of those might have been an attempted hit and run. I sure hope it wasn't but it wouldn't surprise me. Gosh, I hope McGehee proves that his 2009 season wasn't a fluke.

Weeks is the much better hitter. Giving 20 Weeks ABs to Gomez makes little sense to me.

Yes, if he stays on pace for 162 HRs, I won't object to him batting 2nd.

I'm not shocked anymore. It's been like this in Milwaukee for the last five years or so.