If PECOTA Doesn’t Have Anything Nice to Say…

Baseball Prospectus released their PECOTA numbers this week, and obviously there is a ton of data. At first I tried to just pick out some interesting bit of information, which I’ll get to later. Keep in mind that playing time adjustments haven’t been made yet. Guys who won’t be playing are in there, but that shouldn’t affect their non-counting stats. Before that, though, I want to share what really jumped out at me. PECOTA is not very sympathetic to Nationals position players. Here’s what I mean:

PECOTA Doubts the Position Players

PECOTA thinks (ok it doesn’t think, it calculates) that almost all Nats who might be considered starters will have a lower OPS in 2011 compared to 2010. That includes those you might expect, such as Ryan Zimmerman (drop of .069), Jayson Werth (drop of .086) and Mike Morse (drop of .097). It includes others that you might not expect such as Adam LaRoche (drop of .007), Danny Espinosa (drop of .028), and Wilson Ramos (drop of .038). The only starter types with increases are Ian Desmond (increase of .003), Roger Bernadina (increase of .012), and Rick Ankiel (increase of .017).

Getting James Loney, In ScatterPlot

Yesterday I went over a cast of LH first basemen, in order to discover and report who might be available through free agency or trade. One of the things that surprised me while doing this was that James Loney, the 24 year old lefty manning first base for the Dodgers, hit so well outside of his home park.

Over his career, he’s only hit .268/.334/.377 at home, while he’s hit .307/.361/.493 away. That’s not just a little difference, it’s a 143-point OPS difference. I wondered, was this all about the home park? LA is known as a pitchers park, perhaps that’s what taking him down. So I decided to do a simple analysis. I’d take Baseball Reference’s Multi-Year Park Factor and plot it against OPS. Let’s not worry too much about the sausage inside of Park Factor. Instead, just keep in mind that 100 is in the middle, anything below 100 is considered better for pitchers, anything above 100 is better for hitters.

The chart below is Loney’s OPS plotted on the y-axis against the park factor at every park he’s played at and had at least 50 PAs. I figured anywhere lower than that is just too small. Sure, it’s a bit of an arbitrary point, but I don’t have a better way to do it, and anything below 50 seemed EXTREMELY low to me. So that is where I started:

A Primer on What’s Important

Perhaps the greatest post I’ve ever seen on the specifics of what is important and what isn’t in the mind of modern baseball has been reposted in the Pinstriped Bible this week. Check it out here and be enlightened. The list of commandments is long, but I agree with 99% of what’s written here. I’ve listed them below, with some of my own comments on a few of my favorites. You’ll have to follow the link and give them the unique visitor or whatever to get the full text on each, but it’s definitely worth the read:

1. It’s how often a player reaches base and how much power he has that’s important, not batting average, not RBIs.
2. Remember league and position averages: numbers have meaning only in context.
3. RBIs are opportunistic; RBIs are a team stat and are not indicative of a player’s ability.
4. Stolen bases just don’t matter. I have a little bit of a tough time with the one, but I’m willing to admit they are extremely overvalued.
5. The main function of the batting order is to distribute plate appearances.
6. A strikeout is just another out. In fact, sometimes it’s better. With a runner on third with less than 2 outs, you’d rather have an out be a deep fly ball to CF, for sure. But in that same scenario with a guy on first and less than 2 outs, you’d much rather have a strikeout than a hard hit ball to an infielder. Guess which scenario comes up more often?
7. Placing good bats on the right side of the defensive spectrum is one of the keys to winning. Yes, hopefully by now we’ve figured out that if Ian Desmond and Roger Bernadina finish the season with a very similar OPS, Desmond was the much more valuable player.
8. The 27 outs of a ballgame are precious. Managers should not give them away lightly.
9. A player’s offensive and defensive contributions must be in balance.
10. The difference between the best and worst defender is not as large as you think. How many games does a bad fielding Dunn lose compared to how many games his bat wins? It’s a question Rizzo needs to figure out.
11. When formulating expectations for your team’s latest veteran acquisition, keep the aging curve in mind.

Guzman vs. Kennedy

Middle infield rumors have been flying around since way back in September and October. First Ian Desmond was going to take over at shortstop and Cristian Guzman was gonna move to second base. Then the Nats went searching for a second baseman, and most thought that Desmond was being pushed aside. Then they went out and signed Adam Kennedy, and Desmond was indeed pushed aside. Then he went out and hit .385/.448/.692 in his first 11 games of spring training and pushed himself back into the picture.

So now there is a rumor that Ian Desmond will be the starting shortstop for the Nats going in to the 2010 season. While I don’t believe 11 spring training games are enough to establish a resume (Adam Dunn has 0 home runs, but nobody is worried he won’t hit any this year), I have all along lobbied that Desmond should be the starter. His bat seemed ready and I thought his defense was good with the occasional hiccup, and figured that what better group to learn concentration and discipline from than the major league coaching staff? Of the three players, Desmond is the only one with the potential that comes with youth, and he could eventually wind up a very good player. The other two guys are closer to retiring than being called someone with potential, so let’s assume here that if Desmond has role his role, he deserves it.

The thought is then if Desmond starts, Guzman would move to second and Kennedy would play utility man. But is that the way to go? Let’s take a look at the two that might be fighting for the role of starting second baseman:

Runs Created in the Middle

The Nats lineup is looking pretty potent these days, just like it did at the beginning of the season. Back then, Guzman was hitting like a champ, and the Johnson-Zimmerman-Dunn combo was unstoppable. Well, Guzman has had his ups and downs, Zimmerman got cold, and Johnson isn’t even on the team anymore. Nyjer Morgan has changed things further by hitting incredibly well in the leadoff spot. But what makes this offense click is the most important part – the middle of the lineup.

The Nats 3, 4, and 5 hitters (Zim, Dunn, Willingham) have done extremely well, especially since the break. Obviously, they don’t always trot this lineup out there, but it is a good assessment of what the Nats use in the middle.  It got me thinking, who has been better than this group? I used Runs Created (RC) to measure it – for a primer on RC go to the stats page – because it’s great for this as it’s based on cumulative offensive stats. It is position independent, unlike VORP, and it’s a counting stat, so you can just add it up. I found out the totals as well as the standard deviation of the 3 players to see how big of a range they had. Here is what it looks like for the bonny Nats:

Nats Heating Up, Trades Aren’t

The Nats have now won four games in a row, which on the season is… their longest win streak. Yikes. So, the losing streaks haven’t exactly been balanced out. They’d need to win about 34 in a row, and even then, they’d still be 2 games under .500. But all that aside, they have played well of late.

Bally’s Back

Collin Balester pitched well, making him the 45th young pitcher to come to the big league club this year and offer up a quality start. While it wasn’t remarkable, 2 ER in 6 IP against the Brewers is pretty impressive. Balester, a 4th round pick in 2004, was their #3 prospect last year. This outing could be something to build on, especially if the team keeps hitting like they do.

Dunn completely smashed a ball out of Miller Park, I am pretty sure it burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere. And Nyjer Morgan hit a home run to start off the game! Guzman is on a power surge, he’s hit 2 HRs, in 5 days. Does anyone need a middle infielder? Minnesota, I’m looking at you, it could be a nice little reunion. Back to Morgan, he’s now hitting .389/.417/.489  since he came to the Nats. That, my friends, is a catalyst. It may not be sustainable, but it’s fun to watch.

WARP Speed

I was out of the country last week, which is why there was no post, and now it’s the All Star break. Rather than discussing the Nats, which could be very depressing, I’m going to go for a different topic. I mean, talking about the team, am I going to discuss how much they suck, how there are maybe 3 position players on the non-DL part of the roster that are part of the future, or how nobody knows because nobody’s watching? No thanks. So, for the 100th post of this blog first let me say thank you to everyone who reads this. I appreciate it, truly, as I would no longer be writing if people weren’t interested. Anyway, instead of the usual, someone put a comment on the Stats page asking me to explain what WARP and WARP-3 are, and I thought this might be a good diversion for Nats fans…

Who is this guy?

WARP stands for Wins Above Replacement Player, and like the stat VORP, compares a player to the imaginary “replacement-level” player. What is replacement level? Well, there is the long answer and the short answer. Here is the long answer, along with a definition of VORP. I prefer the short answer – he’s an average fielder, and as a hitter, he’s has the level of production a team would expect if they called up a minor leaguer. This is an important distinction. A replacement level player is not an average hitter, he is worse. If a team was full of average hitters, they would be a pretty good team, especially if they could pitch. If they were filled with replacement level players, they would stink. We’re not talking 60 wins here, we’re talking 30 or 40.

So, on to WARP

WARP, again, stands for Wins Above Replacement Level. It is complicated to calculate, I’ve never done it, and despite taking lots of math and stats classes in my life, I have no desire to. For those of you who are curious, it is based upon batted, fielding and pitching runs above the replacement level, as well as the number of runs needed for a win. I am content with knowing it is calculated, and in the answer lies the key. It is more useful in casual baseball conversation than VORP because it gets to the heart of how a player helps. If a player has a WARP of 5, he will provide your team, over the course of the season, with 5 more wins than a replacement level player. Despite the difficulty in calculating or defining it, this concept is beautiful in its simplicity.

Let’s look at an example: According to Baseball Prospectus, in 2007, Ryan Zimmerman had a WARP of 8.0, while the Orioles’ Melvin Mora had a WARP of 3.3. This means that the Nationals had about 4.7 more wins thanks to Zimmerman playing third over Mora. Meanwhile, Chipper Jones had a WARP of 8.5 and AL MVP third baseman Alex Rodriguez had a WARP of 10.7.

That’s confusing enough, can we stop there?

NO! There is also something called WARP-2 and WARP-3. None of these have anything to do with faster-than-light propulsion, which is, from what I understand, extremely more complicated than studying baseball (but not as hard as actually hitting a major league pitch). Baseball Prospectus uses WARP-1 to be the stat that we’ve already discussed, what we called WARP.

WARP-2 is like WARP-1, but the difficulty of the league is factored in as well.

WARP-3 factors in season length as well. This is useful not so much for someone like Ruth (who had 154 game seasons instead of 162) where there is little difference between what the total WARP would be for someone in Ruth’s time and now. It is great, though, for looking at someone like Moises Alou of the Expos in the strike shorted 1994 season, who had a WARP-1 of 6.2 but a WARP-3 of 7.9.

What’s good?

As you may have figured out, since 0 is replacement level, and ARod had a 10.7 last year, WARP numbers are in a concentrated spectrum. Usually the 3-5 range is what an average player would have, while the 7 or 7.5-10 range are All Star caliber players. Above 10 is pretty much the top few players in the league, and if you get above 12 or 13, it would be a pretty historically unreal season. And remember that the rest of the league factors into these numbers. In 1926, Babe Ruth hit .372/.516/.737, very similar to 2003 when Bonds hit .341/.529/.749. But while Ruth’s WARP that year was 15.3, Bonds’ in his season was only 12.7. That is because in 2003 the average player hit much better than than in 1926, causing the difference in this player-average based number