In 1996, Roger Clemens had an offseason by his standards, off enough that it may have been the spur to get him on steroids.  It certainly earned him a ticket out of Boston, off to a new team and a career rebirth in Toronto, and at the time, his departure might not have seemed unwarranted. By traditional metrics, 1996 was but a mediocre prelude for Clemens to winning back-to-back Cy Young awards and going 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA over 1997 and 1998. Clemens went 10-13 with a 3.63 ERA for the Red Sox in 1996, walking the most batters of his career with 106. Pushing 35, he looked to be on the decline, a shell of his once-dominant self.

Clemens did lead the American League in strikeouts in 1996 with 257. And in hindsight, we also know that he led the AL in strikeouts per nine innings with 9.5 and finished second in WAR with 7.7. In fact, it’s one of the best  losing seasons for a starting pitcher in baseball history.

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The folks at Fangraphs have developed, and are advocating the use of, stats that seem to me to represent a major improvement, in evaluation accuracy, over the “save” and the “blown save” as methods for ranking relief pitcher performance.   The Fangraphs concept of the “Shutdown”, as a replacement for the save, is very simple in concept if you  understand the idea of “Win Probability Added” (WPA), which itself has been much discussed over the years at the baseball-reference blog that spun off into High Heat Stats. Continue reading →

SABR Biography Project - http://sabr.org/bioproj/

In a follow-up to my inaugural piece in this vein, I’m looking at trades occurring this week (Apr 9 to 15) in baseball history.

Here’s a quick look at offensive numbers in 2012 vs 2012. Both are through the first 142 games of each season.

(First number is 2011, second number is 2012, all are on a per-game basis):

             2011  2012
Runs scored: 4.56  4.02
HR:          1.06  0.99
2B:          1.65  1.61
BB:          3.20  3.13
K:           7.01  7.42
BA:           .255  .235
SLG:          .406  .385

Ummm…wow. Offense is way down so far this year compared to the same timeframe last year, and last year’s offense continued the overall trend of decline.

If run scoring remains this low for the entire season, it will be the lowest since 1981 (strike-shortened) and 1976 (full-season).

Look  in particular at the strikeouts, which are ridiculously high, up nearly 6% from last year, and last year was a record year for strikeouts!!

UPDATE:

Here are numbers through the first 172 games of each season, 2011 and 2012. All numbers are per game.

      2011  2012   % change in 2012
R     4.55   4.06    -11%
HR    0.98   0.95    -3%
2B    1.75   1.64    -6%
K     6.94   7.51    +8%
BB    3.22   3.14    -2%
BA     .256   .237   -7%
SLG    .404   .383   -5%

These numbers are even more divergent than a couple of days ago!!

Here are some pitching numbers, beyond Ks and BBs as shown above:

            2011     2012      % change in 2012
ERA         4.13     3.66         -11%
IP/start    5.86     5.92         +1%
WHIP        1.334    1.237        -7%

Of course, the answer to that question is a resounding NO. How unlucky could you be with the contract that Cain just signed? But, contract aside, I want to look at pitcher luck in terms of the results achieved for the quality of work produced. In other words, the relationship between wins and losses, and earned run average.

The traditional benchmark of W-L record for evaluating starting pitchers has now been largely eclipsed by ERA. Case in point is the 2010 AL Cy Young winner, Felix Hernandez, who took the trophy with a 13-12 W-L mark. Nevertheless, W-L is obviously still a prominent statistic. I can again cite Hernandez  as a case in point – there was more than a little criticism of his Cy Young selection, based chiefly on that 13-12 record. Similar reaction attended Cain’s new deal. Even a knowledgeable blogger on this site pointed out Cain’s unremarkable career .486 W-L%, rather than his career 125 ERA+, ninth among active pitchers (min. 1000 IP), and in a tight cluster on that list with such names as CC Sabathia and Justin Verlander.

After the break, I’ll take a look at whether comparison of ERA+ and W-L% can provide clues as to whether a pitcher is lucky or unlucky.

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In his age 20 season, 2010, Jason Heyward produced 5.2 Wins Above Replacement, according to baseball-reference’s formula (5.1 using the fangraphs formula).  That’s All-Star level production for a player of any age, and extremely high production for a twenty-year-old. More on high-WAR 20-year-olds, and their future, after the jump. Continue reading →

This photo was from last night’s game, when the trainer came out to check on Shin-Soo Choo. Please come up with a caption for it.

PRESSWIRE

OK, I have posted another stat challenge, and you can join it right here. As Insert Name Here suggested I have opened it to the public so we may get some competition from folks who don’t read the blog. It is free to enter.

Speaking of the blog, we had some downtime this morning for reasons still unknown, but I am suspicious of the live chat plugin since I just installed that yesterday. I have disabled that live chat for now while we investigate. (You can still post comments on the chat thread.)

I have also entered a $1 challenge that has 1000 entrants and a lot of cash prizes. I didn’t create this league. If you feel like it, you can enter that one here.

As a reminder, if you don’t have a FanDuel account, please use this link to sign up as High Heat Stats gets a referral bonus.

PRESSWIRE

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I have changed the Lobby page to a Chat page. You can still post comments there, but now you can also post chat to talk to anybody else in real-time who might be reading the blog.