The rest of this article is restricted to Baseball Prospectus Subscribers.

There was some chatter on Twitter this morning about park factors, and Marc Normandin made the point that all of the most common park-adjusted offensive stats out there (TAv, OPS+, wRC+) use "generic" run-based park factors, not component park factors. (Baseball Prospectus does have component park factors which we use in PECOTA, and we use those to generate our run-based park factors, but we use run-based park factors in TAv.) Marc wondered if using one-size-fits-all rather than the component factors might lead to inaccuracies—after all, we know different parks affect different types of hitters in different ways, and our park adjustment methods here don't account for that. (Marc isn't the first to raise this point, by the way.) So why do we all do it this way?

Read the full article...

‘Sheet cells zing, are you listening,
In B12, Excel’s arithmeticin’
A beautiful sight,
We're happy tonight.
Walking in a spreadsheet wonderland.

Read the full article...

The Colorado Rockies have announced the hiring of new manager Walt Weiss, and it’s an interesting case study in what might be a new trend in managerial hiring. Weiss had a long and fine career as a player, split mainly between Oakland and Colorado. After that, he turned to coaching… at the high school level.  Weiss is making the jump straight to the majors from Regis Jesuit High School (although notably he has been a minor-league instructor and scout in the Rockies’ system until now.)

Weiss wasn’t even the most inexperienced manager under consideration by the Rockies; they were seriously considering Jason Giambi, who actually played for the team in 2012. Such a thing would not have been entirely unprecedented—through much of baseball history it wasn’t unheard of to have players themselves managing—but it’s certainly not very common these days.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

On Friday night, it was reported by several sources that the Angels and Cubs had agreed to swap starter Dan Haren—whose $15.5 option for 2013 was due to be picked up or declined by 12 AM ET—for reliever Carlos Marmol. Ultimately, the Cubs pulled the offer off the table, killing the deal, and the Angels declined Haren’s option, making him a free agent. But before that happened, Colin Wyers wrote up a reaction to the rumored transaction. This is what we would have said had the trade gone through.

Read the full article...

From Bruce Jenkins, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Read the full article...

When I was younger, I was (you’ll be shocked by this, I’m sure) fascinated by space. I learned about the planets and their orbits and their names and their colors (and I learned that there were nine of them—oops). Among my prized collection of space-themed t-shirts was one from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, which depicted the planets in their orbit around the sun. I loved looking at that shirt and picturing the planets as they moved throughout their orbits. And I learned about distant stars and how they worked and what the constellations were.

Now. Learning about the gasses that make up the atmosphere of Venus (hint: if you are ever on Venus, BRING AIR) is pretty cut and dried; it is objective. Learning that it’s called Venus and that it’s a planet is somewhat less so (especially now that there is now some actual controversy over what, exactly, is and isn’t a planet). But it’s a discussion grounded in fact, where the disputes are largely about how we express the reality, not the underlying reality.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Today, the Oakland A’s and Detroit Tigers face off in an elimination game for both teams, with the winner advancing to the League Championship Series round. The A’s looked almost certain to be eliminated last night until they mustered some late-inning heroics, scraping together a three-run ninth against Tigers closer Jose Valverde.

On paper, the A’s were the higher seed coming into this series and thus were entitled to the greater home field advantage. But without last night’s miraculous win, the A’s were never going to see the benefit of their better record, due to the format of the five-game series. In order to cut down on travel days, MLB has switched to a 2-3 format—two games at home for the lower seed, then three games at home for the higher seed. In the 2-2-1 format it replaced, the team with the better record gets to take, well, advantage of their home field advantage if the series runs to three games or five games, with only a four-game series depriving them of that benefit. In the current setup, the series has to run five games for them to see the benefit of their higher seeding.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Over time, baseball teams develop identities, and even if the players change, the identities stay the same. The Yankees (and the Red Sox, for that matter) have cultivated a slow, plodding, methodical style of three-true-outcomes baseball that scores lots of runs and takes its time doing it. The Cubs, until recently, were the team who struck out the world when pitching and wouldn’t take a walk to save their lives. The Twins were all about manufactured runs and control pitchers.

The Mariners have an identity, based largely around 1-0 losses and the brutal, crushing inevitability of death. And some of this can be attributed to the players—this is the team that has tried Adam Kennedy as a designated hitter in recent years. But as Egon Spengler put it, “It's not the girl, Peter, it's the building!” Safeco Park has been absolutely brutal on offense. This has probably not had much of an effect on wins and losses—what Safeco takes way from offense it gives back to pitching and defense. So Safeco isn’t causing the Mariners to lose, it’s just subtracting from the sum total of joy and happiness in the universe.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Every year, at this time, there is a debate over what "valuable" means, in terms of Most Valuable Players. The instructions to voters say: "There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who was the Most Valuable Player in each league to his team." The rules of voting do provide some guidelines:

Read the full article...

I know the crowd I'm writing for, and I know where 90 percent of my readers (if not more) are going to fall on the issue of whether or not Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout deserves to be named the Most Valuable Player in the American League. And I know this has been discussed to death, but I do want to raise one little point—just raise it, nothing more or less.

Read the full article...

It would be an exaggeration, but not TOO great of one, to say that everything I’ve learned in life I’ve learned from the Christian Bible, The Book, Babylon 5 and the British sitcom Yes, Minister. In the last of those, cabinet minister Jim Hacker has to deal with the difficulty of balancing the demands of politics with the machinations of the civil servants supposedly serving him (and occasionally, with the notion of actually doing the right thing).

In one episode, the new leader of the fictional country of Buranda is visiting the UK in hopes of purchasing some oil rigs that the government is very keen to sell to them. Hacker has set up a visit between Buranda’s president and the queen as a way to deliver a state visit to some “marginal constituencies” (the equivalent of swing districts) immediately before an election. His brilliant plan seems to backfire, though, after the leader of Buranda gives them an advance copy of the speech he plans to make, where he urges the Scots and Irish to fight British oppression. A panicked Hacker sounds out his chief source of advice, Sir Humphrey Appleby:

Read the full article...