[The other evening on Twitter, FanGraphs and Baseball Nation author Wendy Thurm called NL first basemen "a wasteland this year." This is the result. --CW]
 

The Waste Land (Of The National League)

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A while back, you may recall, I wrote an article about Brett Lawrie’s rating in one defensive metric, Baseball Info Solution’s Defensive Runs Saved. My conclusion:

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Due to reader feedback, we’ve made some changes to the Playoff Odds report:

1)     Rather than rerunning sims for past days of the season, we’re locking in sims that have already been run. Originally, we were rerunning sims from previous days to make sure that only updated information was affecting the deltas, but the practice seems to have generated too much confusion as to what the deltas were supposed to mean.

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Sabermetric analysis of the Cubs at this point of the season seems mostly pointless; there is exactly one formula you need to analyze the 2012 squad:

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Well here’s something you don’t see every day—the Rockies are going to a four-man rotation. And what’s more, they’re going to put their four starters on a 75-pitch limit. Jim Tracy explained his decision like so:

"I felt we had to do something non-conventional," said Tracy of his beleaguered pitching staff that includes a reliever Josh Roenicke who has thrown more innings than one of the team's starters. "I was given the opportunity to tweak this. We are going to see what transpires as we move forward."

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The really great thing about learning from one’s predecessors is that you can learn just as much from when they are wrong as when they are right, if you take care and are vigilant—which is to say, that you recognize that an error was made to begin with.

At its core, sabermetrics got its start because people were able to read things and then ask questions about what they read, rather than taking everything at face value. Does this make sense? Is this really true? And I think that any sabermetrics worthy of that name is as willing to question itself in this fashion as it is everyone else.

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Last week, we examined the effects of fielding shifts on fielding metrics. For those who missed out, I’d advise you to go read it, but the short version is that location-based fielding metrics can overstate the importance of fielding shifts to a team’s defense and thus overrate players who are shifted in such an arrangement.

But if the fielding shifts are throwing defensive metrics off, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t contributing to team defense, right? And we are in what some people might term a shifting renaissance. John Dewan of Baseball Info Solutions says:

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Let’s play a game called “Which one of these is not like the others?”

Culled from Fangraphs, Baseball-Reference, and yours truly, defensive ratings for Brett Lawrie:

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We’ve identified incorrect data in the playoff odds report. The purpose of this post is to explain what happened, announce that it’s fixed, and offer some technical notes on the process so readers can reassure themselves that it’s now working as it should.

At the heart of the playoff odds report is a database table that contains the current-season MLB schedule. We use that table for many other products as well. After the season started, we moved many of the other products to a different schedule table that went back through the entire Retrosheet era and also included additional data. The playoff odds were a straggler, because we were working on a project that would allow us to run them for previous seasons. (The adjusted standings have been similarly modified, and soon we’ll have adjusted standings available back through 1974 on the site.) So the changes were made to the new playoff odds codebase, and the old codebase was left running on the old schedule table. Unfortunately, at some point during the season, the old schedule table stopped updating properly.

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It's just the middle of May, and the Los Angeles Angels have fired Mickey Hatcher, their hitting coach.

Why they are doing this is pretty clear—the Angels are already seven games behind the Rangers, and their offense is in such poor shape that they've been outscored by the Mariners. Among American League teams, only the Twins have scored fewer runs per game. Despite having the advantage of the designated hitter, the Angels are outscoring only two NL franchises, and the Padres have the excuse of playing in Petco.

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We are happy to announce that rest-of-season PECOTA projections are now available and will be updated daily going forward.

As a reminder, PECOTA projections are restricted to subscribers. We will not be updating all PECOTA products; right now, updated PECOTAs will be available from:

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