Baseball Prospectus has, since its inception, been dedicated to the concept that that there are better ways for major league baseball teams to make decisions. Augmenting conventional, scouting-based reports with objective evidence gathered through analysis of the statistical record can help a team gain a competitive edge. This philosophy, long advocated by BP, reached a critical mass of awareness through Michael Lewis' bestseller Moneyball, and initiated a wave of change that has swept across the ranks of professional baseball. It has even carried some BPers into positions with major league teams. That trend continues today.

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For those of you who haven't played around with the new reporting system, I highly recommend it. Almost all of the currently available standard stat reports are, in fact, using the new system.

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I was recently wondering about the how the game has changed, even over that relatively short span of time. One of the things you commonly hear about "the old days" is how pitchers threw so many more innings, presumably because they were tougher, less coddled, or generated more testoserone. From a sabermetric perspective, the arguments against that usually include how selective memory focuses on the exceptional pitchers, not the dozens or hundreds of pitchers who were forced to quit early due to a dead arm, or how pitchers nowadays have to expend a full effort on every pitch, unlike in Christy Mathewson's day where pitchers could coast until crucial moments of the game, or how even the greats of a generation ago were pitching significantly fewer innings than their predecessors, and how this trend has been almost constant since the inception of professional baseball. While there is truth in all of these arguments, I was interested in a different tack. What if plate appearances themselves require more pitches in the modern game than in years past? If batters have gotten more selective, or better at fouling off pitches, then 30 batters faced in 1950 may have taken less pitcher's work than 30 batters in 2005 would have.

Interestingly, only 19 pitchers had a "choke" during 2005, and only one pitcher had more than one--Chad Bradford, with just two chokes. On July 26th, he came into a 5-1 game with two runners on base, and lost the lead on an Aubrey Huff grand slam. Then on August 9th, he came in with the bases loaded and a 7-3 lead, and gave up two hits, an intentional walk, and two run-scoring groundouts, and left with the game 7-7 and runners still on second and third.

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Baseball Prospectus to the rescue. Here's a quick and dirty way you can approximate the expected number of runs given the bases that are occupied and the number of outs. We'll use an example to demonstrate--runners on first and third with one out:

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I've been working behind the scenes to make our stat reports reconcile better with sources such as ESPN, particularly in less official categories such as holds and blown saves.

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In more mundane terms, the Three True Outcomes (TTO) are those plate appearances that end without the defense getting a chance to touch the ball, plate appearances that end in a home run, a walk, or a strikeout. What started as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a unique player (Deer) has, ironically, turned out to have useful applications not for batters, but for pitchers, in the form of Voros McCracken's work into defense-independent pitching statistics.

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The Three True Outcomes are, at their core, a celebration of hitters, epitomized by the patron saint of the TTO, and the prototype for early BP book covers, Rob Deer. Last year, we introduced a more formal method for balancing the contribution from each True Outcome to a hitter's overall rating. To summarize that method, we compute each hitter's HR/PA, BB/PA, and SO/PA and divide it by the MLB average to normalize the rate. We then look at the lowest value for each hitter (i.e. determining which category he performed worst in compared to league average), and use that value as the hitter's overall score. This ensures that those who rise to the top of the rankings truly embrace and produce all three True Outcomes in abundance.

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As with the revisions to SNWL, I've broken down the new reliever statistics into three reports. The first looks specifically at inherited and bequeathed runners, to determine what a reliever's "fair" RA would have been, taking into account the runners on base and the number of outs both when he entered the game, and when he left.

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The Support Neutral Win-Loss pitching report has been an integral part of Baseball Prospectus since our inception in the mid 1990s. In fact, Michael Wolverton invented SNWL way back in 1993, when it was presented in a paper published by SABR's "By The Numbers" statistical newsletter. The concept behind Support Neutral pitching statistics is a simple one: determine what a pitcher's W/L record "should" have been, if he had gotten average performances from his teammates, adjusted for park, and looking at each start individually.

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