We start by talking about projection systems in general, then dive into 2017 PECOTA team projections. We look to see how adding in actual playing time affects the team totals. Then we talk about individual players that out-performed and under-performed their PECOTA projections.
This Week I Learned:
Harry learns that “bullpenning” is a thing, sort of, maybe, kind of. (h/t Matt Trueblood)
Kendall learns to make adjustments in parenting, just like hitters like Mike Trout have had to make adjustments to high fastballs. (h/t to Jeff Sullivan)
We sat down with Rob Arthur, Ben Diamond, Greg Matthews, and Travis Sawchik to talk about the MLB playoffs. We touched on playoff formats (past, present, and future?) and then moved on to talk about roster construction and optimization for the playoffs. After that, Harry and Kendall talk about the things they learned this week.
This week Harry and Kendall discuss pitcher similarity scores. Where did they come from? What are they? What can they be used for? And what might they evolve into. This week Kendall learned a little about Ted Williams, and Harry learned something from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
With the news of Shohei Ohtani’s imminent posting from the NPB, this episode we talk with Sung Min Kim from the Sporting News about the posting system as well as a closer look at Ohtani. Harry and Kendall then discuss the precedence of two-way players in the Major Leagues and talk about what they’ve learned this week.
This week Harry and Kendall welcome Dan Brooks from Brooks Baseball and Russell Carleton from Baseball Prospectus. We talk with Dan and Russell about how baseball relates to their professional field of study, psychology. Russell has a new book coming out, called “The Shift”, which is available for pre-order. To steal a play from Russell’s playbook, we command you to pre-order it.
This is the first in a new recurring series called Stats and Storytellers. We’re excited to welcome Jonah Keri as our first guest.
This week we talked to Rob Arthur of FiveThirtyEight and Jim Albert, professor of mathematics and statistics at Bowling Green State University about Rob’s article Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real, co-authored by Greg Matthews assistant professor of statistics at Loyola University Chicago
On Episode 2 of Stolen Signs we briefly recap SaberSeminar 2017, answer a listener email about how to learn more about baseball stats, and we have a discussion about pitching metrics with Jonathan Judge of Baseball Prospectus and Neil Weinberg of FanGraphs.
This is episode 1 of the Stolen Signs podcast, a new podcast from the stats team at Baseball Prospectus.