Losing David Justice isn’t good news, considering I’m not a big Scott Hatteberg guy, but I am a believer when it comes to Eric Byrnes, so I guess I’m happy. Outfield defense is always going to be an issue for a unit that has Terrence Long in center field and either Justice or Jeremy Giambi in a corner. While I’m not arguing for Byrnes to play every day, he does give the A’s a hitter who puts hard-hit balls into play, who can cover an outfield corner well, and basically give the bottom of the lineup someone who can help score some of the other more walk-inclined hitters batting higher up.
After a rough start to the season, the Anaheim Angels have taken to beating up the teams outside their division. Granted, they’ve gotten a healthy dose of the Blue Jays, but with a sweep of the White Sox over the weekend, the Angels are now 20-16, a mark that breaks down as 6-12 within their division, and 14-4 against everyone else. They’ve jumped into second place, 5 1/2 games behind the Mariners.
The columnist is sick, he’s cranky, and he’s under medication. Therefore, he disavows responsibility for anything appearing in this space until further notice. — After a rough start to the season, the Anaheim Angels have taken to beating up the teams outside their division. Granted, they’ve gotten a healthy dose of the Blue Jays, but…
RELIEF "We’re going to try to put something together and show people what we’re made of. Everybody knew what we were about when we were losing because we were all over TV and all over the newspapers. This is our moment to show people what we’re really made of." —Hal McRae, Devil Rays manager, after…
Anyway, let’s go on to the minors. I apologize if there’s not a lot of breadth here; I’m focusing on those guys who I’ve been able to talk to some scouts about, and I’ll get to more over the course of the season. I’m concentrating on guys with some upside, or guys who, for some reason or other, are interesting because their level of performance may have changed.
It took most of the first month, but BP’s team in the League of Alternative Baseball Reality edged out of the cellar and all the way up to 11th place. And we didn’t have to fire anybody to do it.
It took most of the first month, but BP’s team in the League of Alternative Baseball Reality edged out of the cellar and all the way up to 11th place. And we didn’t have to fire anybody to do it. Most of the gain has come on the pitching side, where the return of Greg…
Since we’re about a month into the season, and I’m getting a lot of mail with specific questions about prospects, I thought I’d bounce through some of the early performances from the minors and talk to a few scouts. Originally, I had hoped to have a Win Shares review done by now, but the responsible…
For this study, I estimated career VORP for the BA’s top 100 prospects from 1990 through 1997, that is, those who have had at least five years to prove themselves. I used the rule of thumb that 10 runs of value moves one game into the win column. This is what I found:
Can a "can’t-miss prospect" miss? Will young pitchers really break your heart? Last year, in a highly entertaining Baseball Prospectus roundtable Joe Sheehan remarked: I would submit that there are no circumstances in which a pitcher is the best prospect in baseball. To which Derek Zumsteg replied: If a pitcher can’t be the best prospect…
Bonds, over his last 100 games or so, is perhaps the biggest statistical outlier in the game’s history. He breaks the formulae, in that the many walks Bonds takes are, collectively, less valuable than our usual tools for evaluating such things would perceive. He’s being given so many walks in RISP/first-base-empty situations that they are, if not a negative, certainly not the positive that, say, linear weights might indicate. They’re not a bad thing–and they certainly don’t warrant the kind of “Bonds should swing more” analysis that has been proffered–but the context of the walks is something to consider when evaluating his performance.
Yesterday, I provided an overview of Barry Bonds‘s amazing performance so far this season, and reaching back to the latter part of 2001. There’s no question that Bonds is the most dangerous hitter in the game today. However, I do believe that we’ve run into a problem with our advanced metrics. Bonds, over his last…
The type of analysis that we perform is an outgrowth of a passion for the game that we all had long before we ever knew about strikeout-to-walk ratio or context-neutral performance or career paths.
But, geez….628.
That�s Barry Bonds’s on-base percentage, a figure that is so far off the charts as to be mind-boggling.
This week’s question comes from Robert Shore, who asks:
Like many people, I was mightily impressed by Voros McCracken’s work, which strongly suggested that pitchers have essentially no effect on the conversion of balls in play to outs. It occurred to me to wonder about the converse question. Are some batters better than others in converting balls in play to base hits?
Starting today, we will be periodically running some of the best content from the new, super-charged Baseball Prospectus archives. Those new to BP may be reading this content for the first time. Long-time readers can rekindle old debates. We begin today with Keith Woolner’s look at the conversion of balls in play into outs, from 2002. To do your own mining, go to BP’s Search function. To request a specific article from the archives, e-mail jkeri@baseballprospectus.com.