Baseball Notes

A lot of great stuff this week online from a baseball stat and sabermetric perspective. I don’t want to take too much time building it up, so I will just get right into the details.

The Great Clutch Project

I mentioned this a few weeks ago, concerning Tom Tango asking fans to join him in a battle in the clutch debate where he will pit his “good” hitters against the fans’ choice for “clutch hitters” to see if there really is a way people can see and perceive clutch. The stats he is using are his Leverage Index scores and wOBA (weighted on base average), so if you are not familiar with those, read up on them. You can find the summary of the project here, and Fangraphs will be running the season tally here for 2008.

Never thought I would see a Ginger/Mary-Anne and clutch/non-clutch analogy used, but I guess nothing should surprise me anymore.

Hardball Times OF Arms

John Walsh of THT reveals his new defensive metric to measure OF arms, something that has always been missing and that is sorely needed in the defense discussion that has escalated in the past few years. You can search by year on their stats page here, and there is a lengthy description of the methodology at this link. The stats for the OF arms goes back to 2004.

Richard Justice’s war with the stat guys

Local sports writer for the Houston Chronicle has the stats world up in arms from his reaction to a post by Mitchel Lichtman on Justice’s blog piece this week about bunting and how it is always a bad idea. Apparently, Justice has long been a target of some bloggers for his inability to look past emotion and personal feelings and look at the numbers. And the blogosphere just can’t get enough of all of this. And all of this from a couple of sentences about how bunting is always bad in the situation with which the Astros were faced.

For the record, I fall somewhere in the middle of what Lichtman and what Keith Law propose (you need to read all the threads to understand where that is). A manager has to make a yes/no decision in that moment, but his job should be to be as prepared as he possibly can with all the available data that will help him make an educated decision. The ones that are too close to call? Well, that’s why a managers are paid the way they are.

Lineup Analysis

This is not a new tool by any means, but something I have been messing around with this week that I recommend. Baseball Musings hosts a page that has a Lineup Analyzer put together by Morong, Arneson, and Armburst that allows you to put in any nine players with their OBP and SLG and it will construct the ideal lineup based on those numbers, and their calculated comparison and analysis of the two.

Here is the page, use it on your favorite team for this year or any year.