Monday, March 31, 2008

Opening Day

Tomorrow in St Louis the Roxs begin their defense of the NL pennant. Francis takes the mound against Wainwright at 2:15 PM. The Roxs are 8 - 7 in season openers. This is the only second March game in Roxs history (we won 9-2). They lost in extra innings to the D-backs last year. Obviously they begin the year on the road with the home opener on Friday against the D-backs (again!). Francis was 2 - 0 last year against St Louis.

I think it is important for the Roxs to get back into the saddle. The Roxs have an April record of 159 - 180 (86 - 86 at home and 73 - 94 away). Only 4 Aprils have had a winning record in Rox history. To prove to themselves that they belong, put some fear in their divisional foes that last year wasn't a fluke, and to lessen any sort of media pressure that befalls them if they start slow.

The Roxs Roster:

Starting Pitchers: Francis, Cook, Jimenez, Morales, and Redman
Relief Pitchers: Bowie, Buchholz, Corpas, Fuentes, Herges, Vizcaino, and Wells
Catchers: Torrealba and Iannetta
Infield: Atkins, Tulo, Nix, Helton, and Barmes
Outfield: Holliday, Taveras, Hawpe, Baker, Spilborghs, and Podsednik

Surprises...not much except maybe Podsednik and Bowie. I imagine Sullivan will be back up in the bigs by mid summer. Redman in the 5th spot isn't a big deal versus Hirsh. It drops the Roxs into an 81 - 87 win range. Again the big questions for the season is the pitching and relief and can Nix be the answer offensively at 2B.

Enough Talk...Play Ball!

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

MLB Opening Day

It's Opening Day! Of course at 4 AM, I'm not for sure I will be up for watching it. Guess that is why I have a DVR! Anyway glad to have the 2008 season ahead. Hopefully the Roxs will continue to make strides. Since everyone else does it I have to throw out my picks.

AL Playoff Teams
Red Sox, Yankees, Tigers, and Angels

NL Playoff Teams
Dodgers, Roxs, Brewers, and Mets

World Series
Soxs and Roxs Part II!

Baseball quote
"A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day"

Monday, March 24, 2008

Rox Star T-Shirts









Rox Talk - Weather?

And now for something completely off the wall and different. During my previous study on plate appearances, at bats, and left on base, I also annotated the weather data at Coors Field to determine what the weather does for home runs. The adage I have always heard was with the dog days of summer and the heat that homeruns increase. Is this true? Well look at the graph below.

Games

HR

Rate

Temp

Wind Speed

April

13

18

1.38

62

10

May

14

26

1.86

70

8

June

12

31

2.58

79

8

July

12

32

2.67

87

7

August

14

38

2.71

82

6

September

17

39

2.29

75

7

It would seem that as the summer temp go up the rate of home runs go up. What is interesting though is if you look at temperature and homeruns the trend isn't as nice. I mean overall the trend does increase as temperature rises but you don't really see a definite trend.



What about wind speed?


And finally wind direction?
Interesting it seems low wind speed good and wind out of right field.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Roxs Lineups

A couple of year's back I read an article in Hardball Times (?) that linked to another website that did an analysis of the possible runs scored based on OBP and SLG of your line up. The gist of the site was that conventional wisdom (i.e. today's managers except maybe LaRussa) doesn't always hold up. So in another look at projections I used this site, Baseball Musings Lineup Analysis, to check out the lineups.


My projected 2008 Lineup:
Taveras
Tulo
Helton
Holliday
Atkins
Hawpe
Nix
Torrealba
Pitcher (OBP last year was .199 and SLG of .166)


Using 2008 ZiPS the above lineup scores 4.929 runs per game (or 798 runs) while an optimized lineup would score 5.029 runs per game (or 815 runs). The optimized lineup would be:


Helton
Hawpe
Tulo
Holliday
Atkins
Nix
Torrealba
Pitcher
Taveras


Using 2008 PECOTA's the original lineup gives you 5.164 runs per game (or 837 runs) while an optimized lineup would give 5.259 runs per game (or 852 runs). The optimized line up would be:


Helton
Holliday
Tulo
Hawpe
Atkins
Torrealba
Taveras
Nix
Pitcher


Using 2008 Bill James' projections the original lineup gives 5.167 runs per game (or 837 runs) and an optimized lineup would give 5.273 runs per game (or 854 runs).


Using 2008 Chone's projections the original lineup gives 5.138 runs per game (or 832 runs) and an optimized lineup would give 5.228 runs per game (or 847 runs).


So there you have it. In my earlier projections based on runs scored, I found a spread of 823 - 829 runs so these numbers were a bit higher; 826 for established lineup versus 843 for an optimized lineup. It will be interesting to see how things shape up this year. Finally wouldn't it be great to see Helton batting first and Hurdle bust tradition? Maybe in Bizarro world!

Monday, March 10, 2008

Runners on Base?

Still playing around with the offensive numbers from 2007. An interesting question popped up in my head and that was what sort of percentage of runners that get on actually score. So once again went to baseball reference and dug though the season and looked plate appearances, at bats, runs scored, hits and walks (hit by pitch and reached on error), and left on base numbers. What I found was utterly fascinating to me and that is how the averages for each month of the season were so close. Over 24 - 29 game span each month, the plate appearances, at bats, hits and walks, and left on base were remarkably the same.

AVERAGE

G

PA

AB

R

H+BB

HBP+RE

LOB

April

26

40

34

4

13

1

8

May

28

38

34

4

12

1

7

June

27

40

36

6

14

1

8

July

24

39

34

6

13

1

7

August

29

41

36

6

14

1

8

Sept

29

41

36

6

14

1

8


I then plotted the running percentage of a few of these factors versus projected wins just to see which number means most to a teams wins. Again the number that wowed me was that Left on Base per Plate Appearance (blue line above) which indicates that on average the Roxs pretty much consistently left 8 runners on throughout the season. Almost no change.

Monday, March 3, 2008

Season Prediction

Back in January I did a little study on Win Shares, a summary of my conclusion was:

"...based on this little exercise it looks like LA has the early club house lead. They had a bunch of good acquisitions in Andrew Jones and possibly a full season of Schmidt. The unknown factor is the Japanese pitcher Kuroda. San Diego has a lot of offensive holes to fill with losing Cameron, Giles, and Bradley and trying to make this up with Iguchi, Hairston, and Edmonds (who is old!). Haren doesn't solve Arizona's offensive woes (although their young players should start to hit being a year older). What about our Roxs? Well with full seasons from Jimenez and possibly Morales along with a year older Hirsh the pitching should stay fine. The only real hole is 2B. Can Nix get 8 - 12 Win Shares this year (to make up for Matsui's 14)? I think the Roxs will be fine even with the rivals additions."

So that was last year, which really means nothing for the upcoming season! When I did fantasy baseball I used to dig up all the "projections" that people threw out there. Last year I used these projections to try and determine how many wins the Roxs would eke out (the impetus of this study was because Vegas threw out what I thought was an extremely low over/under for our Roxs last year at ~75 wins). Using ZiPS, Chone, Marcel, and the Baseball Forecaster, I determined the Roxs would win about 83 wins (too bad I didn't get to Vegas to bet last year).

So with my thoughts turning to Spring, Vegas usually releases their over/unders for the new season and with the usual no love, the Roxs were given an over/under of 83.5. Now you can't put too much weight in this number as Vegas sets it with the desire to get as many people to take the over as they do the under. It is somewhat an artificial number but does serve as a good starting point especially when you look at what some of division competition is...D-backs are at 87.5, Dodgers at 86.5, and the Padres at 84.5. Where is the respect for the NL Champions? Obviously Vegas is in reality while many of us Roxs fans are still hungover from their miraculous run last year.
The one number, above, that means the most to me is Dodgers at 86.5 (since my Win Shares study showed they had some decent talent returning talent and some good winter acquistions). And with these additions, I also forgot to mention during the Win Shares post that they have a new manager in town, Joe Torre. I believe this was their most important acquistion and will make a world of difference. I think the D-backs will continue to be in the mix due to their pitching but last year they were really a .500 team (allowed more runs then scored) who won a lot of close games. Unless they can score, their duo of Webb and Haren won't mean anything. And finally the one number that floors me is San Diego's. They lost a tremendous amount of scoring capability and didn't exactly add alot of young scoring talent or bring in some bigtime offensive guys. Also throw in the park they play in and I just don't see them winning 84 games.
So that brings us to the Roxs...what do the numbers say? This year I again looked at ZiPS, Chone, Marcel, and added James and PECOTA. Below is a summary of the data. To determine the offense, I took the standard position players with Nix at 2B and four bench players and for the pitchers I took 5 starters (Francis, Cook, Jimenez, Morales, and Hirsh) and threw in Wells, Buchholz, and Corpas. Since most of these projections don't take team at bats into context, I normalized their runs based on the average at bats and runs scored from 2002 - 2007. For pitching I did the same as relief pitchers are difficult to assign at the beginning of the year. Once this normalization was finished I used the Pythagorean expectation to determine the number of expected wins for each projection (used the power of 1.83 rather than 2 as this shows a better correlation).

So what does all this mean? Well a pretty good spread of wins from a low of 77 to high of 93. The average was 84 wins and doing a 95% confidence on the data (take this with a grain of salt since we only have 3 - 5 data points) and based on the projection data the Roxs have a 95% of winning between 82 and 87 games!

Obviously a lot of assumptions are in this calculation. In 2007 the Roxs scored 860 runs and yet none of the normalized projections reach this level for 2008. The big reason for this is the unknown 2B factor. Matsui scored 84 runs last year and Nix is only projected to be in the 50s. In addition with a stabilized line-up with Tulo's pop for an entire season, my hope is the Roxs can score more than 860 runs (the highest total ever is 2000 when the Roxs scored 968 runs!). Unfortunately if the offensive is a bit conservative then the pitching assumptions are probably a bit aggressive. Last year was the best pitching year in franchise history with only 758 runs given up. This was a testament to a good bullpen especially with losing 3/5ths of the pitching staff. If the pitchers can stay healthy then the skies the limit but can we really have as great of a bullpen this year?

So I predict an 85 win season with the Roxs finishing in second to the Dodgers. The D-backs will be neck and neck with the Roxs all year and will finish third with Padres and Giants finishing 4th and 5th in the division.