Monday, February 22, 2010

Rox Talk - Runs Score Part II

Two weeks ago I showed that OBP and runs score seemed to have the best correlation. In addition it seemed that preventing runs might be more important (?, debatable). Well what about looking at just the playoff teams. Taking the 80 playoff team's season totals and graphing them gives the graph below.
Data would suggest that to make the playoffs an average of 94 wins will get you there with a standard deviation of 5. Playoff teams score about 823 (SD 70) runs to 709 (SD 59) runs allowed with a ratio of runs score to runs allowed of 1.16. While the graph seems to me that the runs allow is a tighter data set the hi/lo for runs allowed is 565 - 839 (274 run spread) and the hi/lo for runs score is 839 - 565 (294 run spread).

Either way you look at it you have to score to win eventually!

Monday, February 15, 2010

Rox Talk - Links

Just a few links...gearing up for Thursday when the 2010 campaign formally begins with Pitchers and Catchers reporting...Yeah!

The Baseball Oracle speaks...
Always nice to get some love from Gammons. Now if only the Rox could live up to the hype for once...

OK so we kept Hawpe for insurance reasons...but wouldn't our outfield look pretty grand with Smith, CarGo, and Fowler patrolling?

This one goes back into the memory banks but to refresh a bit it was a 7 - 6 victory over the Braves at Coors with the Rox using 10 pitchers in 12 innings. Mayne faced a couple of Hall of Famers in Glavine (well as a PH), Weiss (an old Rox), Furcal, A. Jones, and got C. Jones to ground out to end the inning!

The 39th Batter? It would seem that if a team pitchers can face less than 38 batters they have a 70% chance of winning...The Rox pitched to more than 38 batters 66 times in 2009. They were 27 - 39 so for 38 or less they were 65 - 31 (68%)...there you have it

Monday, February 8, 2010

Rox Talk - Runs Score Part I

Few years back I was wondering with all of these new stats whether one, specifically On Base Percentage, was worthy of runs score. I mean baseball is about scoring runs. If a master stat doesn't relate to runs score what does it really mean? So I started easily and plotted our Rox runs scored versus batting average, on base percentage (OBP), and on base plus slugging (OPS).


Guess you'd figure that on base plus slugging would correlate the best but OBP works pretty good too. Since OPS seemed to correlate the best with scoring runs, what about the rest of the league (see below)? Well there you have it...on the league level it seems that OPS is the big winner. Funny thing to me is the data below it makes the OBP seems a whole lot more correlated than OPS...hmmmm the miracles of excel!

OK so OPS correlates to runs scored. Well another thing that makes me wonder. Runs scored versus runs allowed...which one matters more? I have always been fascinated by the simple concept behind the Pythagorean run theory (read about it here). Thus if you plot runs scored divided by runs allow against wins you get the graph below.

The graph shows data from 2000 - 2009 seasons. Again this is probably an obvious point but when you score more runs than your opponent you tend to win more games ;-). OK so back to my second thought, is there any way to determine which is more important; a runs scored or a run prevented? Think about it...if a team wins 1 - 0 what is more important the one run scored or the nine innings of preventing a run? I have no idea just something to ponder but I went ahead and tried in my own way to see what plotting the data might suggest. Based on ten years of data the average runs scored was 771 runs. I then removed this number of runs from every team's total and then plotted this against number of wins. I also did this for runs allowed. The two graphs produced looked like this:


Pretty much two scatter shotgun pattern of data points. Both suggest a week correlation (0 being no correlation and 1 showing a correlation). The runs scored had a 0.35 and the runs against 0.45. On this basis could you suggest that the higher correlation in runs against might suggest wins are more depended on allowing your opponent less runs? I am not a stat guy, don't pretend to be, and probably the power of excel makes real stat guys cringe when people like me play with numbers looking for patterns that truly don't exist but either way to me it is fun...

Monday, February 1, 2010

Rox Talk - Links

Odds and ends...

Prediction time...what are the early thoughts? This one says 86 wins finishing behind the Dodgers and one game behind the Braves for the Wild Card. And this one gives us 86 again but finishing behind the Diamondbacks and winning the Wild Card (funny thing about this one was that when I viewed it a week ago the Rox were at 80 wins(?)...does Mora mean that much?). With PECOTA they are projecting 768 runs scored and 717 runs against. The previous projects 831 and 785. This one seems a bit more realistic.

So what was the last decade like for the Rox? Neil Paine published this post on baseball-reference. Using a statistical method called maximum likelihood estimation he created team rankings according to records and strength of schedule. Of the 30 teams the Rox placed 22nd. They had some pretty lean years earlier in the decade...

Ever bet on baseball? I did once on a whim years ago. I took the Rox over the Giants in San Francisco...I won

Rob Neyer jokingly refers to his Royals as returning to national prominence due to them getting a date ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball next year. The bigger question to me is when was the last time the Rox were the Sunday Night game of the week? I have no idea? You would have thought that with them going to the World Series in 2007 they would have gotten a nod in 2008 but I don't think so....