Welcome to 2020

Welcome to anyone who might be checking in on me for the first time. Or for the first time in a long time. Either way is good for me.

As you can plainly see, I don’t write that often. At heart, I am a number-cruncher, not a wordsmith, and this site is about the numbers that are behind the tabs, not the words I use to highlight or stretch those numbers. And that in turn is because I am not thinking of this as a public site; it is really a vessel for me to have a lot of this work available, to me,  when I am not sitting at my own desk.

So a quick guide to whats on here…

The EQA Report tab is for the major leagues, only. I have tables for all major league seasons, back to 1871, which update every day in season. The centerpiece of these tables is a statistic I called Equivalent Average, which measures a players total offensive value and scales it to the historical range of batting average. Not because batting average is superior in any way – it certainly is not – but because baseball fans, at least of my generation, have an immediate grasp of the scale.

Next up is the Playoff Chances tab. This is the output of a million-run Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season – at this point, the entire season.  My version has a wider spread than similar charts run by other sites; I believe they are too settled on their valuation of (say, the Yankees) as a “.600 team”.  I use some tricks to build a distribution of values for the Yankees. In most runs, they are a .600. But in some runs they’re a .650 team; in others, and more, because it is easier for things to go wrong than right, they only get treated as  a .550 team. That’s how the chances for even the Orioles, while miniscule, are not zero.

Then is DTs By League. These are statistics for minor league players, organized by league. There are three flavors to these pages. The first flavor is the real stats  – completely unadjusted. The second flavor is the DT – the Davenport Translation, originally developed in the late 80s – which estimates what that the real statistical line is worth, right now, in major league terms. The third flavor – peak DT – builds on the second flavor but adds “normal” improvement with age. For the US minor leagues, I have these stats going back to 1979. Triple-A leagues go back to 1946. Japanese leagues go into the 1930s. Other foreign, winter, and independent leagues are randomly available.

DTS by Organization are probably the pages I myself look at most often during the season. It is only going to have players for the current season, arranged by major league team, with all of their minor league affiliates listed with them.

The Projected Standings is where projected statistics, for team and players, resides. The projections have two flavors to them. One is the straight out of the computer numbers; the other is the result of loading those numbers into a very large spreadsheet, manually assigning playing time to everyone, and then rebalancing the numbers so that the hitting and pitching totals are consistent. Those manual adjustments are a real chore, and difficult for me to maintain through the season.

The last tab is the Spring Stats, which is going to start populating Any Day Now. While they are generally of limited predictive value, they certainly do affect who actually makes it out of spring training. There is also a second tab in there, for Current Team DTs, which has three entries per team – all of the team’s hitters (“.2020dt”), all of their pitchers (“.2020pdt”), and a depth chart (“.2020orgdt”) culled from the computer-only projections.