Happy Independence Day!

I didn’t get quite as much done this Fourth of July weekend as I had hoped. There were other household tasks – getting the front and back yards mowed, gutter guards installed, rotting fascia boards replaced. There were computer-related tasks – installing a new UPS (the old one had spaced out twice in the past three weeks) and putting in a new OS (upgrading Suse by .3). There was the day job, calling me in this morning for four hours to troubleshoot missing data in the blended TPW.

But I like what got out just the same. The main thing to notice is in the DTs, either the ones arranged by organization or the ones by league. Instead of a simple list of player names on each line, you will find a link that carries you to a page for every minor league player. Right now I only have them up for players active in 2011 – expanding those to other years is todo list item 5 on the whiteboard beside my desk.

On those pages you will find a full DT for every player – including years prior to 2011, so that you can see this season in context with his past performance. They are always arranged with a “real” section – those are real stats, untranslated. The next section is a regular DT, which is the level of play that can be reasonably expected by translating his current performance directly to the major leagues. And finally there is the peak DT section, which incorporates his age and assesses what kind of peak (“age 27” season, for all practical purposes) can be expected, given his performance in that season. Players whose peak doesn’t clear a .240 eqa (for a hitter) or get under 5.00 (for a pitcher) are unlikely to make the majors.

On those individual pages there a couple of other new features. There is a search box, which is working, although it searches my entire minor league database. Some of the names, many of them in fact, have not have player cards built for them yet. There are also two links for player split data, although I didn’t finish writing thse scripts this weekend as I’d planned. They should be up by next weekend., I hope. I already have the split data for all the players on the site, but arranged by teams. You can currently look up Bryce Harper in the Washington org page, and you can get all the different splits for the organization as a whole (with Harper included), but there’s no one-stop lookup for all of Harper’s split data. At least, not until I get those links active. The year-centric stats will arrange the splits like this

2009 All
Left
Right
2010 All
Left
Right
2011 All
Left
Right

The split-centric ones, by contrast, will arrange like this

All 2009
2010
2011
Left 2009
2010
2011
Right 2009
2010
2011

Depending on what I’m doing, these are the two ways I most frequently want these stats arranged, so I figured I’d script ’em up both ways and leave the option to the user.

Finally, I passed through a moderately-sized reset of the DTs, in a way that effectively increased the difficulty gap between the majors and minors (and, in the process, made minor league DTs look worse than I had ben ranking them). Check back in later this week, and I’ll explain what I changed – and why I thought it was necessary.

Clay

I’m Clay Davenport, one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus. I still have a (looser than before) affiliation with BP, so don’t expect to see me using this site to dish dirt or run anybody into the ground. I’m old enough and stubborn enough to have my own way of doing things, and some of those things are contrary to the way BP wants to do things, which is why I wound up out here.

The main products for me – judging by the way I find myself accessing the site when away from home – are the DTs by Organization pages. DT stands for Davenport Translations, and they are a system I’ve developed over 20 years to translate statistics from one league into another. Given a player’s known performance in one league, they estimate what that performance would be worth in another league. The two main uses I’ve made of that are translating stats from past major league history to different eras – what Babe Ruth, for instance, might hit if he were playing today.

The DT pages now are more than just DTs. They are a linked set of over 2000 pages based on four permutations in the menus at the top of each page. You can choose from each of 30 major league organizations, switch between hitter and pitcher stats, choose between three levels of translation (real untranslated stats, normal translations, and peak translations, which extrapolates a player’s peak performance from his current stats). The fourth menu consists of a variety of split choices, so you can use these pages (in REAL form) as a source of minor league splits. Or you can see that, while a player’s overall stats don’t translate to major league value, his performance against LH players might.

The DTs by league are just the same as the DTs by organization, but arranged by league. Both the league and org DTs will eventually be available for years prior to 2011, and will have player pages.

The EQA page gives you a current look at the Equivalent Average and related stats for every player in major league history, with breakdowns by team and position. Links through the EQA page connect you to a stats page for every player in major league history, just as I’ve had on BP for years. One difference is that I have broken the player pages into sub-pages, for hitting, pitching, fielding, and – at least for the last 30 years – the full minor league DT that goes with them. So you can see what kind of player Derek Jeter was expected to be from his minor league numbers.

As my title indicates, this a place for me to keep some statistics I happen to care about. These are statistics that I’ve run at Baseball Prospectus for many years, but BP has decided to discontinue them – or at least transform into something I no longer recognize.

Baseball Prospectus was originally founded on the premise that, since no one was publishing the baseball book we wanted to read, we would print one ourselves. In that same spirit, since BP is not publishing the stats I want to see, the way I want to see them, I’ll put them up myself.

This will be an extended work in progress.  There are any number of features to add, which are not yet there. Of most immediate interest, I suppose, would be:

EqA reports: EqA, EqR, VORP, WARP for all seasons from 1871-2011, updated daily (~noonish). Also the main access point to the player cards until I get the search php written.

Minor League DTs By League:The drop-down menus will allow you to change between hitters and pitchers, between real/translated/peak DTs, and between leagues, as well as offering a few splits on the data.

Minor League DTs By Organization;Same as above, but organized by major league team, with all of their minor league teams on the same page.

Adjusted Standings

Playoff odds, in regular, projection-based, and ELO flavors.

 
Clay Davenport