On June 14th, the standings in the NL LABR looked like this:

1 Baseball HQ (Doug Dennis)                   97.5
2 Baseball Info Solutions (Steve Moyer)   95.5
3 Rotoworld (Wolf/ Colton)                        81.0
4 Hardball Times (Derek Carty)                80.5
5 ESPN.com (Tristan H. Cockcroft)          75.5
6 RotoWire (Dalton Del Don)                    74.5
7 ESPN (Eric Karabell)                              67.0
8 Sandlot Shrink (Bob Radomski)              64.5
9 Razzball (Rudy Gamble)                         62.5
10 NFBC (Ambrosius/ Childs)                   58.5
11 Yahoo (Brandon Funston)                     56.0
12 USA TODAY (Steve Gardner)            49.0
13 Baseball Prospectus (Clay Davenport) 48.0

This was a deeply embarrassing place to be, not the least because I was the league’s defending champion. I had also been very high on my team coming out of the draft, projecting myself as having a first-place team. Now it can certainly be argued that many players weren’t as good as I thought they were, but I truly believe that the main reason for this standing was injuries. The injury bug hit my team early and often; at one point in late April, over more than $120 of my $260 worth of players was off of major league rosters, either on the DL or in the minors – a list that went something like Ryan Zimmerman, Zach Greinke, Angel Pagan, Ubaldo Jimenez, Andrew Cashner, Barry Zito, Roger Bernadina, Jeff Keppinger, Ross Ohlendorf, and probably some others I’ve (no doubt chosen to) forget about.

Most of those players are back, and while they’ve been slow to regain their full form the change in my fortunes over the last six weeks has been most gratifying:

1 Baseball HQ (Doug Dennis)                     102.0
2 Baseball Info Solutions (Steve Moyer)      86.0
3 Rotoworld (Wolf/ Colton)                           78.0
4 Hardball Times (Derek Carty)                   77.0
5 Baseball Prospectus (Clay Davenport)  70.5
6 ESPN.com (Tristan H. Cockcroft)             67.5
7 Sandlot Shrink (Bob Radomski)                 66.0
8 ESPN (Eric Karabell)                                 65.5
9 NFBC (Ambrosius/ Childs)                        64.5
10 Razzball (Rudy Gamble)                          61.0
11 RotoWire (Dalton Del Don)                      60.0
12 USA TODAY (Steve Gardner)                58.5
13 Yahoo (Brandon Funston)                         53.5

I could conceivably make up another 10 points or so, giving me a realistic shot at third place, which would be a very satisfying performance – a very respectable title defense. I could, just as easily or even easier, find myself working back down through the pack. Being able to turn this one around elevates what was already a strong fantasy year for me:

LABR, currently 5th/13

MABL (work league, both leagues, fixed price menu of players) – currently 1st (of 12)

Groundhog League (NL E and C only, lots of odd rules) – currently 1st (of 9)

Murder City (AL) – currently 3rd/12; not likely to catch both teams ahead of me, but a pretty good lead on the 4th place team.

Murder City Lite (NL) – currently 2nd/14, good chance of winning it, as the lead has bounced back and forth

The best case scenario from here looks like 3 wins, a 2nd, and a 3rd, which would be easily my best overall year for drafting. The last three mentioned leagues are money leagues, so there’s a good chance that October will show a nice profit. You could say that I am very, very pleased with how my projection routines ran this year.

So the Mets have traded off Carlos Beltran, and their reward is a 21-year-old pitcher in high-A by the name of Zach Wheeler.

Wheeler comes from the Giants, and is very highly rated as a prospect…at least by the scouts. I’m here to judge him solely by the numbers. And I will say, in preface, that numbers are somewhat more likely to lie with a minor league pitcher than they are with a hitter. A hitter, minor league or otherwise, cannot dictate the action; he has to take whatever is thrown to him, and if he can’t hit a slider he can expect a steady diet of them, and the farther up the ladder he goes the truer that gets. A pitcher, by contrast, does have control of what he’s doing; he can, and does, work on secondary pitches, throwing pitches in minor league situations that he would never consider in the majors. This can have an extremely distorting effect.

The DTs don’t particularly like him. His strikeout rate is good, but hardly great; while he has struck out an impressive-looking 10 batters per 9 innings in San Jose, the league as a whole whiffs 8.33 times. His walk rate, 4.8 per 9, is pretty bad, almost disqualifying as a prospect, yet represents an improvement over the prior season. One thing that I think goes in his favor is that he has a huge platoon split; he gets absolutely clobbered by lefties, but has been right dominant against the other side. At a minimum, it provides a major league role that he could fill, even if he never does learn how to get the sinister ones out.

One type of translation that I produce, which I don’t have posted anywhere on-site, is what I call a “no-dif” translation. A nodif translation only tries to adjust for the offensive playing environment – the league offense and the home park, but not the difficulty level. That means, in nodif, that a perfectly league average pitcher will always translate to a 4.50 ERA, and 9.0 hits per 9 innings, 1 home run, 3 walks, and 6 strikeouts – in the AL, the NL, the Pioneer, Japan, in Denver or San Diego. The usual use is for making comparisons between leagues to find out just what the difference between AAA and the majors is, but I’ll use it here to look for similar pitchers.

My database on players goes back to 1978. When I look for 21-year-olds pitching in high-A, I get 2649 players. I’ll mandate 75 innings (Wheeler has 91) – that cuts it to 991. Wheeler’s a starter, so let’s put in a 12 start minimum, and that gets us to 835. Wheeler’s no-dif K rate comes out to 7.6 per 9 innings; we’ll select anyone between 7.1 and 8.1, and that leaves us with 113. Wheeler’s adjusted walk rate is 4.1. We’ll look at anyone with an adjusted walk rate of 3.5 or worse, and find that we have 40 pitchers left. Specify right-handed, and you’re down to 27.

Of those 27 pitchers, 16 never pitched in the majors. Four of them are currently active in the minors – Cody Scarpetta, Steven Johnson, Bruce Pugh, and Clint Everts – and could conceivably add to the list.

Of the 11 who reached the majors, five had minimal time. Chris Bushing pitched four innings over six games, Chuck Malone had seven innings, Steve Watkins and Kerry Woodson (not Wood) had 14 apiece, and Marc Kroon pulls in with 27. Woodson is the only one of the bunch who pitched well enough that you wonder why he didn’t get more of a chance. The five of them, combined, pitched in 58 games, starting just 1, and earned a total of -0.8 WARP3.

The list includes Erik Hiljus, who logged 124 career innings and a 0.3 WARP. Next up is Billy Buckner, with 138 innings and a -0.8 WARP. And there’s Wayne Gomes, who relieved 321 times in the majors, to whom I give a -2.3 career WARP3.

Eight of the 11 major leaguers, then combine for -3.6 WARP spread over 449 games and 696 innings. That leaves three pitchers we’ll call success stories.

Success #3 may be a highly premature call, since he’s only pitched 23 innings in the majors. But with a positive 1.3 WARP3, he’s already in third place on this list. Javy Guerra stuck his foot in the Dodger’s revolving door at closer and, for the moment, has brought it to a stop.

Success #2 is Roger Pavlik. Pavlik only pitched three full seasons in the majors, since he had enough injuries to earn loyal customer discounts with his local orthopedic surgeon. He did have two season with WARP above 4.0, and went 15-8 one year despite an ERA of 5.19 ( a mark which was slightly better than league average, as attested by the 4.34 normalized run average (NRA)). He finished his career with 13.6 WARP3.

Success #1 is Ubaldo Jimenez., which means there is one legitimate star player that Met fans can point to when they talk about Zach Wheeler’s potential.

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