We have moved into the month February, the Super Bowl is over and like a large number people I have switched my main attention over to baseball. But as Spring Training hasn’t even started yet so my attention is more
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Category: Analytics
The Shift – What Is Causing The LHH v RHH Difference
This previous analysis I have done (here & here), I have shown that shift is working against LHH but not against RHH. Also, I have shown that what is going on with the shift, for both RHH and LHH, is
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Trading Away Your Best
The ‘Hot Stove’ that is free agency has been rather cold this year, with neither of the top 2 players (Harper & Machado) having signed at the time of writing. But there have been numerous trades and plenty of trade
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How well is your team using the shift?
In a previous article, where I looked at the impact of the shift in 2018, there was some evidence to suggest that shifting was working against left handers and not against right handers. But there are additional variables which we
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All home runs are equal, but some are more equal than others.
When looking at a baseball players stats, you will see a home runs column. Be that for batters or pitcher. When you see those columns, those homers are treated as equals. Even for the more advance stats like FIP, wOBA
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No shift! What if defensive alignments are making hitters better?
The infield shift is a much-maligned defensive strategy, hounded as one of the worst analytics-based changes to baseball. Multiple times each season there will be some conversation about banning the shift and each time pros, ex-players/managers, commentators and analysts will
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Introducing the replacement level WAR team
Nowadays, with the statistical generation and the people that Jayson Werth likes to call “nerds” taking over the game, we have a whole raft of numbers at our disposal. But one always seems to take the biscuit and is used
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How to measure a pitchers overall performance?
The question of how good someone is at a task extends beyond baseball. In professional sports where there are now very large sums of money involved in player development and contracts, it has become a question people want to be
Read moreThe Compassionate Umpire or The Cold Automated Zone
At the half way point and at end of the season Jeff Sullivan from FanGraphs does pieces on the worst call ball and strike of the season so far. These are usually quite bizarre calls that have some unusual circumstances
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Analytics and its effects on the MLB – The Stolen Base
This is the second piece in a series on the effects of analytics on baseball, the first on the bunt can be found here. This time I will be looking at the decline of the stolen base, the involvement of
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