Hello and welcome to Intro to Sabermetrics 101, your biweekly introductory course to the world of sabermetric analysis. My name is Michael Jong, and I’ll be walking you through the wonders of the statistics of our great National Pasttime, baseball. Today’s topic is a light one; we won’t be going into any notes or doing any hardcore studying, but rather I’ll be discussing the syllabus (also tentatively known as the regular schedule), resources, and reading material for this site, as well as a little bit about myself and my background.

Introduction

It was clear I was destined to be analyzing baseball with the best of them when I was a Little Leaguer. In my first season in Little League, I was the starting right fielder for all ten games our team played (of course, I’m fairly certain we only had nine or ten players on our team). It was immediately obvious that I knew the value of a walk; I had a walk rate of 91% in 33 PA’s. I really was a Three True Outcomes kind of guy, as in the other three plate appearances I had, I struck out. Heck, I was a regular Jack Cust back then, even without the homers. All in all, my wOBA for that season was an astounding .654, though due to the lack of data on Little League games of the early 2000’s, I don’t know how well I did against the average.

Really, playing baseball was not for me, but I was always a fan of the numbers of the game. Back then, I was just like everyone else. I knew batting average, home runs, and RBIs. I knew that 100 RBIs was good, a .300 batting average was good, and over 20 home runs was all right. And for many years, since 1997 (the year my Florida Marlins won their first World Series) to about 2007, that was good enough for me.

Then somewhere along the way I started learning about slugging percentage and on-base percentage, and this began the slow descent into madness that has led me to quote things like wOBA. I realized that batting average isn’t the best indicator of offensive value, and that SLG and OBP were far better indicators of run scoring. Eventually, I put the two together and joined the OPS bandwagon. With OPS, I learned that the value of the walk and the extra base, in addition to the value of the single, were significant and important to run scoring. Then, sometime this year, I learned OPS was bad too, and that better statistics were available for measuring run scoring, statistics based on linear weights. And this is what led me, sometime four months ago, to wOBA/EqA and eventually trying to learn about sabermetrics.

Qualifications

I’ll make it clear right now: I have not made any grand statistical research on baseball ever. My “work,” if it can be called that, is not in the field of research. Don’t get me wrong; I love the research that’s being done, and I wish that I had the time to get such things done, but I have yet to find the time or topic on which to research. I am not Tom Tango, MGL, Dave Studeman, Mike Fast, Colin Wyers, or Sean Smith (more on those names later).

I’d liken my work to Dave Cameron and his stuff on the Seattle Mariners over at U.S.S. Mariner, though I’m not even close to as good as Dave. Similarly, the things you usually see on FanGraphs’ blogs is the kind of stuff I do. Call it “practical applications of sabermetric analysis on the game” rather than “research.” I can’t (or at least haven’t) built custom linear weights tables or anything like that, but I can tell you that Dan Uggla was bound for regression earlier this year (and he did regress back to a good hitter) and that Alfonso Soriano’s lost power, but has otherwise been the same this year.

At around June, I started writing a blog for my favorite team, the Florida Marlins, called Marlin Maniac. Over there is where I do all my Marlins analysis work. About two months in, I was also picked up to write current events articles for Beyond the Box Score, one of the premier saber-slanted blogs in the business. Up there are two examples of my work for both Marlin Maniac and BtB, so I won’t go too much more into it. You can check out the rest over there.

At around the same time as my BtB invite, I was also invited by Fan Huddle’s own executive editor Brad Stewart for the Fan Huddle project. And here I am, on board and ready to help others in their transition to a saber-slanted baseball worldview.

Syllabus

What should you be expecting from this site? I’ll be writing regular columns biweekly here, and you can also expect some random thoughts here and there during the week, more like quick blog posts rather than full-fledged articles.

Mondays: Player Profiles

Mondays will be reserved for a sabermetric player profile. This could be anyone that I find interesting or relevant to the current events of the baseball world. Since the postseason is coming up, expect a lot of players on playoff teams. In the offseason, you’re more likely to see free agents recently signed or still looking for a home, big name players in trades, and whoever else happens to be in the news. The style is similar to that of the Soriano piece linked above. Readers are free to email me or comment requesting player profiles, as I love to do these.

Fridays: General

On Fridays, I’ll be looking at a general topic in the saber-world. It could be a series introducing an important concept, a review or rant about a recent occurrence, my own small amounts of research (whenever I can get it in), or whatever floats my boat that week. I can’t guarantee that the article will be anything, other than that it will most certainly include some numbers. Again, readers are free and encouraged to email or comment requesting certain topics.

Other Days: Other Things

For other days, the posts will be short. Occasionally I’ll grab some links for you. Sometimes I’ll give you some quick analysis about something that happened recently that just had to be discussed. Other times it might even be about other sports (I’m a big fan of basketball and football research as well). Keep your eye out for these random posts, but pay the most attention for the Monday and Friday articles.

In addition to these articles, I will be assigning reading material to readers. Usually, the material will be timely (as in, from this recent week) and will pertain to baseball topics of my interest that have good analysis. I expect people to read these assigned readings, not because I’ll be testing you, but because it’s likely by some of the best minds in the field.

Resources and Reading Material

I would be remiss if I started off our class without the proper materials and resources you all need to succeed in climbing the sabermetric learning curve. Let’s start off with some sources of numbers.

Stats: FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, StatCorner

FanGraphs was the first site I was exposed to with regular, excellent sabermetric work. It was really my first exposure to the stuff, and I haven’t stopped using it since. It is also the premier source on the Internet for advanced stats; from FIP to tRA to wOBA to WAR, FanGraphs has it for you. FanGraphs also has live Win Expectancy and play-by-play coverage, complete with Leverage Indexes. Awesome.

Baseball-Reference, or B-R for short, is the best place for historical numbers in various splits and for historical league values. Even though FanGraphs and StatCorner can give you wOBA and tRA for overall values, when you need to find the average runs scored outside of Interleague Play for the American League between 2000 and 2004, there’s no reason to go anywhere else but B-R.

StatCorner was initially the only place you could find wOBA (and it’s still the only place you can get wOBA including ROE numbers). It uses data from Retrosheet, whereas FanGraphs uses data from STATS inc. One of the original founders of StatCorner, Graham MacAree, is also the creator of tRA.

Historical WAR: Rally’s Historical WAR database

This is the place to go if you want WAR data from before 2002. Sean “Rally” Smith runs Baseball Projection, a site which provides a lot of different information, including the amazing historical WAR database. If you’re not yet “into” WAR, you will be quite soon, and this is an excellent resource to use to reference players from the past.

Pitch f/x: Brooks Baseball

Dan Brooks over at Brooks Baseball has set up an amazing tool in his Pitch f/x tool, which allows you to download any game’s set of pitching data for any pitcher. I use it often for my analysis, and if you’re ever interested in how a pitcher did during a game, you should check it out.

Research: The Book, The Hardball Times

Top of the line research by some of the best names in the industry is done on these two sites. Tom Tango has a veritable cornucopia of research in his articles on The Book site, to go along with daily commentary from him and UZR creator Mitchel Lichtman (MGL) on the site’s blog. The Hardball Times (THT) includes up-to-date research from some of the best people in the game. There’s almost too many people to name, I’ll let you click on the link and find who you like. Whatever field you’re interested in, chances are someone covers it over at THT. You can also find great stuff on FanGraphs and Baseball Analysts.

General: Beyond the Box Score

In addition to FanGraphs, BtB offers some excellent stuff in a wide variety of fields, from current events to original research. It might be a homer argument, as I write for them as well, but it’s a great source for original articles.

That’s it for class today. In our next installment, I’ll define some critical terms and point out the research articles behind them, so we can get ready to start the actual material.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Course Materials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.