Fun With Sabermetrics - Day 2 - ERA+

Sup, boners. Let's get right into it because I'm about to go to Jamba Juice.

ERA+ or Adjusted ERA

Another pretty heavily-weighed stat, this time for pitchers, obvi. It's basically a pitcher's ERA adjusted for ballpark (whether the ballpark is a hitter's park or a pitcher's park) and for the average ERA for the league the pitcher's in. Essentially it takes pitchers who throw in pitcher's parks and pitchers who throw in hitter's parks and plops 'em smack on an even playing field. So let's say a pitcher has an ERA of 4.0 in a hitters park where the league avg. is 4.0. He'd have an ERA+ of 100. For ERA+, 100 is the league average. So you got yourself a pretty average pitcher.

To the formula. To find ERA+ you take the league ERA, multiply that by the home park factor, multiply that by 100, then divide by the pitcher's ERA.

Confusing right? If only there was a player we could use as an example. Oh I know. How 'bout newest Rangers pitcher and recipient of a brand new robot arm, Brandon Webb!

B-Webb had 2 absolutely beast years in his last 2 full seasons. Let's take the most recent, 2008. Webb had an ERA of 3.3 while going 22-7 on the year for the D-Backs. So. According to baseball-reference.com, the '08 ERA avg. for the NL was 4.29. Now Chase Field in AZ is a big time hitter's park. In fact in '08 the only park that batters hit better in was, hi-o, Rangers' Ballpark in Arlington, home of your 2010 American League Champion Texas Rangers. Chase had a park factor of 1.135 in 2008. So 4.29 x 1.135 x 100 is 487, divide that by his ERA of 3.30, and KERSPLAT. You have a beastly ERA+ of 147, meaning he was 47% better than the average NL pitcher in 2008.

Some other notable pitchers with awesome ERA+, that douchebag closer in New York who gets to wear number 42 even though it's retired across the league has the best ERA+ in a career at 202 but who cares because he's gonna die in a fiery inferno tonight. Pedro's mystical 2000 season carried an ERA+ of a ridiculous 291. And Tim Keefe, whose name I only mention because it rhymes with queef, set the alltime record in 1880 with an ERA+ of 294, but that was back before the invention of sabermetrics or television or paper or dinosaurs.

So. There.

-Me.

Fun With Sabermetrics - Day 1 - BABIP

Welcome to Fun With Sabermetrics because I'm bored and have had a baseball boner for so long I need to call that hotline that Cialis gives out at the end of their commercials. These posts will consist of me walking you amateurs through Sabermetrics. As you might not know because you're busy going to college and getting jobs while I'm busy looking at the 1987 Texas Rangers box scores, "Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity rather than industry activity such as attendance." I know, right? It's dumb. It's over-analysis. But it's kind of cool, and you heard it here first: it's going to get big. In the next decade you're going to start seeing a lot more of this, because it's actually pretty accurate shit.

So let's start out easy.

BABIP - Batting Average on Balls In Play

Pretty much the quintessential stat for every day hitters, it basically measures the amount of base hits a player has for every time they hit a playable ball. So no home runs, remember that. Many say it's a statistic of luck, but that's bullsh. A hit is a hit is a hit, and the ability to get good bat on the ball isn't luck. Formula is as follows:

So in the words of Double Rainbow Guy, "What does this mean?" Well shut up for a second and let me tell you. Using someone we all know and want to be inside of love.

Elvis' is pretty easy to calculate, because he doesn't strike out a lot and he totaled ZERO for both HRs and SFs in 2010.

So. For '10 his standard BA was .265. 156 hits, basic math tells us that's the numerator. 588 at-bats minus 96 Ks equals 492, your denumerator or whatever the hell it's called. 156 divided by 492, bam, you got a BABIP of .317 for Mr Andrus, meaning almost 32 percent of all balls put into the diamond by Elvis will fall for base hits. The over/under for the league is about .300, so Elvis is a bit above the average, most likely due to his speed and the ability to beat out BIP that the fatass Milwaukee Brewers first-basemens of the world wouldn't be able to.

So there you have it. BABIP. Go take on the world.

Excuse my mood.

I think the title alone explains it perfectly.

"I know you niggas aimin, i see you muggin hard, you can't deny me, they all salute the underdog."

Welcome Back to Me, The Better One.

I found it fitting to put the first song off of the best cd out this week as my comeback blog post. Sir Lucious Left Foot and The Son Of Chico Dusty cd review to come later.

Back from Hiatus/Current Song

Welcome back. To myself.

Today's Top Story

Current Song

C'mon, Man!

Not going to be near as long as yesterday's Sports Rant, but did you see that the Canadian Women's Hockey team had to apologize for drinking beer and champagne and smoking cigars after beating the U.S. 2-0 to win the gold yesterday? Yup, they had to apologize for celebrating after winning the fucking gold medal. I don't know who's more in the wrong, Team Canada for feeling an apology was necessary or the International Olympic Committee, who got all up in arms about it and said it wasn't appropriate and wasn't what they would've liked to see from Olympic athletes. How dare they. There is absolutely nothing wrong, ever, with girls getting drunk, especially when they're hot, as many of the girls on the team are. Though I realize most of them probably hate penis.


Can I start reporting about baseball yet?

-MS

The Last Straw.

There are many things in this world that anger me. But only sports gets me angry enough to blog. So prepare yourself for anger and rant.


The above game was played on April 1st, 2009. This video from some reporter dude in Washington was posted on April 24, 2007. Caron Butler has been chewing on straws during games since he was playing AAU ball in 1998, and that includes two years with the Heat, one with the Dirty Lakers, and five with the Wizards. There was a national story on TNT in 2008 about his habit, in which Barkley and friends had Butler close his eyes and identify which of the straws they gave him was from McDonalds (he correctly identified it before even having to chew on it). That's 8 years of well-publicized straw-chewing. But he wasn't playing for the Mavericks during that time.

With yesterday's big stories in the NFL and MLB being new blood testing for HGH or something, the NBA and David Stern had better things to do. As of around 5ish yesterday, Caron has been banned from chewing straws while playing. That's right. Perhaps the most harmless habit in the history of the NBA gets banned, because Butler is now playing for Stern's favorite owner, Mark Cuban.

It's being called a "safety issue." Didn't seem to be a safety issue the first eight years he did it, though. I guess they think that, hypothetically, the straw could poke someone in the eye. I promise you more people have been poked in the eye by fingers than by Butler's straws, so I expect fingers to be banned from NBA play soon.

But I digress. Seriously. This is ridiculous. Could Stern be a little more obvious with how much he has it out for the Mavs? It's already been claimed by Tim Donaghy that the 2006 Finals were fixed (but I didn't need Donaghy to convince me. Shoot another 20 free throws, D-Wade) all because the NBA and NBA referees don't like Cuban. I love Mark, I think he's up there with Troy Aikman and Nolan Ryan as some of the best things to ever happen to Dallas sports, but it's getting to the point where I don't know if the Mavs can win a championship under him. Certainly not because he's not a good enough owner; he's undisputedly one of the best in the league. And certainly not because the team isn't good enough; they were better than Miami in 2006, but it's hard to beat a team when their star player can trip on his own feet and be rewarded with free throws. But with all he's done (which, in reality, is telling the truth, albeit loudly), and all the bridges he's burned, plus with the Mavs' star being a 7-foot German white guy who can't dunk or handle the ball or yack his mouth with the likes of Kobe, LeBron, and Dwade (making Dirk less marketable), if they're able to get back to the Finals who's to say 2006 doesn't happen all over again. It's hard to win a series when you're battling a good team along with the refs.

I think it'd be awesome if every single one of the Mavs came out on the court chewing straws when they play the Hawks Friday, but that won't happen, because they're not angry bloggers. The story's so fresh that Cuban hasn't really been able to speak about it yet, but I can't wait until he gets the opportunity. F David Stern. Peace.

-MS

Mixtape of the Week

Here's this weeks mixtape....its raekwon so you know its legit....I'll write a review here by the end of the day.