Petition

[olehippi]

WOW! All this over a controversial failed bunt attempt.....

Wonder how it would have played out if Perlozzo hadn't tinkered with the lineup last night by batting Markakis 3rd.....or was that just him making an innovative decision that went against "the book.?...

[bryanman8]

I heart I heart Miggy. That was brilliant and I couldn't have even reiterated my own opinion any better myself. :-) Well done.

I would just like to say again that...I apologize for my temper on this site. I'm a little too much like Billy Beane here...I start chair-throwing and such. It's quite funny, because in real life, I'm the most polite of all of of my friends, I never curse, and I have the complete ability to converse about baseball with people who know absolutely nothing (like TyCobb) and still keep it very respectful and you would hardly even be able to pick up that I'm a strong supporter of the new age and radical ideas. When I get on the internet though, it's a whole different ballgame. Sometimes, I get a bit too riled up. I fully believe in everything I said, but was tired of making like half of the posts in this thread and being the only one on my side. I appreciate you coming to my side and hope 1970 agrees as well. You guys are both invited to front-office positions when I'm GM. ;-) lol.

[TyCobb]

I have a bit of a background in Mathematics and Statistics as well (definitely more business related than baseball related), and one of the first things I learned when I got my Six Sigma black belt (Nerdy business statistics accreditation) was that the numbers don't lie, that's what the statisticians are for. Using any statistic as a predictor is valid as long as you understand the inherent flaws in predictive statistics. That is why mutual funds are obligated to say that "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

Oh I completely agree. The value system for the variables in the formula I don't like that much. In baseball I am 99.99% sure that someday some genius is going to come up with a Stat that really does show what will happen next season. Right now I don't think there is a stat that comes close enough to use it. I don't consider DIPS a good stat. I am old school, and I do believe that wins are important. I know most of you guys do believe that Wins- and Losses mean nothing, but to me they do me something. I believe pitchers pitch differently with a lead. If you are winning you are willing to give up runs. You don't do it on purpose but you just pound the strike zone. The pitcher mind set is not to go out there a put up the best stats. It is to win the game.

[OmahaDaveRudaba]

WOW! All this over a controversial failed bunt attempt.....

No kidding, I guess I was wrong when I said 'end of discussion' back on pg 5....soooo did we decide if we fire him yet:rolleyes:

[TyCobb]

Hey bryanman can you please tell me how DIPS indicate what a pitcher will do next season?

[bgfield]

Would you consider it disloyalty to bench a player with a .225 avg? Would the player feel betrayed? No, because that statistic is accepted as truth. Most people thought it was appropriate to send Ensberg to the minors, despite a .850+ OPS, because dumber old school heads prevailed. Benching someone because of uncommon statistics would not be well received, but it would be if those statistics became more common. That's what Bryan' fighting for, shifting importance onto better statistics.

I'm gonna disagree with you here. If teams of yesteryear ignored OPS, that's foolish. OPS is without question a very good representation of a players offensive performance of a year. What bryan is talking about is a stat that helps to predict future performance of a pitcher.

Everyone in baseball could have known that Chen would fall back to earth this year. That doesn't mean he should have been let go. Whether by luck, chance or divine intervention, Chen pitched well last year. He kept his team in ballgames more often than not. To totally discredit that and tell him "You got lucky last year. See ya" is to turn your back on a player and sends a terrible message to the clubhouse.

[bryanman8]

Hey bryanman can you please tell me how DIPS indicate what a pitcher will do next season?

It doesn't guarantee anything (I'm required by law to say that), but it's pretty much your best bet.

Here's something I wrote a while back to DIPS newcomers:

Go to ESPN's pitching stats for last year for the MLB, qualified only. Sabermetric. Sort by DIPS%. The guys with the high DIPS% got immensely lucky last year. They had, for the most part, very good ERA's but mediocre DIPS. If you check there ERA's this year, I believe every single one of the top 10 and many more have an ERA far closer to their DIPS than their ERA. Most of them completely fell off the face of the earth.

On the other end, the low DIPS% people, or the ones who got unlucky, are often enjoying great success this year, closer to their DIPS of last year, age permiting.

A simple guide as well:

DIPS

* There are several possible outcomes for any pitched ball.

o Strikeout

o Walk/Hit Batsman

o Ball put into play resulting in Home Run

o Ball put into play resulting in an out

o Ball put into play resulting in a single, double or triple

* The pitcher has direct control over the first three, and there is a strong correlation between the players who lead these statistics from year to year. Nolan Ryan, Greg Maddux, Kerry Wood, Billy Wagner

* The last two are affected by the defense and can be summarized by Batting Average on Balls in Play (BAbip).

* Voros McCracken found that BAbip is only weakly tied to the pitcher, and there is very little consistency in who leads this statistic from year to year. It is primarily the result of defense and luck.

* You can compute a defense-independent ERA (dERA) based on the first three factors and this is a better predictor of next year's ERA than the current year's ERA is.

Source: http://www.sju.edu/~sforman/research/talks/baseball/node22.html

[TyCobb]

Well you said it would better indicate what a pitcher's ERA would be the following season. DIPS has nothing to do with anything like that.

[Frobby]

The fact that DIPS is a better predicter of future ERA than real ERA is, doesn't mean that it is a good predicter of future ERA. It's been a long time since I took stats in college, but you'd need to knw the standard deviation and various other things to know how "reliable" a predicter it is. My offhand guess is it is not very reliable at all.

[TyCobb]

The fact that DIPS is a better predicter of future ERA than real ERA is, doesn't mean that it is a good predicter of future ERA. It's been a long time since I took stats in college, but you'd need to knw the standard deviation and various other things to know how "reliable" a predicter it is. My offhand guess is it is not very reliable at all.

The fact of the matter is DIPS doesn't predict anything for the future. So if you look at ERA to see what a pitcher will do next season or if you look at DIPS to see what a pitcher's ERA is going to be the next season you will find out that they both have equal value(which is none).

[TyCobb]

Well thats pretty good at 65% of the time. LOL on the cherry picking comment. What I meant by the DIPS at year 1 and ERA at year 2 were so far off for some of the pitchers I looked at that I would be able to be within the 1-1.5 difference it was in.

[Mashed Potatoes]

I'm gonna disagree with you here. If teams of yesteryear ignored OPS, that's foolish. OPS is without question a very good representation of a players offensive performance of a year. What bryan is talking about is a stat that helps to predict future performance of a pitcher.

First off I started extrapolating beyond what Bryan was saying. I got all philosophical and took it to the next level. Main point being that we're waging a war on tradition, and DIPS is one of many statistics that require more focus. I could be wrong but DIPS measures the past as well as the present. Am I crazy? They're used as a predictive device because they more accurately describe a pitchers past than ERA.

Everyone in baseball could have known that Chen would fall back to earth this year. That doesn't mean he should have been let go. Whether by luck, chance or divine intervention, Chen pitched well last year. He kept his team in ballgames more often than not. To totally discredit that and tell him "You got lucky last year. See ya" is to turn your back on a player and sends a terrible message to the clubhouse.

If Bryan was GM I'll bet we would've traded him for whatever we could get. His [value was at an all time perceived high.

To the bolded part, again, you're assuming the validity of ERA. By other objective standards Chen did not have a good season last year. The clubhouse would accept a new methodology if it led to more wins.

[bryanman8]

I'd like to chime in if I may.

Reference DIPS. I had the same question on its effectiveness. Just so happens I had (key word being had) a spreadsheet with the numbers of every pitcher who faced at least 200 batters (or was it 100?) a season between 2002 and 2005. So I did things the old fashioned way (while I may be good with baseball stats, I am far from a statistician). I compared every pitcher's Year 1 ERA and DIPS ERA to his Year 2 ERA and DIPS ERA. This part is purely from memory:

For those 4 seasons, DIPS correctly predicted which direction the pitcher's ERA would move the following season somewhere between 65 and 70% of the time. As I recall, it is much better at predicting an increased ERA than it is at predicting a decreased ERA. While I was at it, I did the same thing with FIP ERA, x-FIP, and a theoretical stat I was trying to develop. I believe the order in terms of being correct was x-FIP, DIPS, FIP, mine. I have since improved my system. I just did the same test for a group of 30 pitchers from 2002 to the present. My new formual was right 65.9% of the time (I think). I'll correct this later when I'm on my laptop - I'll also let everyone now how the other stats performed in this test.

Someone posted about how X-number of pitchers in the top 20 in DIPS ERA saw an increase in ERA this year. The question is how many of those pitchers had a higher Year 1 DIPS ERA than ERA?

Someone else said he could predict a pitcher's future ERA better with ERA than someone else can with DIPS ERA. Unless you are cherry picking which ERAs you're looking at - I find that very hard to believe.

What was the percentage of ERA being correct?

[Flosman]

I am not by any means on Bryan's side on this, we have a few long standing differences of opinion. But Dips and dips% can be used to forcast future trends. This is where Bryan loses me he fails to consider like ty and frobby point out that it actually does not predict future ERA. Fact ERA measures how many runs a pitcher gives up during a mythical 9 inning game. Fact Dips attempts to measure how many runs the player should have given up all things being equal. Fact how many runs a pitcher gives up determines success or failure. How many runs he should have given up does not. How ever when evaluating pitchers it is useful to determine weather he had results better than he should have or worse than he should have or about what should be expected. Chens Dips% indicated he was not as good has his results last year. Does that mean he won't repeat his performance? No it does not. Does it mean that it is likely that any pitcher will regress toward his Dips? Well it means if he pitches the same has he did the year before he likely will but he might just do the same thing again. Now I have not dug into the Dips outliners but I think I am going to try to do that tonight and get a fell for how good or bad the corrolation is.

I think the O's where hugely unlucky this year in that Roddy and chen did not make it six more months with the smoke and mirrors that they have thier whole career. Because it is pretty obvious that this FO has a plan and part of that plan was to get a rotation centered on the "big 4". Chen and Roddy where pieces to get there and the FO i believed hoped to turn both of them into future everyday players or solid bull pen arms during this season, they stunk and the plan is two players short now. They are hanging on to them to attempt to get some real value for them, I think if the pieces fall together this offseason and they are truly on a competitive talent level you will see these types of players go, the FO has proven they have a eye for impact talent they want better value than they give in this building faze and that is the proper view. When they have a contender then it is time to pay what is neccessary to get the ring, not now.

[TyCobb]

I personally have no problem bunting with 1 one and no one out if we didn't have the top of the order up. I coudl be wrong but wasn't it a lefty out there to face Markakis? Maybe it was somebody Markakis never saw. Maybe the pitcher shut downs lefty so Sammy thought he would have a better chance at getting a run by bunting Markakis. Markakis does hit a lot of hard balls to 1st-2nd base area where double play is possible. I didn';t like the call but if I had all the infor Sammy had at the time I could think differently.