Moneyball Report

Here's the first (of hopefully many) Moneyball Reports, on Moneyball Mondays. Here I'll be taking a weekly look at team leaders/losers in OBP, UZR, and FIP and seeing what changes take place week to week. Since this is the first one and it's rebooting my blog, I'll make it somewhat of a primer.

If nothing else, Moneyball told us the importance of OBP, at least compared to the previous standards in baseball like batting average and runs batted in. So, what teams are getting on base a lot and what teams aren't.

Team Leaders in OBP: Yankees (.359), Dodgers (.353), Angels (.350), Rays (.349), Red Sox/Indians (.345)

Bottom Feeders in OBP: Giants (.306), Padres (.307), Royals (.311), Mariners (.314), Rangers/Reds (.316)...just for show the A's have the 6th worst at (.319)

However, the true point of Moneyball wasn't that the A's valued OBP, it was that Billy Beane through statistics and analysis took advantage of underutilized assets in baseball, just one of those being OBP. When the book was made (and before that since Beane had been doing this for some time, and several others have too just Beane got most of the credit) not everyone realized the importance of OBP, and Beane was able to snag players like Scott Hatteberg for cheap. Nowadays, everyone (for the most part) realizes that OBP is a vital statistic, so it's not like the A's can have a low payroll and pay top dollar for OBP. They have to find other ways to evaluate players that teams haven't taken advantage of, and right now there is no better way to do that than defense. So let's take a look at which teams have the best/worst defense so far this year according to Ultimate Zone Rating.

Team Leaders in UZR: Giants (38.7), Padres (38.2), Rays (37.0), Mariners (35.9), Tigers (24.1)...just for show A's are 12th (7.4)

Bottom Feeders in UZR: Nationals (-30.9), Mets (-30.7), Royals (-27.8), Twins (-23.3), Red Sox (-21.0)

If you stopped right now and took a look at the standings you would see there are several teams with bad OBP that have winning records, and a chance at the playoffs. This isn't because OBP is a bad stat, it's that OBP isn't the only stat. There are many ways to win games, and defense is definitely one of them. The Giants for instance have the worst OBP in the majors, but are contending for the wild card largely because they also have the best defense. The Mariners also have among the worst OBP in the majors and have a winning record because of their stellar defense (and some luck but we'll get to that later).

When Voros McCracken discovered that "major-league pitchers don't appear to have the ability to prevent hits on balls in play" all hell seemingly broke loose in the world of sabermetrics, and defense independent pitching statistics were born. Sometimes that line drive by the batter goes for a double down the line, sometimes it's hit right at the 3b. Sometimes that popup is caught by the 2b, sometimes it falls right between in and the right fielder. This doesn't mean that the hits pitchers give up is irrelevant or anything like that, it just means that once the batter touches the ball (so long as it's not a hr) the pitcher has no control over where it goes. You can argue against this all you want, but even the best pitchers in the game have their BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) vary from year to year. Pedro Martinez is largely considered one of the best pitchers, if anyone could control their BABIP it would be him right? Than explain why in 1999 his BABIP was .343, and the next year it was .253? Or why in 2004 his BABIP was .303 leading to an ERA of 3.90, when the next year it was .257 leading to an ERA of 2.82? You can't other than saying not even Pedro can control his BABIP.

However, there are things that Pedro and every other pitcher do control, and those are their home runs allowed, walks, strikeouts, hit batters, and their fly ball/ground ball percentages. So using the things a pitcher can control, we can take out the fielding aspect of baseball and really hone in on what a pitcher is doing. There are many defense independent pitching statistics, DIPS, FIP, xFIP, LIPS, DICE, QERA, tRA, but for our sakes I'll use the simplest one FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) developed by Tom Tango.

Team FIP Leaders: Braves (3.63), Red Sox(3.77), Giants (3.80), Dodgers (3.86), Rockies (3.88)

The Mariners, Rangers, and Giants (among other teams) all have lower team ERAs than team FIPs, they also all have excellent defenses. The Nationals and Royals have lower FIPs than they do ERAs, they also have crappy defenses. Luck can play a part in this too, but when we are talking about teams with over 850 innings pitched, it's less of a factor than it is with one pitcher with 150 innings pitched. Teams have long known excellent defense helps the pitcher, but now with UZR and other tools, they are able to quantify defense. You would be surprised, but not every GM (most notably Royals GM Dayton Moore) buys into these defensive stats, and defensive independent pitching stats, so if there is ever a Moneyball stat that is being overlooked, you are looking at it right now.

Now we will talk about expected records. Bill James has long done his Pythagorean Expectation on what a teams record should be based off of their runs scored and runs allowed. Although a great bullpen will help, a large part of 1 run games can be associated with luck. Essentially, the larger difference between my runs scored minus runs allowed, the better record I can expect. If I win 20-1, 18-4, 7-0, and then lose 2-1, 3-2, 4-2 my record will be 3-3 even though I would have outscored my opponents by 36 runs. I'd have a winning % of .500, when I should have one of .927. So sometimes teams win a lot of 1 run and close games and have deceiving records because in some cases they have scored less runs than their opponent. Let's take a look at the Expected Records we should have in baeball right now.

Team Leaders in ExpWin%: Dodgers (.633), Rays/Red Sox (.585), Yankees (.571), Phillies (.570), Rockies (.560).

Most of those seem in line and they should, but it's not exact. Take a look at the Yankees, they are in first place in the AL East, above the Red Sox and Rays except according to this they should be in third. So, if nothing else changes don't be too shocked to find the Yankees slip a few games while the Red Sox and especially the Rays rise a few. The Houston Astros have made some noise recently rising to only 2 games behind the division lead, which makes us ask are they legit? If you look at their ExpWin% you'll see it is .479, making that an easy answer, no they are not legit. The Astros have given up more runs than they have scored, yet they are 50-48 and 2 games behind the Cubs for the division lead.

Moneyball Moves: The Mariners are now having their rumors heat up about trading Jarrod Washburn. That would be a good move for Saber-Friendly GM Jack Z. The Mariners have a winning record yet have been outscored this year, can you say lucky? They really shouldn't be contending in the first place, so to expect them to get better to reach the playoffs would be insane, trading their soon to be free agents like Washburn would be a good move, one would even say a Moneyball Move. I will get to more trade talk tomorrow during Trading Tuesday.

There you have it, our first Moneyball report. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or recommendations please comment on this post and I'll get to it. The next reports won't have the lengthy explanations, just the information with some other individual performances that are of note to highlight. Hope you all enjoyed this, because you will be seeing more of it in the future.