Haw Haw, Baseball Prospectus!

for this to turn into some flame war between you and B-Pro. What can they possibly reply with? That they were just bad, or more like, that the Halo’s were just lucky, again?

It’s been said before and I’ll say it again; since the start of the 2004 season the Angels have played 971 regular season games (today’s game not included). During that 971 game span the Angels have a record of 566-405. That’s a .583 winning percentage.

I appreciate that you took the time writing this post but regret that you wasted money on the BPro guide.

you are the man. This was a very well written post. Another great post.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

was i the only one the saw the humble pie picture on the right when reading this post?

that our history has become revisionist as we’ve performed so well under the adversity experienced from last October to this one.

That said, I saw you qualified your post at the end and was satisfied with the acknowledged error margin inherent in predictions. However, it is simply inexcusable the language portrayed against the team. I would’ve expected a less hate-filled post from a die-hard Boston fan literally mouthing his team to the Fall Classic.

But I digress; I personally picked the Angels to win 85 wins and finish second to the Rangers with 92, so I can’t rip on this fella too much. We’ll just have to chalk it up to some key players stepping up when everything else was down and how resilient the team has been in the face of all adversity.

Now pardon me while I run out to go brag about our 4-4 playoff series record.

this thread gives me many of them. someday i hope that being an Angels fan will mean we get our respect before we take the field, but until then, we’ll earn it. I cannot WAIT for the ALDS; last year still haunts my dreams.

On the 1-run games point, you are correct that the Angels did worse in those games than multiple-run games. This is missing the point, however. The Angels did better than all but three other teams in 1-run games. The fact that the 2008 Angels had so many 1-run games does not reflect well on them – it means either their offense wasn’t scoring many more runs than opponents and that the pitching / defense was allowing more runs and more close games. I’d rather have my team consistently win by 3+ runs than by 1, and if they played so many close games, I’d worry about them regressing to the mean.

On a broader note, the Angels’ performance this year in no way rebuts BP’s conclusions about the 2008 squad. The Angels have a substantially better team this year than they did last, which all the metrics except wins will tell you. As far as BP’s predictions go, they should be vindicated – as of my writing (before today’s win is entered) their predicted wins total for the 2009 LAA (93) is almost exactly where their Pythagorean wins total ended up (around 92).

- Branch Rickey

too bad BP doesnt do us the service of doing a follow up on all their projections and admitting where the system fails.

obviously they cant sell you memberships if they let on there are plenty of holes in their precious little projections.

“Good teams win close games.” That was one of Jim Healy’s favorite observations. He frequently made the point that good teams have the ability to reach back and come up with a little more in order to secure a win, and mediocre teams don’t.

Baseball Prospectus is feeling the heat. On one hand, their core group of founding members has moved on to bigger and better things, like working for bigger media outlets, consulting for MLB teams, or gaming the stock market (or whatever it is Nate Silver does these days). On the other hand, they’re being pressured by sites like Fangraphs and the Hardball Times that give away data and analysis at least competitive with BP’s (if not better) for free. In other words, they’re stuck selling a product you can get better for free.

From the looks of this article, they’re about to cross the border between the “thinking man’s” baseball source and the shallow hyperbole-filled schlock of ESPN. For example, I know that they know that playoff success is almost entirely random. There’s an entire chapter about it in their book entitled “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s Shit Work in the Playoffs.” Their conclusion? They were mostly just unlucky. The few factors that do have a small influence on playoff success have nothing to do with offense or base running: having a good closer, striking out lots of opposing batters, and playing good defense—things the Angels have usually done well. They know this. They fucking wrote it.

I think they’re just being pushed into being “edgy.” They have to find a reason for everything because that’s what the big boys at ESPN and Fox do, except while the big media falls back on “intangibles,” “clubhouse presence,” “leadership” and other bullshit for explanations, BP uses Pythagoras as a crutch. Baseball Prospectus has done some great stuff in the past, but I’ve moved on. They no longer take their own work seriously, so why should I?

The Mariner’s pulled off a house-of-cards 85 win season. They were baseball’s luckiest team as their Pythag record has them at just 75-87. They also rode their lucky streak on an absurd 35-20 record in one-run games.

Standings

The M’s offense was inept:

• last in the AL in runs scored
• last in the AL in both OBP and OPS

Offense

The pitching wasn’t that good either. They were first in ERA but:

• only ninth in FIP
• led the league in LOB% (which is luck, not skill)

The M’s do play great defense (1st in UZR), but that’s not enough to offset a lousy offense and a mediocre pitching staff. Team chemistry means nothing; that is not talent-based nor is it convertible into wins. So there you have it, the luckiest team in 2009: the Mariners.

………………………………………………………………………………………

I intentionally wrote this in a “luck-based analysis” style. Last year the Angels were criticized as being lucky by various blogs. Has the same been done this year by the blogosphere with regards to the Mariners? If not, why not?

Since these are statistical indicators, I would think that they would accurately predict a teams performance within a standard deviation or so, ie there should be at a couple of teams that outperform or underperform the predictions.

Knowing that the Angels always outperform, there seems to be something wrong with these “statistics”, but how do they hold up against other teams?

If I weren’t too lazy…… Anyone?

This is sort of a broken record, though; eventually, it becomes like Lucy van Pelt with that football, and the PECOTA-proselytizers falling on their asses every damn time.

While it’s pretty obvious in hindsight that keeping Kendry was a brilliant move, I would argue it was far from clear at the time BPro 2009 went to press. Kendry’s highest slugging average at any level prior to this year was .544 in 100 at-bats for Rancho, and .543 in the high elevation, batter friendly confines of Salt Lake; the man hit .569 in his first full season as a regular while taking 46 walks, both professional career highs. The questions about Rivera were equally daunting (and seem to have been somewhat borne out by his status as 11th best in left by OPS); even with this year’s good numbers, he clearly flamed out in the second half with a .257/.309/.418 line, which should give you an idea that maybe the people who said he was a second-half player were right — at least, they were right about him producing for only half the year. Yes, he’s better than Anderson, but he’s certainly not a top-flight left fielder.

I have been on man a message board discussing “prediction” as it relates to astrology. Okay go ahead an snicker, but here is something that mightbe of interest: The way baseball predictive model people rationalize their failures to accurately predict the future mimics that of astrologers who failed to accurately predic t an event:

FIRST, the definition of ACCURACY is muddied up into nothingness.

SECOND, a host of previous events are brought into the discussion o minimize the damage of a singular incorrect prediction.

THIRD, if backed into a corner after failing in their attempt to change the reality of what happened into ambiguous ether, they bring up words like LUCK and CHANCE (in astrology they also throw in LILLITH and TRANS-PLUTO).

The urge to predict the future brings out wounded egos when public pronouncements fail. BP needs to ditch the ego and be more like TV weathermen and just say: “I know I said it was going to be rainy but then a high pressure system moved in and it was sunny, wow, aren’t we all glad I was wrong!”

That when they were ranking Free agents Torii was the number 1 and on some lists #2 FA pick up a few years ago… Once the Angels signed him, it was funny to watch all the backpeddling – they call it a bad Contract adn a mediocre signing.
If the Yankees signed him we would have heard quite the opposite

Every single year there are lucky and unlucky teams. And it therefore follows that some teams will be lucky enough to put together multiple lucky years. My Mom once lost 14 straight hands in blackjack; it was unlikely that that would happen to her, but it was fairly probably that it would happen to someone. It is the same in baseball. If a team has a 50/50 shot at overperforming/underperforming, then chances are that some team will flip heads multiple years in a row. Luckily enough for you guys, that team has been the Angels. (Also, I think your consistently great bullpens over the last many years pushes the odds in your favor.)

I know everyone around here loves to think that the mainstream media (ESPN/ Pedro Gomez) as well as the stat-head media (BP) have gotten together and decided to presecute the Angels with negative coverage and predictions, but that is pretty hard for me to believe. Maybe BP has something wrong in their formulas regarding the Angels, but to think it is because of some sort of intentional bias seems absolutely absurd to me.

An acquaintance at BP told me midseason: The Angels are the worst of the contenders.

So much for those silly number breakdowns. The Bill James crowd never grew up. Wake up and enjoy real men playing real baseball.

As for Matt, great mention here:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509364