28 July 2011

Chicago blunders....but I guess that's nothing new

Two Chicago sports franchises have made a couple facepalm moves today.

The Cubs traded OF Kosuke Fukudome to Cleveland for 2 prospects, a pitcher and an outfielder. While the Cubs can say they got rid of the Fukudome's hefty contract, they really can't, because they are still paying a big load of that contract. Of the estimated $4.5 million he's owed the rest of the year, the Cubs still have to pay all but $775,000 of it.

And what exactly are the Cubs getting in return? As I aluded to with this tweet and Keith Law confirms (sorry non-ESPN Insiders), not a whole lot of anything. Abner Abreu, a 21-year-old outfielder, is doing a whole lot of striking out this year in high-A, with 102 K's in 92 games this year. Also not helping is his low walk rate, with 22 BB in 363 PA. There's really not a whole lot of good I can say about him. He's batting .244/.294/.431, with 12 HR, and as Law mentions,
He's just 21 and is already repeating high Class A, so he's been moved aggressively, but has also shown very little development in his ability to recognize balls from strikes -- and the Cubs have not had success in teaching impatient hitters how to work the count.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And also a distressing critque of the Cubs organization, as working counts and getting on base is one of the foundations of sabermetrics. Ultimately, this move demonstrates that Manager of Statisical Anaysis Ari Kaplan is either a) not doing a very good job, or b) doesn't have nearly enough say in deals made, and I'm guessing the latter.

The other prospect the Cubs received in the Kosuke deal was pitcher Carlton Smith, who has played all of 2011 in AAA Columbus. Smith, 25, doesn't look like he can hack it in anything above AA, posting a 1.606 WHIP in 94 AAA innings since his promotion last year. I've generally looked for high strikeout rates in the minors as a general indicator of "stuff," and Smith hasn't posted anything higher than 7 K/9IP in any full minor league season. It also seems that he struggles against lefties, allowing them to hit .292/.395/.508 this season, indicating that even if he does make the majors, he won't be any more than a specialist reliever.

And now allow me to air my beef on the Bears moves (and lack thereof) today. This evening the Bears traded away TE Greg Olsen, a fan favorite and one of the bright spots of the Bears offense. At 6'5", he was a big target for Jay Cutler in 2010, catching 41 balls for 404 yards and 5 TDs, tied with Johnny Knox for most on the team.

What really astounded me about the trade was that they traded him to Carolina....for someone not named Steve Smith. The Bears have been a complete nonthreat at wide receiver, and everyone and their mother knows that. Except Jerry Angelo. There's no reason he should be trading away Cutler's biggest target without getting a big or bigger target in return. I did see there was a draft pick involved, but with Angelo's draft history, it amounts to just about bubkis.

Hat tip to @Kimberly_Lucio for how I will close this post: Greg Olsen gone, NBA lockout, Bulls lose to Heat in playoffs, and the Cubs. Chicago sports fans need a big group hug right about now.

20 July 2011

MLB Projections

I've tweeted a little bit about this earlier this week, so here's the fruits of my labor. I've developed a little bit of Excel programming skills over the past couple years, and wanted to find a way to see how bad the Cubs can b....I mean see where the MLB season might end up at the end of the regular season. The two main components I would need are a measure of teams true ability to win games, and a predictive formula for teams given their remaining schedule.

Enter the Pythangorian Win Expectation and Log5 formulas.

For those who are currently thinking of jokes of my dorkdom, Pythagorian Win Expectation (PWE) takes a team's runs scored and runs against, and spits out an expected win percentage. It gets its name from looking somewhat like that old Pythagorian Theorem we all learned in trigonometry (a^2 + b^2 = c^2):

PWE = (R^2) / (R^2 + RA^2),

where R is runs for and RA is runs against. Further research on the subject showed that a more accurate exponent is 1.81 instead of 2. A different exponent can also be used for college basketball (somewhere between 8 and 9) and the NBA (somewhere between 14.5 and 16).

The Log5 formula comes from the Godfather of Sabermetrics, Bill James. Based on the Bayes Theorem, this formula is used to find win probability of two teams when they meet. If Team A and Team B played each other, the probability of Team A is given by

P(A) = (A - A * B) / (A + B - 2*A*B),

where A is Team A's win percentage, and B is Team B's win percentage.

So now we have an decent estimation of a team's ability to win games, and a way to estimate the probability of who will win a game between two teams. All there is left to do is throw the remainder of the MLB schedule into the hopper and see what we come up with (h/t to Daily Baseball Data for putting the entire MLB schedule in Excel format).

American League

EAST

W

L

Boston

98.5

62.5

NY Yankees

96.1

62.9

Tampa Bay

84.8

76.2

Toronto

81.4

81.6

Balimore

63.4

96.6

CENTRAL

Detroit

84.5

77.5

Cleveland

84.3

77.7

Chicago Sox

79.3

82.7

Minnesota

72.6

88.4

Kansas City

67.1

94.9

WEST

Texas

93.5

69.5

LA Angels

82.0

81.0

Oakland

72.0

91.0

Seattle

70.5

90.5

National League

EAST

Philadelphia

100.6

62.4

Atlanta

94.1

68.9

NY Mets

81.3

81.7

Washington

79.3

83.7

Florida

75.7

87.3

CENTRAL

Pittsburgh

85.2

75.8

St. Louis

85.7

77.3

Milwaukee

84.2

77.8

Cincinnati

83.4

79.6

Chicago Cubs

64.4

98.6

Houston

57.3

105.7

WEST

San Francisco

91.1

71.9

Arizona

85.7

77.3

Colorado

79.7

83.3

San Diego

71.7

91.3

LA Dodgers

70.7

91.3


I do give my apologies, because this table was made in the middle of a day of games. I don't have time to wait until midnight for all the games to be over, nor the time in the morning to get it done before the early afternoon games start. This also skews the run totals a bit, but not a whole lot for our analysis.

In a showing of how the futile the Cubs are this year, the first thing I noticed was that they are, on average, not headed for a 100-loss season. Around the league, here now are the storylines I will be looking for the rest of the season:
  • The reigning pennant winners, the Rangers and the Giants, will run away with their respective divisions.
  • The AL East will once again take two playoff spots, leaving Detroit and Cleveland fighting for one spot while Boston, New York and Tampa fight for two spots
  • With the East Coast Bias of the media, the watch will be on to see if the Phillies will win 100 games for the first time since 1977
  • The exciting 4-team race for the NL Central, which includes the Pirates quest for their first winning season since Barry Bonds was skinny (1992).

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