Pitching Uber Alles

As a prior post reiterated, on a point I've made over the years and codified into my business plan, it is pitching differentiated teams that can go deeper into the playoffs, and maximize their chances not only to get to the World Series, but to win it.  

NextGen Scouting Evaluation in Baseball

Being an obsessive, I follow a lot of baseball news to catch news about the Giants, and thus am interested in all parts of a baseball operations.  I've been participating in, basically, a crowdsourcing initiative, and their method of evaluating predictions I think is something that could be used in evaluating scouting, so I thought I would discuss my thoughts.

Baseball Prospectus Secret Sauce: Their Rationale for Ending It Was Incorrect

[NOTE: wrote most of this up before, just getting around to posting now]

Baseball Prospectus did a study for their great book, "Baseball Between the Numbers", of how teams historically, during the divisional baseball era, got deep into the playoffs, answering the question Billy Beane had, of why his sh!t didn't work in the playoffs.

They found, on an overall basis, that offensive stats was random and all over the place, meaning that it is defensively how teams got deep into the playoffs, that is, pitching and fielding.  They narrowed down the variables to three key metrics:  K/9 for the pitching staff, WRXL for their closer, and their Fielding Defense metric, FRAA.  The only offensive metric that seemed tied to going deep was stolen base attempts, which they attributed to the link of team speed to stolen base attempts.

For a few years, BP published analysis based on their "secret sauce".  But after a number of failures, they decided to end the analysis, making the assumption that the playoffs had changed in some way to make it fail as a strategy.

Seventh Inning Stretch: I'm Going On Hiatus

As you may or may not remember, I've been out of work for a long while.  The good news is that I found a new position and been gainfully employed for over a month now.  Yea!  Big thank you to all of you who supported me, it helped me get through everything.

The better news is that it's a pretty exciting position for me, with a company I've admired for a long time, learning about the latest and greatest in new IT technology, while taking a position in an industry I've long studied:  I'm now an outsourced resource.

Though my joy at finally working again is tempered greatly by the fact that the coronavirus has put a ton of people out of work, has put too many people into the ground, and has changed life irreversibly, as much as some people hope for a return to what we had before, our lives have been changed permanently.  And now we have the long needed protest over the treatment of African Americans in our society.  Hopefully life will be much better for everyone, no matter of color or any other criteria that people use to discriminate, and so I stand with my fellow people of color, as I recall my Mom's stories of racism during her life.  

The MLB Draft and the Future of Player Development

While writing my "last blog for a while" (which will come out soon enough), I realized that I had thoughts on the MLB Draft being reduced to 5 rounds for this season, and the whole MiLB contraction move.

Your 2020 Giants: Revised Top Prospect Timetable Thoughts

Obviously, with the MLB season unlikely to begin until June or July, that throws all my prospect timetables out of whack, since they won't be playing, something I should have realized when I posted them (honestly, as you can tell by the length of each, I just wanted to get them out).  I probably should have thought about that before publishing, realizing that things have been moving so fast on Coronavirus Time.

So I thought I would take a stab at initial thoughts on how the top prospects might be affected, based on the current thinking that the MLB won't start until mid-year.  CDC guidelines is restricting meetings of 50+ for the next 8 weeks, which lasts to mid-May, but even if that works and people can somehow start to congregate again, the players will need spring training again, which pushes the start to, at best, early June; and some GM's are thinking July, because many players come into spring training having already gotten ready, but with this order, nobody is staying in shape.  Plus, some counties, like in the SF Bay Area, has a shelter order in effect, restricting people to stay at home for the three weeks, except for essential business (of which, entertainment is not).  Who knows how long that will take?  Still, thought I would tackle the scenario where the season starts up around June/July.

Your 2020 Giants: Top Giants Prospects Lists

I compiled some Top Giants Prospects lists, some only had 10, others had a lot more:

• Baseball America Top 10 Giants Prospects
• MLB Pipeline Top 30 Giants Prospects
• Baseball Prospectus Top 10 Giants Prospects
• FG:  Top 36 Giants Prospects
• The Athletic:  Keith Law Top 20 Giants Prospects
• Minor League Baseball Analyst (MiLBA)

Also interesting are rankings of the Giants farm system in the majors:

• Baseball America: #14
• MLB Pipeline:  #10
• Baseball Prospectus:  Has not been released yet
• Fangraphs:  Has not been released yet
• Keith Law:  #10
• Minor League Baseball Analyst:  #6 (A- in hitters, C+ for pitching, A for Top-End Talent)

I know I said this for my last post, but this one (plus the last one, combined) is probably going to be in lieu of my usual Big Six prospect post (so refer to my post on Top 100 for further info on the top prospects) that I've been doing in the spring most seasons.  :^)

Of course, with the coronavirus delay to the season, who knows how much of the 2020 season will be played.  Stay safe and healthy out there!

Your 2020 Giants: Top 100 Prospects Lists

Many of the major Top 100 Prospects analysts have put out their rankings and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to post the rankings and talk about my thoughts about the Giants prospects ranked.

The rankings I'm utilizing are:

• Baseball America (subscription)
• MLB Pipeline
• Baseball Prospectus
• Fangraphs:  Eric Longenhagen
• ZiPS:  Dan Szymborski
• The Athletic:  Keith Law (subscription)
• The Athletic:  John Sickels (subscription)
• ESPN:  Kiley McDaniels

And not being ranked does not mean that there aren't other potentially good players in the farm system, these rankings are not the final word.  For example, Pablo Sandoval wasn't even ranked on the Giants Top 30, let alone Top 100 the season he reached the majors, and Brandon Crawford never made any Top 100 lists either.

On the other hand, being ranked isn't an automatic ticket for MLB stardom either:  Gary Brown was ranked #18 by Baseball Prospectus and #38 by Baseball America after the 2011 season.  Or how about Jesse Foppert, #5 overall per Baseball America after the 2003 season?  And Angel Villalona was ranked in the Top 100 three seasons in a row, hitting a peak of 33 (BA) and 29 (BP) for the 2008 season.

This is probably going to be in lieu of my usual Big Six prospect post I've been doing in the spring most seasons.  I'm not really up for a big research project, though maybe I'll just post a list and quick thoughts on some, sometime near Opening Day, if I feel up for it (sorry, just down right now, wife's aunt passed a couple of weeks ago, then lost out on a job that I thought I was very qualified for and was even told that coming in person interview would be the next step, before I got the decline e-mail 10 days later. Then I just got rear-ended the other day... and my insurance company hasn't bothered to call me, except once, since, it's basically two weeks since...).

Giants Draft Analysis: The Sabean Era Drafts Overall (fourth and last in a series)

In this series, I broke up the Sabean era into three distinct periods - basically pre-Dynasty, Dynasty Building, and post-Dynasty - and analyzed each one based on the probabilities for finding Good and Great players, that I came up with in my recent study of the first 50 years of the draft.  It examined the odds of ending up with nothing in any particular draft and the cumulative probabilities of how many good and great players a baseball operations leader would have in a random draft (that is, if the leader has an average clue, as good as the average GM, as to which player is good, and thus is randomly choosing these prospects in the draft, based on this average expertise, randomly based on past history).

In this final blog post in this series, I look at the entirety of the Sabean era, see what the odds are of where the results are now, and where he could be if some of the current top prospects end up being good players.  As I've noted, it could take a decade or more for players to retire before we know the final results of any GM's draft results, if there are any players still playing and look like they could reach Good status.

And while this is the last of this series, I'm probably going to be updating this particular post after every season or two, see where he is, based on progress or decline of the remaining remnants of his drafts.  Obviously, there will be declines where we can say that a player won't be making it most probably, and there will be breakout seasons where he puts himself back into play.

Giants Draft Analysis: The End of the Sabean Era Drafts (third in a series)

This analysis of the Giants drafts covers Sabean's final years as leader of the Giants front office, 2010-2018, using the data I collected on the picks up to 200th overall, from Gary Brown to Joey Bart.  His string of successes ended, but amidst all the complaints I see continually of the decay of the farm system, and how Zaidi has made it better, it is Ramos, Bart and Corry who are bringing up the farm ranking, and they should continue to rise, and perhaps make the ending all the more sweeter and brighter.

Giants Draft Analysis: Building A Dynasty (second in a series)

This analysis of the Giants drafts covers Sabean's dynastic years as GM, 2002 to 2009, using the data I collected on the picks up to 200th overall, from Cain to Belt.  Things turned around in a huge way, though it was still not looking good until his great trifecta of Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey.

Your 2020 Giants: Trade for Will Wilson

It's been a while since the Giants traded a PTBNL (Garrrett Williams eventually) for Zack Cozart and the 2019 15th draft pick overall, SS Will Wilson,.  The Giants recently DFAed Cozart (FYI:  Cozart was ironically DFAed so that the Giants could add an Angel's pitcher who had a horrible 2019, who has now been DFAed to pick up another Angel's player, who was ranked #11 on by MLB Pipeline, oddly enough), so I have provided some analysis on the trade, now in this context of not even seeing if Cozart could meet the value of his contract, both in comments on The Athletic and on my own blog.

Thus, I thought I would capture most of my thoughts together here in one post, for reference on this trade, which now clearly was done to buy a prospect by taking on a large contract, which Zaidi mentioned he would try to do.  Below, I look at various ways one could evaluate the trade, as well as discuss likelihood of events, as I think the Cozart trade is interesting enough for future Zaidi tea leaves reading to capture all the following points in a blog post.

Giants Draft Analysis: Early Dry Sabean Years

I've decided to work on the Giants drafts first, covering Sabean's early years as GM, 1997 to 2001, and the picks up to 200.

A feat few remember is that Sabean turned around turned around the 1996 94 loss team to a 90 win team in 1997, which won the NL West, but then they unfortunately lost to the wild card Marlins in the LDS.  So while he got a good pick in his first draft in 1997, once you start winning, you get a lot of picks with poor odds of finding a good player, which continued until the Giants started losing in 2005.  My contention over the years, because of my first draft study, was that it was very hard for a team to rebuild via the draft, because the odds were against it.

Sidenote:  I've decided to create a separate blog where I'll be posting my R baseball analyses (when I'm able, still learning, part of my New Year's Resolution to get proficient in using R), probably starting with my draft database collected from baseball-reference.com, a great resource for anyone who wants to analyze baseball.

Draft Analysis of First 50 Years (a series): Definitions and Initial Analysis

As I've been saying I would do, I'm finally done collecting and doing initial analysis of the June MLB draft.  I collected the data from that great baseball resource, www.baseball-reference.com, after the 2018 season (so the data is up to date up to then, plus I bumped up a few players who look likely to move up to the next category).  But given that it takes a number of years for prospects to reach the majors, I thought I would just focus on the first 50 years of the draft, covering 1965-2014.

I'm not done with the more serious analytics, but there are a lot of random bits of info that I wanted to share now, as well as providing my methodology and definitions.  I've been releasing some of this in posts this year, covering the early parts of the draft, in relation to the Giants picks, as I had the early parts of the draft done before, but just recently finally went over and inputted the last picks I had captured, covering the first 200 picks overall in the draft.  As usual, my semi-long post has grown large.