September 10th, 2013

Today's slate.

The Big Hurst - Tony Cingrani

skoormit - Julio Teheran

La Osa Rosa - Francisco Liriano


skoormit: Mike Trout's WAR went down by 0.2 yesterday. He went 1-5 with a single and a walk. Not great, but not terrible. His WPA was -0.058, so his results were certainly below average, but WPA is not calculated directly from his stat line but from the specific situation and outcome of each plate appearance. (Theoretically, what is the average replacement-level WPA per game? If a replacement-level team wins 33% of their games, that means over 162 games, the team loses 27 more than an average team. If the batters are responsible for half of those 27 extra losses, and there are nine lineup slots over which to spread the blame (assuming AL, therefore DH), then each batting slot loses an average of (13.5/9)/162 = .009 games per game.)  In the field, he played 8 innings in CF and made 3 PO in 3 chances. I'm not sure what cost him 0.2 WAR.
The Big Hurst: This game may be starting to look like this: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."  Or perhaps this: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  It's hard to tell.
   Meanwhile, I really wanted to pick Clay Buchholz, but I'm not sure he'll be off the short leash.
   About Trout, that's weird and a good catch.  Neat thought about replacement-level WPA.  You can really dissect things out a long way nowadays.  Continuing that thought, I think WAR is somewhat of a black box.  I don't really trust it past the decimal point.  As a useful stat, it suffers from being (1) complex and (2) prone to manipulation.  I'm aware that its internal formulas have been subject to quite a bit of tinkering and it's not quite standardized or settled yet.  Since I can't understand it and can't double-check it, I wouldn't treat it as useful past the whole numbers.  But even at that level, it's still valuable.
The Big Hurst: This gif is way cool.  And this (talk about being out in front!).


RESULTS

The Big Hurst: Back spasms.  Ugh.

 

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