Jimv

Maybe, but if you are a fly on the wall at the owners meetings, I'll bet you'd conclude that the performance they most want to maximize is revenues minus expenditures. And that correlates with spectating experience.

Not a big deal in the scheme of things, but it sure seemed unjust to me to hang the loss on Thielbar. He faced 4 batters and got them all. A "perfect performance". How can that be a losing effort? It's not his fault that the rules put a runner on second to start the inning. In this situation, it seems to me that the pitcher who allows the runner to score should be responsible, since there was no pitcher that put the runner on base. I'm sure he's not losing any sleep over it, though.

"I totaled up all the performances and combined them. Assuming that my excel muscles haven’t atrophied to zero, here’s the math. This selected group of 8 aces combined for a 2.57 ERA in 500 innings, with a 30.8% strikeout rate and a 6.2% walk rate. Sounds ace-like to me. Here’s how the Twins impacted them. Against Minnesota, these top starters had a 4.11 ERA, and against the rest of the world, it was a 2.30 ERA. The A.L. average for starters this year is 4.49, so basically what this is saying is that the Twins took these good starters and dragged them closer to the median. The Twins also drew more walks (7.9% vs. 5.9%), struck out less often (28.1% vs. 31.3%) and homered at a better clip against these aces (1.17 HR/9 vs. 0.89) than the rest of the league managed as a group." That's really interesting, creative analysis, Derek. Thanks.

The Twins played 7 games on the road against two teams that are leading their dividsions, and both of whom had a better record prior to the games than did the Twins. I would have been very happy to come out over .500 against that schedule, and to me, being one game worse than happy doesn't constitute ugly.

Wholeheartedly agree. How are you doing in Portland? (Apologies if this has already been asked and answered.)

I think your points are good and would love to see data broken down that well, but nonetheless, I thought the data in the article was illuminating and appreciated the analysis.

If "outcomes" means win or loss, even that isn't always a good measure. The absolute "right" measure is your second sentence. For example, consider the guy who comes in for the bottom of the ninth with his team up by 8 runs and trying to get to the airport. His job is to get his team off the field as fast as possible (without coming close to losing the lead.) Nibbling at the corners, giving up a hit, and walking 2 guys but striking out 3 may look good in stats, but even though that's a win, that's an inferior performance to the guy that attacked hitters, gave up two solo home runs, and got his team off the field in 12 pitches with 3 ground outs. The problem is it's hard to statistically quantify intended performance. It takes eye tests to do that.

So let's say you have a pitcher who hits the target 100% of the time--when the ball makes it past the batter. Unfortunately, Batters are hitting .400 against him. And a second pitcher who hits the target 50% of the time, but batters are hitting .100 against him--what would be called "effectively wild". The second pitcher is probably more effective. Obviously it's a bit of a silly example; my only point is that command, which is measured by hitting the target, isn't the same as effectiveness. However I do believe, as I suspect you do too, that the two are pretty well correlated, despite my silly example.

Actually, as any statistician will tell you, numbers do lie. Frequently. Not because they aren't factual, but because people use them to predict things that they are not capable of predicting. For example, the goal of a baseball team is to win as many games as it can (ignoring teams that intentionally lose for other reasons.) So statistics that have a high correlation coefficiency with winning the most games are the most useful. The problem is we don't have many (any?) of those. So we are forced to take statistics that correlate to something that is useful to winning games, and try to combine them somehow, hoping we don't violate statistical basics such as independence of variables in doing so. And then we use judgment to weight the various statistics--and by using judgment we are now out of the purely statistical realm. Another example of statistical failure is in looking at results of (perhaps now defunct) loogys. We've all seen cases of loogys having much better stats than other middle relievers, and often better than closers. Does that mean that loogys are better pitchers? Of course not. They are simply given a much more limited role where they have a higher likelihood of success. But the statistics don't really measure that--at least not the statistics I know. More broadly, if you consider all relief pitchers, it can be very difficult to do a statistical evaluation because they haven't all had the same opportunities/played the same roles. To do an accurate statistical comparison of closers vs non-closers you'd have to have a quantification of how much harder hitters bear down in the last at-bat and the effect of pinch-hitting or the threat of pinch hitting. I don't think that exists. Without that, any precise statistical comparison of effectiveness is impossible. T his is not to say statistical measures aren't useful. Of course they are. But their limitations need to be understood, and the way you try to compensate for those limitation is through eye tests. In the end, though, I'm not sure that's relevant to your article. Perhaps I didn't read it well, but it seemed to me that you didn't offer support for your claim that the eye test didn't work, you merely compared a common statistical measure--ERA, with what have been called more advanced measures. I'm not convinced though, that those advanced measures are more likely to predict wins than the basic measures. In fairness, I'm not convinced the other way either. However neither of those, at least in my use of the term, would constitute an eye test. An eye test is what a scout would say after watching the two pitchers. And those thoughts would be an interesting contrast to the numerical evaluations we call statistics. I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the scouts' eye tests supported a contention that Rogers has been the better pitcher.

Interesting to see that May is the WP. I think this is one of those somewhat unusual games where the Sp left with a lead but didn't have 5 innings, so can't get the win. In those cases, I think the official scorer gets to pick the WP, based on overall performance. If that's right, and I'm the official scorer, my choice is the guy that pitched twice as many innings as any other reliever (none of them gave up a run), and also had the lowest WIP of the group. And best of all, it's the guy who would be getting his first major league win--Cody Stashak.

I hope you played the lottery today.

I absolutely agree. But I think he's got some pretty abysmal 60 day performances too. Which will we get? My crystal ball seems to have a giant crack in it.

I hope that's right. I know they said at the beginning he was asymptomatic, but hadn't heard anything since. And typically, if you're positive at day one but asymptomatic, by day 10 or so you're negative or symptomatic. So I hope he's negative but nothing has been announced.

I think the opposite side of this question is even more interesting. You mentioned Rosario, and to me, he's the most hot/cold player we have. IF he's hot at the beginning of the year, he can give us a huge kick start toward the division title. But what if he's not? What if he's swinging the way he does during his slumps? How long do you let him play before benching? In a 162 game season, you let him play through it. Can you afford to do that in a 60 game season? Or does Rocco bench him quickly in favor of someone like Marwin? And I don't mean to pick on Eddie here--it's just an example. The same question holds with any regular on the team, be it the Twins or any other team.

Hope he's ok. It's been at least a couple of weeks since he was tested, I think.