http://blog.stealingfirst.com Stats, stories and stuff Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:59:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My latest post at Beyond the Box Score takes a look at whether pitchers throw harder as relievers than as starters - with some surprising conclusions. The data I used can be found here. http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/06/26/do-relievers-throw-harder/ My latest post is up at Beyond the Box Score - looking at how umpires "mistakes" are affected by various splits on pitches near the edge of the strike zone. http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/05/12/looking-at-pitches-on-the-edges/ Over at Beyond the Box Score, a commenter named Iblemetrician suggested that I reconsider how I calculated the value of switching a ball to a strike. When I originally calculated the run value of a ball to a strike, I looked at all plate appearances for a given count. That ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/05/01/revisiting-the-run-value-of-switching-a-ball-to-a-strike/ I uncovered a bug in the parser script that was causing the nightly update to fail for all dates after the 10th of the month. Grab the new ZIP file for the fix. Also, you'll need to run the parser manually starting from April 10. If you need any help ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/28/update-to-pitchfx-parser/ "The decision to acquire Matt Morris last July did not turn out to be a sound baseball judgment" -Pittsburgh Pirates team president Frank Coonelly Really?  I'm sure no one could have seen this happen.  I actually had higher hopes for Morris.  I thought he'd at least be able to hold on through ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/27/from-the-department-of-duh/ My new post summing up the different factors that influence how umpires call pitches is up at Beyond the Box Score.  It's a continuation and expansion of some of my more recent posts here, so check it out if those interested you. http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/24/why-do-umpires-make-the-calls-they-do/ Continuing my look at how different variable affect how umpires call pitches, today let's talk about what happens in each inning. We'll start with a table: Inning Runs / 150 Pitches 1 .10 2 .01 3 -.05 4 .03 5 -.03 6 -.08 7 .02 8 -.04 9 .06 10+ -.18 Remember that positive numbers are good for the pitchers (fewer runs), while negatives indicate more scoring.  The innings that jump out are the ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/16/stop-calling-strikes-i-wanna-go-home/ Another in the series of short posts breaking down how umpires call close pitches for pitchers.  Again, I'll be doing a much more thorough job with this in a longer article this week over at Beyond the Box Score. This time I looked at whether better pitches got more close calls ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/12/good-pitchers-dont-get-favorable-treatment/ Probably the most common response to my look at catcher framing was that the pitching staff had to have something to do with the results. I totally agree, but I was curious about how the staff would affect the number. I thought of three possible "biases" that could change how ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/10/grandpa-gets-all-the-calls/ I've decided to start work on a pitch classifier similar to what Josh Kalk describes over at from small ball to the long ball.  I know he's already built a good one, and can generate some really cool graphs from it, but he hasn't released the algorithm, and it's a ... http://blog.stealingfirst.com/2008/04/10/pitch-classifier/