WAR - it is good for something after all (Part 3)

Part 1 of this mini-series explained the concept of WAR and part 2 showed the level of accuracy of WAR in forecasting the final records of all 30 teams in 2009.

This final part will use WAR to preview the potential win total of the Pirates in 2010, by breaking down each person on the presumed 25 man roster.

I did not run simulations on how many AB's, home runs, doubles, an estimated range and arm strength, etc. Nor did I attempt to calculate the FIP for each pitcher and how many innings they would pitch.

Using Fangraphs' player profiles (and clicking on the "Value" tab), I simply looked at their previous WAR history and adjusted accordingly. I did use some judgment calls, which I will explain when they come up. Also, for those new to WAR, a WAR of 2 to 2.5 is considered to be an average/slightly above average player at his position.

C Doumit -- 2 WAR (he's ranged from 1.8 to the mid 3's, so this seemed safe)
1B Clement -- 0.5 WAR
2B Iwamura -- 2 WAR
SS Cedeno -- 1 WAR
3B Laroche (1/3 of season)/Alvarez (2/3 season) -- 3.5 WAR (every other position in this exercise has just one player, but we all now Pedro Is Coming. I gave 1 WAR to Laroche and 2.5 WAR to Alvarez)
LF Milledge -- 2 WAR (I actually am buying into the hype about him, but held back)
CF McCutchen -- 4 WAR (it's been a long time since the Pirates had a consistent 4 WAR player)
RF Jones -- 2.5 WAR (welcome back to Earth, but he'll still be good)

Bench Church -- 0.5 WAR
Bench Pearce -- -0.5 WAR
Bench Crosby -- -0.5 WAR
Bench Vasquez -- 0 WAR
Bench Jaramillo -- 0.5 WAR

SP1 Maholm -- 3 WAR (he's pretty consistent at this point)
SP2 Ohlendorf -- 2 WAR (WAR is not kind to non K pitchers, I would love to say he's a 3 WAR)
SP3 Duke -- 2 WAR
SP4 Morton -- 1.5 WAR
SP5 McCutchen -- 0.5 WAR

About the bullpen...WAR devalues relief pitchers (as they should be), so if these all seem low that's why. Recently, Dave Cameron had an article of Fangraphs explaining the "chaining effect" of a bullpen, meaning that if Dotel is hurt, Hanrahan will move in and not a call-up from AAA to close the games.

CL Dotel -- 1 WAR
SET Hanrahan -- 0.5 WAR
SET Meek -- 0.5 WAR
BUL Donnelly -- 0.5 WAR
BUL Carrasco -- 0.5 WAR
BUL Lopez -- 0 WAR
BUL Hart -- 0 WAR

Let's total it up:
48 baseline wins
17.5 starting batters
0 bench bats
9 starting pitchers
3 bullpen

77.5 wins
So WAR says a 78 win season...hmmm...using the +/- 4 win threshold, I'll feel more comfortable predicting a 76 win season in 2010 for the Pirates.

There you have it. Numbers don't lie. If the Pirates don't win 76, it's not math's fault...it's the players. All of this keeps the Pirates on track to break .500 in 2011 as I've predicted for a couple of years now.

WAR - it is good for something after all (Part 2)

OK, in the last post I gave a quick primer on the concept of WAR so let's dive into this topic....
How did WAR do as a model, based on the final win totals for 2009?

The concept of WAR gauges how each player can do against his potential replacement by a AAAA-level player...a player that is too good for AAA, but never good enough to play in the majors.

It is assumed that an entire 25 man roster of these replacement level players would win 48 games over the course of the major league season. So the 2003 Tigers (43-119) actually would have been better just playing their whole AAA team!

On fangraphs.com you can find WAR by a whole team for both batting and pitching. So I went through a added each team's batting WAR to its pitching WAR and then added in the baseline 48 wins to find what WAR predicted each team to finish. Listed below are the results, with each team's actual wins listed first and their WAR win total calculated (baseline + bat + pitch, in that order). The number in parentheses after the WAR total is the difference between the two.

NYY 103 (48 baseline + 38.2 bat + 18.7) = 104.9 (-1.9 wins)
BOS 95 (48 + 27.4 + 23.6) = 99 (-4 wins)
TB 84 (48 + 34.1 + 16.9) = 99 (-15 wins)
TOR 75 (48 + 21 + 18.1) = 87.1 (-12.1 wins)
BAL 64 (48 + 15.5 + 7.4) = 70.9 (-6.9 wins)

MIN 87 (48 + 21.7 + 16.4) = 86.1 (+0.9 wins)
DET 86 (48 + 21.3 + 16.5) = 85.8 (+0.2 wins)
CHW 79 (48 + 10.8 + 22.6) = 81.4 (-2.4 wins)
CLE 65 (48 + 19.6 + 10.5) = 78.1 (-13.1 wins)
KC 65 (48 + 6.8 + 19.9) = 74.7 (-9.7 wins)

LAA 97 (48 + 29.5 + 16.6) = 94.1 (+2.9 wins)
TEX 87 (48 + 22 + 18.5) = 88.5 (-1.5 wins)
SEA 85 (48 + 20.6 + 16.4) = 85 (0 wins)
OAK 75 (48 + 16.9 + 19.3) = 84.2 (-9.2 wins)

PHI 93 (48 + 27.5 + 13.3) = 88.8 (+4.2 wins)
FLA 87 (48 + 19.6 + 14.1) = 81.7 (+5.3 wins)
ATL 86 (48 + 17.9 + 23.4) = 89.3 (-3.3 wins)
NYM 70 (48 + 12.1 + 7.3 ) = 67.4 (+2.6 wins)
WAS 59 (48 + 16 + 3.7) = 67.7 (-8.7 wins)

STL 91 (48 + 18.8 + 19.3) = 86.1 (+4.9 wins)
CHC 83 (48 + 12.6 + 18) = 78.6 (+4.4 wins)
MIL 80 (48 + 25.8 + 3) = 76.8 (+3.2 wins)
CIN 78 (48 + 14.4 + 10.4) = 72.8 (+5.2 wins)
HOU 74 (48 + 12.1 + 10) = 70.1 (+3.9 wins)
PGH 62 (48 + 14.2 + 8.1) = 70.3 (-8.3 wins)

LAD 95 (48 + 23.9 + 19.4) = 91.3 (+3.7 wins)
COL 92 (48 + 18.7 + 23.6) = 90.3 (+1.7 wins)
SFG 88 (48 + 12.3 + 21.7) = 82 (+6 wins)
SD 75 (48 + 15.8 + 5.9) = 69.7 (+5.3 wins)
ARI 70 (48 + 15.6 + 17.9) = 81.5 (-11.5 wins)

A few thoughts...
1. 14 of the 30 teams were plus or minus within 4 wins of their actual totals. 4 wins either way is a 2.5% margin, very reasonable in my opinion. If you expand to +/- 5 wins, over half of the league (17 teams) meets this criteria.

2. WAR really missed on each last place team. It just can't account for the unmeasurable....some teams just can't win some years.

3. Take another look at the WAR win totals by division. Aside from ARI and ATL, WAR predicted the finish of each division. To me, that is the most amazing predictive use for this stat.

4. I wondered if each team's over or underachievement from the +/- 4 wins threshold was due to their defensive prowess (or gaffes). I looked at the Ultimate Zone Rating for each of these 16 teams and did not find a correlation. 8 of the teams that were outside the 4 wins threshold had a correlating good/bad UZR, while the other 8 did not. Meaning if you were the ARI Diamondbacks and underacheived by 11.5 wins, your defensive rating was a +2.5, meaning we can't blame your failures on not playing defense.

The final part of this will break down the 2010 Pirates and see what could be in store for them. Special preview -- it's better than you think.

WAR - it is good for something after all (Part 1)

Settle down, dirty hippies. I'm talking about a baseball stat.

After posting some travel thoughts, food thoughts, and deep thoughts about the state of our cities, it's time for a good old-fashioned nerdy baseball post. WARNING, WARNING!! This post contains numbers and a stat you can't find by reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette!

One of my favorite new-age baseball stats is WAR or Wins Above Replacement. It was developed by Dave Cameron who is the main contributor to his own blog "U.S.S. Mariner" and another great website called "Fangraphs". The main concept of WAR is to determine how many wins a certain player is than if he was replaced by a run-of-the-mill AAA player that never has achieved success at the major league level. This AAAA-type of player is called Replacement Level...a readily available commodity that can be paid the major-league minimum. For instance, Andrew McCutchen last year was a 3.4 WAR player, meaning he was worth an extra 3.4 wins to the Pirates over some typical AAAA-level scrub.

WAR is for both pitchers and batters. For batters, there are 4 main things (with a bunch of little things in each of those four things):
Batting
Fielding
Positional Adjustment
Replacement Adjustment

The detailed description of these items for batters and pitchers can be found here...
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/glossary/#winvalues

...but the thumbnail sketch is this:
Batting - based on stats accrued during the season (BA, OPS, K rate, etc)
Fielding - based on a defensive metric called Ultimate Zone Rating to account for range, arm strength, errors, etc)
Positional Adj - some positions are harder to play than others and if you play one of them, you either get extra credit (SS, CF, C, 2B, 3B) or deducted (1B, DH, LF/RF)
Replacement Adj - this is based on a 600 plate appearance season, so you get a percentage of the points if you are less than 600 PA's

The same concept applies to pitchers, but primarily revolves around a metric called FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching). This metric takes the defense out of the equation and sees what a pitcher's ERA would look like based on his own merit. It gauges a pitcher's strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed...all things that the pitcher is solely responsible for. Just because your SS had a bad night does not factor into FIP.

Again, consult the glossary above for more explanation.
Not only can you determine WAR for each individual player, but then you can aggregate it for the whole team and determine how many total wins that team may or may not achieve. It is a good predictive model for a season.

In my next 2 parts, I'm going to look at how WAR did as a reflection on each MLB's teams win total from 2009 and then I'm going to break down each of the players on the potential 25 man roster for the Pirates to determine the 2010 Pirates' win total.

Number crunching at its finest!

The 4 Food Groups of Prospects

When it comes to drafting talent in the June amateur draft, there are 4 food groups to select from:
High School Hitter
High School Pitcher
College Hitter
College Pitcher

In their first two drafts, Neil Huntington and the rest of the front office have signed 54 picks. The breakdown is as follows, with 2008's number and 2009's number separated in parentheses.
HS Hitter -- 7 (5, 2)
HS Pitcher -- 8 (2, 6)
College Hitter -- 20 (13, 7)
College Pitcher -- 19 (11, 8)

So roughly 72% of our signees have been from college, a very high percentage. But many college guys selected are organizational filler...soldiers you can move around to fill gaps in your system as they don't really have much of a future past AA.

As a percentage of the DBS Top 30 prospects, the HS players have a much higher representation. Of the 15 of them drafted the past two years, 7 are on my 30 (around 46%). In contrast, 6 of the 39 college players made the DBS 30 (just over 15%).

Your HS players are usually your higher impact players, especially due to their age advantage.

All of this is steering me away from thinking that the Pirates will draft a HS Pitcher as their 1st round pick (2nd overall) this upcoming June. It is presumed that Jameison Taillon is the 2nd best talent, behind Bryce Harper, but this front office does not seem inclined to spend well-over slot for a HS pitcher. Their belief, to date, is that value can be found in selecting guys that fall for signability concerns in later rounds and paying them above-slot, but not record-setting amounts.

Taillon will probably be looking for a similar deal to Jacob Turner of this past year. Turner, signed by DET, got around $4.5M as a bonus with a ML-contract worth a total of around $5.5M.

Without even delving into the lunacy of putting an 18 year old HS pitcher on the 40 man roster, that bonus does not seem to fit in with the current thought process of this front office.

My money is that we get a college bat again.

Cities - our greatest achievement and our greatest failure

When I was 10 years old, my parents took me on vacation to Cancun, Mexico. While on that trip, we took a rickety old bus tour (is there any other kind in Mexico) to Chichen Itza, a site of Mayan ruins.

I remember scrambling like a billy goat up the side of the main pyramid, much to my protective mom's chagrin. I even faintly remember being inside of it. Another memory that has always stuck with me about that trip is the "sporting arena" where the Mayans would play a form of soccer for sport, except with human heads. That makes an impression on a 10 year old boy...who played soccer.

At one time, Chichen Itza was a major epicenter of Mayan culture. It's been recognized as one of the New 7 Wonders of the World. And now, aside from a pyramid or two, it is a pile of rubble...overgrown with weeds and filled in with silt, sand, and stones. A faded memory from a time we only read about in dusty books. And I wonder now, looking back on it nearly 24 years later...What must that place have been like during its peak?

Will that one day be the fate of our modern human culture?

With the human race engaging in competitive homicide as each day passes, it's not inconceivable that 500 years from now there will be tour groups passing through the once-towering canyons of Manhattan, now reduced to a much smaller size after the buildings have crumbled. People will explore the rotting husks of Tokyo, London, Mexico City, and even our fair Pittsburgh and wondered "What happened? And what must these places have been like during their peak?"

With the rise of Burj Khalifa in Dubai a couple of weeks ago, that 2600+ foot-high tower is probably literally and figuratively the peak of human society. It is an architectural and engineering marvel. It is the capstone of perhaps the greatest 20 years of architecture/engineering in modern history. We have pushed and pushed on the boundaries of what science, art, and technology can combine to do with regards to the building industry.

And now with the world struggling to pull out of the worldwide recession, it seems very realistic that no skyscraper will have the financial backing and audacity to challenge the Burj Khalifa anytime soon.

That's a good thing, though. Dubai is a symbol of how this world has lost its way. We build and build and strengthen our outer skins (the suburbs where the rich escape), while letting the inner core rot (our inner cities and the poor we have forgotten).

The building in Pittsburgh that I am in love with now is 3 PNC Tower, the green-hued skyscaper being completed next to Market Square. I'm in town semi-regularly for either business or pleasure and always try to pass by it. But as I walk past it, I'm reminded of how we need to re-commit ourselves to fixing what we already have instead of building new things. The smells of sewage that waft up from the grates that portend the pending overflow into the river, the roadways filled with cracks and dotted with potholes that the City does not have the money to fix, the homeless that have given up hope because society has given up on them.

You build from the inside out. Strengthen your core and then you can work on the window dressing. The early part of this new decade can be when Pittsburgh can show the rest of the world how it is done. Let's do things that are not sexy or will win votes. Let's re-pave our roads, fix our crumbling water and sewer infrastructure, re-develop new housing zones, and extend a hand to those who need it most.

Let's not end up as part of a 10-year old boy's tour in the year 2510.

New Orleans - that voodoo you do

New Orleans is just one of those cities that you have to go to at least once. For me, I'm up to 3 times (2 pre-Katrina, 1 post-Katrina) and I find myself longing to go back again.

It's a city in which voodoo is an active part for many people's lives. Not just the "I don't like my boss, so I'm going to stick him with a pin" voodoo, but voodoo also is for finding love, gaining strength, and other more mundane things as well. It's fascinating to watch people explain it and wild to take a night-time (sponsored and guided) tour of above-ground cemeteries with a voodoo-themed tour.

There is so much more to do than see the French Quarter, but you have to see the Quarter, especially on your first trip. And of course, if you're in the Quarter, you have to see Bourbon Street at night. Bourbon Street is a non-stop party, pretty much 365 days a year it seems. I have been there twice in May and once in October and you would not believe the atmosphere. I shudder to think what it is like during Mardi Gras.

The French Quarter is worth seeing just for the architecture. The balconies overlooking the streets, the prevalence of wrought iron, the color schemes, the courtyards tucked in to the majority of the buildings...it all adds up to a style that you can not find anywhere else in the United States.

And the food. My love of Cajun and cooking Cajun came from my very first trip to N'awlins back during my 21st birthday in 1997. There are so many amazing restaurants down there, too numerous to name, but if you want a very affordable representative taste of New Orleans, I recommend The Gumbo Shop. It has all the major dishes -- gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish dishes, red beans and rice -- within a characteristically old structure with a courtyard.

Mulate's is another great place, although outside the Quarter closer to the Convention Center, but they feature great live zydeco music on the weekends in addition to the fantastic food.

You can not swing a dead cat without hitting a fun bar and/or a bar that features great live music (rock, zydeco, jazz) but I highly recommend Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop on the edge of the French Quarter. Lafitte was a infamous pirate during his day and this once-functional blacksmith shop bears his name as an attempt at legitimate business. At night, the place does not have any lights, just candlelight.

But if you are in New Orleans, you have to try the Hurricane drink, a wicked concoction of rum and fruit juices served in its own distinctive glass. The touchstone for this drink is Pat O'Brien's. If you have 2, you will feel no pain. 3 and you may want to cancel breakfast plans the next day. 4 and you will be traveling through time.

This is going to be one of those topics that I will make multiple posts about, as there is just so much more about N'awlins that I would like to share. Consider this the appetizer, the cup of gumbo if you will, to the rest of my thoughts about this great American city.

Gumbo Shop - www.gumboshop.com
Mulate's - www.mulates.com
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop - www.atneworleans.com/body/blacksmith.htm

New Year's Eve Menu

Both DB~ and I dislike New Year's Eve. For me, it's "forced fun". You're being told to have fun and get crazy specifically on this night. And if you want to go out to dinner, enjoy a reduced menu at an inflated price with a maitre'd floating over your shoulder putting you on the clock in you chew too many times. Then add in the idiots cruising around drunk behind the wheel. No thanks.

So we decided to be hermits and stay in but make an outstanding dinner just for the 2 of us.

Here's was the menu:
Spinach, Pear, Gorgonzola, Walnut salads w/ Honey Mustard Vinagrette
Whipped Sweet Potatoes with Vanilla, Brown Sugar, and chopped Walnuts
Parmasean Risotto with Pears
Grilled Quail with a Lemon, Garlic, Olive Oil brushing with various seasonings
and for dessert...
Creme Brulee

Both of us agreed that everything was fantastic, but we both enjoyed making the Creme Brulee for the fact that we got to use the little butane torch. There was a gleam in DB~'s eye when she lit it up the first time. The picture is when I was able to wrestle it out of her hands to glaze the final ramekin of creme brulee.

This meal, per person if ordered in a restaurant, would easily have been $40 or more, but we were able to make it for half that in just the food costs.

Even though it was cold and there was snow on my deck, it was worth it to taste the crispy grilled quail. Quail is like a big chicken wing, and a little pricey ($18.50 for 4 quail at Market District in Robinson), but fun to eat and present on a plate.

It was a great night and we didn't miss being out at all.