This Bird Has Flown

I've had it with blogger's sketcy, unreliable service. I'm surprised that this Google-backed enterprise is of such consistently poor quality. I'm sure they will eventually put a couple of smart interns on it to fix it, but in the meanwhile I've had enough.

You can now find "Notes From The Bullpen" at http://www.livejournal.com/users/alexvollmer/.

Draft Day Results

It's been a long time since my last post. We finally closed on both houses and we're deep in the middle of packing, painting and prepping to move. Fortunately I was able to grab enough time here and there to get my pre-draft analysis complete.

This year's analysis was much like the approach I took last year. I calculated a regression line for several offensive and defensive categories and then evaluated how far above or below the regression line (called a residual) each player was in those categories. Since this model is inherently biased towards players with major-league experience, it highlights past performances instead of estimating the future. This year I wrote some Python to pull down the projected depth charts from Baseball Prospectus and simply multiplied hitters' total residual scores by their projected plate appearances.

I decided not to do this with pitchers because multiplying the residual scores by projected innings pitched buried relievers far down on the chart. By not multiplying you could argue that relievers bubbled up a little too high on the list, but I was less likely to miss some reliever with the pitchers sorted in this order.

So without further ado, here is the rosters for your 2005 Swing Kids:

Jorge Posada (NYY - C) - My second overall pick and perhaps drafted a little too high. Last year I got killed with unproductive catchers. This year I vowed not to let that happen

K. Cash (TB - C) - OK, so Cash was one of the lame catchers I had last-year. He was a very late-round pickup and at that point all of the remaining catchers were awful.

Mi. Sweeney (KC - 1B) - God I hope they don't let him play in the field any more than he has to. If he sticks with being DH I figure there's that much less of a chance of him hurting himself. If I can get 400 plate appearances out of him I'll be happy.

J. Cantu (TB - 2B,3B) - A late-round pickup. Honestly, who would draft anyone from the D-Rays before round 15?

J. Crede (CWS - 3B) - This was a guy I drafted based entirely off of my computed draft sheet, not from any first-person knowledge. If you asked me to pick his mug out of a lineup, I couldn't do it.

Á. Berroa (KC - SS) - I really wanted to steer clear of any Devil Rays, Tigers and Royals as much as possible. But as a mid-round pick when all of the most productive middle-infielders were gone, Berroa could work out. I have to think that somewhere between his rookie campaign and his awful sophomore year lies the real Berroa.

J. Gibbons (Bal - 1B,OF) - Roster-filler

R. Adams (Tor - SS) - See Jay Gibbons

G. Sheffield (NYY - OF) - I know, I know. I said to myself I wasn't going to draft a bunch of old guys. As great as Sheffield was for me last year, he was hurt and he's on the wrong side of the age-curve. But there he was in round 6. I couldn't just let him go by? That's leaving .300/35/110 on the table! I couldn't let him go by?! Could I?

J. Damon (Bos - OF) - Here's hoping that Jesus, er, Johnny has another year in him like last year.

S. Finley (LAA - OF) - Yes I know that Mr. Finley is old. But he is also a freak of nature and has somehow managed to remain extremely productive for a long time. I was thrilled to get him

T. Nixon (Bos - OF) - Probably one of the best names in baseball. He was almost worth drafting for that alone.

F. Catalanotto (Tor - OF) - See Jay Gibbons

E. Durazo (Oak - Util) - I had to get at least one Athletic. Unfortunately it wasn't Eric Chavez.

R. Johnson (NYY - P) - My first pick. I had to get one super-star pitcher. Since our league does a down-and-back style draft I had the next immediate pick and spent an awfully long time thinking about picking up Curt Schilling to boot (see Jorge Posada)

T. Percival (Det - P) - In the real-world the Angels made the right move by letting Percival and his increasing salary and declining skills walk. In fantasy-baseball land he's still gotta be good for 30+ saves and a good pile of K's

K. Millwood (Cle - P) - A good-enough addition to the rotation and a mid-round pick I was happy to land.

B. Ryan (Bal - P) - Should be the closer in Baltimore. They should be close enough in enough games that he should get about 30 saves.

E. Guardado (Sea - P) - Yeah yeah yeah. Another old guy. Sure everyday-Eddie could turn out to be a bust and never pitch again. But if he can come back healthy enough to close for the M's I should have enough K's, WHIP, ERA and Saves from Ryan and Percival to have a good staff.

P. Byrd (LAA - P) - See Kevin Millwood

M. Timlin (Bos - P) - This year we added 'holds' as a new category in our fantasy league. Timlin is in the small group of guys who are practically guaranteed to get a pile of holds.

W. Miller (Bos - P) - Of the new additions to the Red Sox rotation, he is the weakest. I really wanted to get Matt Clement, but as a number five started Miller should do...or I'll cut him.

O. Hernández (CWS - P) - Sure El Duque ain't what he used to be, but he should be an adequate space-filler.

A Mover And A Shaker

It's been quite a while since my last post--mostly due to the craziness that comes from buying and selling a house in the middle of a white-hot real estate market.

Getting our house ready has been a wonderful exercise in the types of lies adults tell one another. In order to present our current house as spacious and livable we have had to put in a Herculean effort over the last week to move most of our stuff off-site. Presenting our house is not about describing our lives, it's about describing a kind of life one could have in this living space. But the truth is that anyone who is buying a house in this market probably has lots of stuff--a consequence of being a participant in the modern consumer society. Realistically no one could really live a life so spartan, clean and presentable as the one we are portraying for today's open house.

Similarly, when we looked at the house we bought we tried to keep this in mind, but the presentation by the seller greatly enhanced our feeling that our new home was spacious. In the new house we could have a neater, more organized life in the new house instead of living in sprawling clutter.

The pessimist in me believes that it's only a matter of time before we acquire more possessions which will prompt us to look for yet a bigger house once again. But if there is one thing I've learned in the last week of hyper-accelerated home improvement, is that I've been pretty lazy getting our house in order. For an organizationally-oriented personality like me the investment of a little time each weekend to "take care of business" pays off big dividends. While I understand that the fictional life portrayed in open-houses is non-existant, there is a measure of satisfaction in getting close.

Quick Notes

Some of my most creative baseball thinking happens in March. But after going to an open-house on Sunday any baseball content in my brain has been replaced almost wholesale by thoughts housing, contractors and financing. Yes I'm going to explore new levels of property-backed debt in an effort to pursue the American dream of a pot roast on every stove and 2.5 kids. Our offer was accepted on a new house that we absolutely love and so we are now in a mad scramble to prepare our current house for sale.

All of that means less time for baseball. Fortunately I have a very understanding wife who is okay with me disappearing for six to eight hours the day before the first open house to attend my fantasy baseball league's draft. And once we run out of boxes to pack for the evening and Audrey has gone to bed I have managed to get some quality time in on the laptop preparing for Draft Day. I'm optimistic that I will be able to show up with something prepared rather than a freshly-purchased fantasy guide from the local 7-11.

Act Your Age (Pt. III)

My original question was "do players follow a general aging pattern with respect to playing time?" To answer this question we first looked at very general trends. In the last installment we explored this question along a temporal dimension, focusing on the last forty years of baseball. Today I want to see how aging differs over a positional dimension.

To start, I created some graphs of average games played, by age for each position. Each graph has a line for every five-year period explored. Here they are by position:
First basemen:




Second basemen:




Third basemen:




Shortstops:




Catchers:




Outfielders:




What is interesting is how wild the variation is for 1B and 2B versus the other positions. Between the ages of 26 and 34 all other positions, other than OF, don't show any particular trend over time--just noisy consistency. Now outfielders are another story. Note how far off of the bottom outfielders fall in average number of games since 1995. What can possibly explain the precipitous drop-off? One guess is the heavy increase in platooning outfielders. But is it enough to cause an average drop of twenty games?

This final chart looks at average playing time by position since 2000. Clearly designated hitters are in a category by themselves. Like outfielders in the previous graph, this probably reflects the DH platoon situation many clubs face. Additionally inter-league play eats into their playing time.




What can we conclude from all of these graphs and numbers? The only certain conclusion is that any trends about age only apply at a very gross level. We can say that players tend to get a steady amount of playing time between the ages 26 and 34 with a sharp drop-off thereafter.

How will this affect my strategy on Draft Day? I'm definitely going to be very wary of drafting anyone over 34. When looking at players like Gary Sheffield or Steve Finley I would think twice about the inevitable effects of aging. He's had a great career, but when will Father Time finally catch up? On the other hand, if we have learned anything from this exercise it is that baseball tends to have more exceptions than rules.

Why BP Rocks

This morning the line at the local coffee joint was huge. I knew I had a good ten-minute wait from enqueueing to getting my morning go-juice so I cracked open my phone-book sized 2005 Baseball Prospectus to pass the time. Lucky for me the canned music covered up my snorting laughter when I read a passage in which the BP boys described the Angels decision to move Mo Vaughn to from DH to first base akin to "putting a glove on a jelly donut". That's funny.

BP!

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by livollmers.

After a teeth-gnashing February, I managed to finally track down a copy of the elusive 2005 Baseball Propectus. Oh Amazon! How you have failed me! Oh Elliot Bay Books! How you have won me over again!

When I checked out I saw two other people pickup up their copy. If you don't have yours yet, you'd better get cracking!