Posts

As I’ve stated in the past, my annual goal is to read 24 books each year. While that’s a slippery goal as not all books are made the same — it’s certainly true that I’m hesitant to take on large books because of this goal — it still keeps me reading, and that’s the intention behind it. This year, I also tracked what genre I’d consider each book to be in, and what medium (digital or physical) I used to read the book. I don’t really use audiobooks, so those aren’t a consideration. Note that genres are not exclusive; sometimes I would assign multiple genres to the same book if it felt right. In all, I read 25 books by 15 different authors. Among those, 4 were physical books, while all the others I read digitally. My most popular genres were: Science Fiction (8 books) Fantasy (7 books) Literary Fiction (6 books) And finally, the list itself! ...

That’s right, I’ll be the first to put down my foot and say The Lord of the Rings is actually really good. ...

This Blogmas experience proved to be a fun, engaging, and informative project. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I’m glad I dove in and made it happen.1 ...

Hot on the heels of Ultimate Zone Rating is another tool with the same goal: measure a player’s defensive contributions in terms of runs saved. This other statistic, Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), doesn’t just have a better name, but in my experience is favored over UZR in most situations. ...

Thanks to the wonderful book The Last Nine Innings by Charles Euchner1 I had an early introduction to some advanced statistics, at least those that were popular a few years into the 21st century. Among these was Ultimate Zone Rating, a first crack at trying to measure how well a player defends their position. ...

Leading into the home stretch, let’s discuss some defensive statistics. As a category, these represent recent innovations in baseball, as defense is the most dynamic aspect of the game. Players can change where they are positioned, which affects their ability to get to a ball. As we gather more data — ball speed off the bat and launch angle — we can better analyze defensive ability. But it’s still messy. ...

We’ve already addressed the concept behind WAR (Wins Above Replacement) in the abstract and for offensive players in particular. Today, we’ll consider how we quantify runs for pitchers and overview calculating their WAR. ...

Relief pitchers can enter the game in very different situations, and that should be accounted for when evaluating their performance. Coming in to clean up a 12-0 victory (or defeat) is different than coming in during a close, tense game with a lot on the line. We measure this disparity using Leverage Index (LI). ...

ERA+ is a funny, messy statistic. Unlike OPS+, it doesn’t tell us how much better a player is than the league: it instead tells us how much worse the league is than the player. This ignores our intuition and causes unnecessary confusion. Furthermore, it makes it harder to use as a tool for direct comparison: someone with a 200 ERA+ is not twice as good as someone with a 150 ERA+, while that would effectively be true with OPS+ (and similar offensive statistics.) ...

FIP is a cool, clever, and simple statistic to try and normalize how we work with ERA in a way that simply ignores defensive factors. However, we can ignore, or normalize for, at least one other factor to adjust the comparison. ...