D

Nice piece, Evan. I have to admit that after about 10 minutes of utter glee after the last out yesterday, it did occur to me that if the season ended today, the Rangers would draw the Yankees in the first round. But, as you say, that’s my birthright! I told my sister on Saturday morning that it’s a good thing it’s the players and not the fans who had to play that night’s game because if it was us, we’d just all stand on the field for 9 innings crying. LOVE how this team turns the page.

@Evan: Very good read Evan. Sorry I’ve missed the last couple of games. Been in San Antonio.

I’m excited and appreciate the effort they make and also the effort you and the D Mag team makes to put this forum together. I think this has to be a boost in morale and Ranger interest. This has to exceed even the most ambitious projections in hits. It makes this seem almost like a Big League town.;-))
Good Work, Evan, take a bow!

How is FIP calculated? Never even heard of it. I tried learning the UZR/150 but gave up when the slide rule cracked.

The calculation for FIP is simple: (13*HR+3*BB-2*K)/IP

Oooooooh, I love it when you boys talk numbers. So what is a good overall FIP versus a poor one? I want to learn all I can. Go TEAM!

it seems like it’s on a scale similar to ERA. 5 teams (Braves, Giants, Dodgers, Rockies, Cardinals) have team FIP’s under 4.0. The Rangers stand at 4.54 currently. The Brewers are last at 4.94

so what’s the 13 for?

sunny d lite – glad you enjoyed your first game – a cool one to go to.

adam – all that crap doesn’t take into account how hard the ball is being hit (how many times a it bounces before it reaches the IF, how high it hung in air).

Just see Pedroia’s quote that this staff as opposed to last year hit their spots and didn’t give them anything to hit.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT MISSING BATS, DESPITE WHAT ROB NEYER MIGHT SAY.

you really think the pitching is only marginally better? Wow, it’s true what they say – anything can be spun by anybody.

I love watching this team this year. They play hard, the talent is obvious and the kids are growing up fast. There are things to nitpick about (Hank for instance) but that doesn’t change how much fun this team has been this year. Thanks Rangers, Evan and the rest in the Corner for making this a really fun baseball season.

F NY. We are a BMac meltdown with a 4 run lead from splitting with them. We’re better off playing NY than DET, due to the nature of the park. As Evan has pointed out, we don’t fair so well buddy when the park doesn’t play to the long ball.

I’ll take my chances against alex in October and teixeira when it matters, anyday of the week.

I HOPE we get NYY. Bring them on.

Jack Daddy, you’re right that FIP doesn’t take into account batted ball type (line drive vs. fly ball). But tRA and tRA* over at statcorner do take these into account (as well as park factor), and those values indicate the batted balls against our pitchers should produce, on average, 5.3 runs per game. it is our defense that is making up the difference.

@Jack: gotta love “non-biased” equations.

the weights on the FIP are calculated based on expected run values of each event… that’s why HR’s are weighted 13 and K’s weighted 2 and so forth…

stats are a very useful tool. but you don’t build a hammer. You use a hammer to build a house.

I disagree that feldman has had a ton of balls hit really hard at people. I’ve seen an inordinate amount of broken balls and saw jobs from the guy, and I’ve wactched all but maybe 3 innings he’s pitched this year.

The other problem with this whole, “Defense is the only reason we’ve improved our pitching” theory, is ALSO STAT RELATED. NAMELY, ISN’T THE SAMPLE SIZE BIG ENOUGH NOW THAT YOU CAN’T CALL IT A STATISTICAL QUIRK? You can’t have it both ways.

At the end of the day, doesn’t matter. I’ll take Nippert’s game yesterday over the one last week where he struck out 10. You build your team with those guys and I’ll take my guys that change speeds and hit corners and I’ll make the playoffs for the next 10 years. Is 10 years a big enough sample size?

BTW, adam, this isn’t directed at you, but the collective group thinking on this topic.

while we’re at it screw dustin elf pedroia for good measure. Just because.

yes, walks are down… since that’s a counting stat, it’s more instructive to compare percentages as opposed to totals since we haven’t reached year-end yet.

BB% (i.e., walk percentage) is down to 8.0% this year from 9.4% last year. that’s not a huge difference, but more importantly is that both walks are down and K’s are up, so last year’s 0.49 BB/K was much worse than this year’s 0.37 BB/K.

re: Feldman. yes, he has a lot of broken bats against him this year. this is almost entirely due to his cutter. his cutter his worth 23.4 runs above replacement this year (think Mariano Rivera company). but he only throws his cutter 30% of the time. he throws his fastball nearly 50% of the time, and it’s worth nearly 9 runs BELOW replacement. so in some sense, we’re both right.

Jack Daddy, I was at the game yesterday too… Nippert got hit HARD. Hamilton and Borbon bailed him out numerous times. I would much prefer he miss bats (10 K’s) than get hit hard right at people. He had one bad inning in his previous start and 0 run support… cut that one bad inning in half and get a couple runs, and you’re singing a different tune altogether.

adam – i wrote mine before I saw yours. definitely agree on yesterday.

even after friday, this was definately one of my favorite baseball weekends i can remember.

Solid article… Saturday night was perhaps the best game I’ve ever been to at the Ballpark. Even with a solid number of B(andwagon)oston fans, the place still roared. I’ll be honest, after Friday’s game, I wouldn’t have wanted to roll out of bed the next morning. Hell, I wasn’t looking forward to Saturday night’s game for the simple fact that it had the potential to be the real nail in the coffin, salt in the wound. This team’s ability to put up such a solid performance on Sat. after a horrific collapse is, as Evan stated, what makes this team different than those of the past decade. Here’s hoping we can break that annoying string of playing sub-par versus, well, sub-par opponents.

Smoak won’t be coming up this year. next year at the earliest.

I have to get back to work until game time tonight, will enjoy reading remaining comments. Stats are fun and do prove useful. Not against them, just don’t like to dwell on them as opposed to winning. Lots of these things seem primarily useful in player development and contract negotiations.

Don’t get to see many Ranger games on TV up here (the wife of 34 years says no to the MLB package), so watching the game yesterday on TBS was fun. Nippert makes you nervous but in a better way than Padilla. In that heat, who would have wanted to play the field with that guy pitching?

Let’s have fun and beat the Twins!!

Whoa – I wasn’t saying anything about bringing up Smoak – just glad to see he’s getting his feet under him in AAA after the really slow start there.

Adam D with the line of the month -

“I enjoy watching Michael Young stare down a pitcher like he just impregnated his sister. ”

My two cents – instead of arguing about which is better, can’t we all just agree that both the pitching and D are remarkedly better this year, and both owe big parts of their improvement to the other. The pitchers are working soooo much faster, throwing strikes (and quality ones) and changing speeds/location better than before, and therefore inducing weaker swings, keeping fielders on their toes and alert. The fielders are making both the routine and amazing plays consistantly, which gives them more confidence, and most importantly gives our pitchers more confidence to throw strikes, pitch to contact, and not give in like they have done almost every year.

These things go hand in hand, so to say that it is all defense or all pitching is simply foolish. If baseball could be perfectly explained with numbers only then why play the games?

I go by my own eyesight, which shows me that the pitching has been fantastic, the D suberb, and we sweep the Sox if Hank was sitting on the bench and Crush was in there to stretch on Variteks grounder Friday night. This team will takeoff and run away with the WC as soon as rosters expand on 9/1. I CANT WAIT!!!

for those interested, here’s a very nice (brand new!) article about fielding metrics vs. the naked eye: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/seeing-and-uzr-and-teixeira/

yes, fielding metrics (and a lot of advanced pitching and hitting metrics for that matter too) can paint a fuzzy picture. yes, there is some variation, as there is amongst any statistical sample size. no, they cannot totally be ignored compared with what you see with the naked eye.

@adam D: hope lunch was good.

so what i just read was that it’s a completely objective equation only after a person determines how much a HR is worth? Kind of like a person determining who is an average fielder for the basis of the UZR/150.

on the contrary, it’s an objective equation first, then somebody can scale it up or down to put it on par with other metrics for comparison purposes… say for example you had a pitching stat where the good value was 1, and a really bad value was 2. couldn’t you just multiply the result every time by 3, so the good value was 3, the really bad value was 6, and you could compare it with familiar numbers like ERA?

so, the home run is worth what it’s worth. it’s what they multiply it by that gets it to 13.

the problem comes into play when “somebody” can scale it up or down. that instantly makes the equeation subjective to what a person “thinks”. there’s no interaction with stats like BA or OBP. In the example, you just can’t multiply the result by 3 because sombody has to “set” what is a comparbile multiplier to try to get an apple match an orange. what happens if you didn’t agree with the 3 being used. what happens then?

i don’t think it’s a problem to scale things up or down for comparison purposes. the relative weights for all the coefficients are the same either way. from a mathematician’s point of view, there is no difference in saying x=4 and 4x=16.

ok – enough seamhead/pitching/defense talk.

Let’s talk schedules. Here are some highlights:

LAA – 7 vs. Tex, 10 vs Oak, 3 vs. Tor, 4 vs NYY, 3 vs det, 3 vs Cle, 3 vs Bos, 4 vs KC, 6 vs. Sea

Bos – 9 vs Tor, 6 vs. NYY, 8 vs. ChiSox, 6 vs. TB, 5 vs. Balt, 3 Vs. LAA, 4 vs. KC, 4 vs. Cle.

Thoughts:

1. overall, the easiest of the 3 schedules is LAA by far and the hardest is Boston, also by far.
2. Sea could decide the West, as they play LAA 10 times and the Rangers 11.
3. Roy Halladay could decide the Wildcard, as the Sox have 3 series vs. Tor. Hopefully, Doc pitches in each series.
4. Boston, TB and ChiSox all could do some serious damage to each other.
5. Texas will have to do this at home, as 27 of their 46 remaining games are on road.

Conclusion – I just don’t see us catching the Halos unless we win 6 of the 7 against them. I also see Boston fading and think the fight is between Tex and TB. Hopefully TB and Boston split their 6 games. I see us holding off TB for the WC, with 94 wins (28-18 the rest of the way).

Players to watch the rest of the way:

Torii Hunter, Vlad, Santana, Ortiz, Buchholz, Kinsler, Josh and Frankie and Kazmir/Price.

We know what most of the other Angels/Sox/Rangers will do. These guys are the guys that can swing this thing.

elaborating on my last point:

IF this were to happen – Davis comes back up and he, Kins and Josh replicate their 2008 avg performance, we definitely win WC and probably the division. If 2 of 3 come through, WC is proably ours, but no division. If 1 of the 3 comes through, W/C is a toss up. If they all continue to play like they were before this recent reversal, hello Hot Stove League.

@It’s baseball: I think you’re a little mixed up… x=4 and 4x=16 both mean x=4. where you would change the scale would be 5x=20, but still, x=4. the home run is worth what it’s worth. if you want to scale it to some other metric, nobody has a problem with that. but it was scaled the way it was for direct comparison with ERA, so that people wouldn’t have to memorize or familiarlize themselves with a different scale for each metric. but any way you scale it, x=4.

@Jack Daddy: I appreciate your optimism, I really do but is it realistic for a team that is 16 games over .500 this far in the season to be 10 over the rest of the way? according to PECOTA (see baseball prospectus), the Rangers have a 19% chance of catching the Angels and a 20% chance of winning the wild card, about the same. “how can that be?” you might ask… because we would only have to catch 1 team for the division, but fight off several teams for the wild card. The Red Sox have a 38% chance to win the wild card (precisely because Texas has such a good chance to win their division), and the Rays have a 26% chance at the wildcard. It’s a lot of percentages to split up, which is why the two percentages of the Rangers getting into the playoffs are about equal. Either way, a 40% chance of making the playoffs in any manner this late in the season is something to celebrate.

The 6th reason is that we haven’t ripped off a long win streak since May. Teams routinely have 2-3 per year (even somebody like the Padres). I see an 8 gamer in us, maybe even this week.

elaborating on 6th point –

you know what a 90 win team is? A team with 2 8 game winning streaks, surrounded by .500 baseball. We have 1 more coming due – the STATS/AVERAGES guarantee it .

different team. Feliz (and more imporantly his split finger fastball) is a game changer. Getting 4 innings every 3 days from him equates to 15% of your innings. That’s significant. Right now, he is virtually unntouchable. He changes everything with how we attack a game.

The offense, with Kins and Hammy is NOT the same offense for the first 4 months. If Borbon continues this (and probably more importantly, is given the CHANCE to continue it), then we’re not remotely close to what we were and you can’t model or simulate that. No historical track record to go off. Totally diffenent team now.

Oh yeah, add in Holland. He’s pitching like a staff ace right now. Even if SABRE geeks can successfully argue that Hunter will come back to earth, Holland has ACTUALLY BEEN UNLUCKY and should GET BETTER (see, stats can be a useful TOOL ).

@adam – 7 days ago I would have said we weren’t making the playoffs. I still don’t think we can win division (though our dominance head to head with LAA has me holding out hope), but I am NOT impressed by, or scared of, the Sox. If they are really going to roll with Penny and Tazawa, then “Get your bags ready, it’s on!”

Meanwhile, the ball Oritz hit yeasterday might have been the hardest hit homerun I’ve ever seen in person. That sounded like a cannon blast.

Furthermore, this breaking news just in – Pedroia is major dousche.

My head is going to explode with these stats you can use to prove any point you want…I think we can see with our own eyes the pitching AND defense are better than last year by an astronomical amount. They go hand in hand. Defense makes pitching better and the ability to get soft grounders, etc make defense better.

that’s my point exactly. you CAN’T see everything with your own eyes and be objective about it. as a human, you will always have a relevancy bias. you will choose what you remember most, and the typical human remembers the extremely good and the extremely bad with more weight than the routine. the stats capture the routine with equal weight.

I’m not saying it’s all due to one Mr. Andrus, but he is the biggest statistical upgrade per-position, combined with Mr. Vizquel. But in truth, nearly every defensive position is better than it was last year.

Here is a positional UZR/150 breakdown (2009 values first / 2008 values second)

1B: 1.4 / -4.8
2B: 4.5 / -8.7
3B: -10.8 / -23.4
SS: 11.8 (best in MLB by a lot) / -6.0
LF: -1.6 / -4.7
CF: 6.8 / -8.8
RF: 12.7 / 11.7

does this give any indication of what a tremendous upgrade in defense we’ve seen?

1. Adam – you and I can agree on that!! And listen, i see the improved D (particularly elvis, whose D I was touting since I saw him last year), I just think its both — the D has improved a lot AND the pitching has improved. Some of it is cause and effect, but I think some is unrelated as well.

2. Rangers Fan – I have never like him, just now choosing to be vocal. Reasons for not liking: I think he’s a dousche and a thorn in Ian’s side (who I think is superior as a ballplayer). Reason for now being vocal – now in a race with them, so its personal! plus sat first row yesterday and really had the chance to see him up close. Just don’t like him.

@adam d those are some very enlighening numbers…….CF is the one number that really jumps out as a surprise……..haven’t noticed that nearly as much as the change at short……..
Does 3B numbers indicate that MY might eventaully be looked at to move to first?
other surprise is the mild improvement at 1st….would have though cd is much better than that number….is blalock the reason it is only 1.4

i’ll try to address both CF and 1B…

at 1B, 74 games of CD gives a UZR/150 of -0.7, while Blalock has a 5.7 in 45 games. I’m not sure I can explain this without looking further into the calculations. The only major metric that HB exceeds CD in on a per-inning basis is double play’s turned, and surely that’s not as important for 1B since they are generally only on the receiving end. Otherwise, the two look comparable in most of the counting metrics per-inning, or CD slightly is better, but I can’t explain the disparity in UZR/150. It says Blalock has a better range than CD. However, in 2008, CD rated a 2.2 in 51 games while Blalock rated -16.9 in 34 games. Maybe HB is learning the position better.

In 2008, Josh Hamilton was one of the worst everyday center fielders in the game, rating -17.7 for 111 games, and Marlon Byrd rating 15.3 for 57 games. This year, Hamilton is GREATLY improved, rating 18.8 over 46 games while Marlon Byrd is -0.7 over 72 games (effectively, neutral).

I don’t think you can move MY to 1B.. what about CD and Smoak? And then who would you put at 3B? Despite his shortcomings, I think you have to be happy that he’s an improvement over 3B last year (Hank Blalock, Travis Metcalf, German Duran, Chris Davis, and Ramon Vazquez)

bear in mind, there are always error bars on these statistics…

as for the range, i’m not sure. i don’t really have the time right now to dive into the numbers. i was just taking them from fangraphs.

as for fielding metrics in general, there is a wide consensus that nothing we have right now is anywhere close to optimal. but it certainly quantifies a whole lot more than we could even 5 years ago.

wait… blalock only HITS left handed. he fields right handed.

for all you guys giving up on the division, remember that pitching is what gets you into the playoffs and the angels pitching has not been good.
If you have to score 8 runs a night to win you will hit a slump at some time, the angels cant keep scoring like they are, we have tried it for the last 10 years and should know it wont work.
if they slip even a little we can take the division.