Statistics

Some of my Tiger blogging brethren have clever names for their link round up posts, like Bless You Boys “Like Stripes on the fur coat of a Tiger” or Mack Avenue Tigers “Bunt Singles” or Roar of the Tigers “Pug Marks.” Here’s my foray and we’ll call it Junkballing:

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Lee Panas at Detroit Tiger Tales consistently produces interesting analysis.  Now he’s working on a study about consistency.  Fans love guys who they perceive as consistent performers, and tend to get infuriated with streak hitters (at least during the cold streaks).  It turns out that the fans are on to something as Lee found that consistent players have better results. 

But…there’s always a but.

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There are a few items that didn’t fit into the other posts about the outfield park factors that I wanted to wrap up.
First I wanted to acknowledge some other work that was done. Chone calculated outfield park factors in the fall of 2006. I either missed this or completely forgot having [...]

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Earlier in the week, I questioned the widely held belief of whether with an outfield like Comerica Park’s the Tigers should have 2 centerfielder-types to man the large left and center fields. Using park factors and looking at the rate at which balls in the air drop in for hits, we saw that fewer [...]

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“How big is it?”
You need 3 center fielders to cover all the ground out there
Okay, as a joke it’s awful, but it is a common statement amongst Tigers fans. At the very least the belief is that multiple center fielder type players are required to man left and center fields. When you look [...]

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Over the last month or so, David Pinto has released the majority of his studies using his probabilistic model of range (PMR). Today we’ll delve into the Tigers defense using this advanced metric.
I’ve explained PMR in the past, but a refresher is probably worthwhile. The PMR model uses data play by play data [...]

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Last week one of my favorite publications showed up on my doorstep - The Bill James Handbook. This year’s version doesn’t disappoint. I’ve already dropped references to +/- fielding metrics which are an important reference point for evaluating defense. The usual assortment of win shares, park factors, player stats, and projections are [...]

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I love looking at spray charts of batted balls and seeing where hitters have success. I’m funny like that. Fortunately Dan Fox, proprietor of his own blog and writer for Baseball Prospectus has released an application that shows ball in play distributions for the last 4 years and he just released the updated [...]

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All season, reader Sam Hoff has been calculating the team’s performance over 18 game stretches. Why 18? Because it represents 1/9th, or one inning of the season. Here is his 9th inning report. Thanks to Sam for his contributions all season
The 9th Inning is over.
Each 18 games represent 1 inning of [...]

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Dan Fox at Baseball Prospectus recently did a post where he used the enhanced gameday (aka pitch/fx) data to categorize hitters by eye. He broke hitters down into the following groups and subsequently created some pretty slick graphs.

Square: This is the new metric, defined as the percentage of pitches in the strike zone swung [...]

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Sam Hoff has been breaking down how the Tigers do in each 18 games stretch of the season, as 18 games is 1/9th of the season, or 1 inning. The 8th inning includes games through Monday night.
The 8th Inning is over.
Each 18 games represent 1 inning of a baseball season. The Tigers record so [...]

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