skyking162

I’ve contributed a lot to my new home this week. If you haven’t been over there or haven’t created an account, what are you waiting for? I mean, you’re reading this right now…

What I’ve written about this week:

• Carlos Delgado is so obviously not the NL MVP. Heck he’s at best the fourth-best option from his own team. And Carlos Beltran, well, he actually a pretty good pick if you disqualify Albert Pujols for some dumb reason.
• What if RBIs measured real offensive production? Well, for one, you wouldn’t see Ryan Howard’s name on the leader board.
• I’m quite proud of this pseudo-study of pitchers who have posted low ERAs with crappy K/BB ratios over the past five years. As you might expect, it’s tough to do and even harder to repeat. That’s bad news for Edwin Jackson and Gregory Smith, and I would be shocked not to see Jackson traded this off-season (and maybe even Smith).
• One of my favorite activities is to pivot-table my way through Justin’s position player stats. Here’s the September 5th version.
• The Padres pitchers are actually much more to blame for the team’s struggles than the hitters. PETCO Park, anyone? And their offense has been just as productive as the Rockies’. Bet you didn’t expect that, huh?
• I tracked down five interesting football articles.
• As mentioned by others, Cliff Lee’s faced much easier competition this year than most other AL starters, including Roy Halladay.

Popularity: 52% [?]

As of today, I’m going to do the majority of my blogging for Beyond the Boxscore, which is part of the SBNation blog network. I’m excited about the move for a few reasons:

• There are three other writers over there right now, with the hope of adding one or two more for weekly columns. Not only will the other writers fill in the gaps when I inevitably go dark for a few days, but being part of a group should be more motivation for me to keep things rolling. I especially enjoy talking baseball with RJ, who runs a phenomenal Rays blog.
• The SBNation software is state of the art, and they have a full time tech team working on improvements. For users, that means nested comments, the ability to jump through new comments with simple keystrokes, front-page listings of posts with comments you haven’t read yet, avatars, signatures, and fan-generated side-bar posts. It’s like a blog and a discussion forum in one, put together in an intuitive way. Oh, and you can join any SBNation blog community with a single user-name — almost all MLB, NFL, and NBA teams are covered, with many other blogs for college sports, the NHL, soccer, and golf, and mixed martial arts.
• Beyond the Boxscore currently receives decent traffic, but the potential is there to make it a large, intelligent community. I look forward to helping mold the growth over the next year.

My first post will be up on Monday, and I’ll be sure to link to it. But if you haven’t been to BtB (as I’ll call it going forward) go have a look and maybe sign up for an account. And yes, the limes will be going with me.

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We need more people to do more things like this: a reader over at Lookout Landing compiled a nice list of links to well-written articles about smart baseball analysis. These articles are good refreshers for uber geeks, great primers for newbies, and (mostly) excellent examples for everyone about how to write well. Head on over, unless you can’t stand the Mariner slant.

Mike Fast’s PITCHf/x article database over at The Hardball Times should also get more use.

Popularity: 53% [?]

Those Super Duper Better-Than-VORP Stats I mentioned last week have been updated. (That link will always take you to the most recently updated numbers.) Justin also has some Cy Young and MVP lists in his most recent blog post. Grady Sizemore is the only runaway leader at this point.

Popularity: 53% [?]

Someone at a discussion board made the assertion that setup men are, in general, more valuable than closers because they pitch in tight games, while closers often “protect” three-run leads. I’m certainly not going to defend the misuse of bullpen aces, but closers most certainly do pitch in their fair share of tight situations.

The chart below is the 25 relievers with at least 30 innings pitched who have the highest LIs. LI stands for leverage index, a measure of the importance of a particular plate appearance. An LI of two means that the situation is twice as important as the average situation. The LI listed below is the average of LI across all of a pitcher’s batters faced. Thanks, Fangraphs.

Name		SV	LI
Fran Rodriguez	45	2.55
B.J. Ryan	22	2.34
Brian Wilson	32	2.33
C.J. Wilson	24	2.29
George Sherrill	31	2.26
Huston Street	18	2.15
Kevin Gregg	25	2.13
Trevor Hoffman	24	2.01
Kerry Wood	24	2.00
Brian Fuentes	21	1.98
Ryan Franklin	14	1.98
Heath Bell	0	1.91
Salomon Torres	22	1.91
Brad Lidge	28	1.88
Joe Nathan	31	1.88
Mariano Rivera	28	1.88
Matt Capps	17	1.88
Francis Cordero	22	1.83
Hideki Okajima	1	1.83
Joakim Soria	32	1.82
Brandon Lyon	24	1.80
Takashi Saito	17	1.79
Tyler Walker	0	1.76
Troy Percival	25	1.75
Jon Papelbon	31	1.75

Notice how only three relievers with fewer than 14 saves make the list? The lowest LI of any reliever with at least ten saves is 1.42 (Brandon Morrow). The lowest LI of any reliever with at least 20 saves is 1.62 (Jose Valverde).

Here are the relievers with at most five saves who have pitched in the most important situations:

Name		SV	LI
Heath Bell	0	1.91
Hideki Okajima	1	1.83
Tyler Walker	0	1.76
Dan Wheeler	4	1.66
Kyle McClellan	1	1.61
Scott Downs	5	1.58
Scot Shields	2	1.55
J.C. Romero	1	1.52
Jim Johnson	1	1.48
Guillermo Mota	1	1.48
Chad Bradford	0	1.48
Frank Francisco	0	1.47
Octavio Dotel	1	1.45
Luis Ayala	0	1.45
Chad Qualls	2	1.44
Joaquin Benoit	1	1.43
Alan Embree	0	1.43
Saul Rivera	0	1.43
Doug Brocail	2	1.42
Renyel Pinto	0	1.41
Scott Linebrink	1	1.38
Eddie Guardado	3	1.37
Brad Ziegler	1	1.37
Tony Pena	1	1.37
Damaso Marte	5	1.36

It’s definitely true that bullpen aces are misused, but closers still tend to have the most important role given the current bullpen usage patterns.

Popularity: 57% [?]