Baseball Prospectus 2013 , livre ebook

Baseball Prospectus
2013
Baseball Prospectus

2013

THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE 2013 SEASON
EDITED BY KING KAUFMAN AND CECILIA M. TAN
R.J. Anderson • Michael Bates • Craig Brown • Russell A. Carleton Derek Carty • Jason Cole • Jason Collette • Bradford Doolittle • Ken Funck • Jay Jaffe King Kaufman • Matthew Kory • Ben Lindbergh • Ian Miller • Sam Miller Rob McQuown • Bill Parker • Jason Parks • Daniel Rathman • Josh Shepardson Adam Sobsey • Paul Sporer • Cecilia M. Tan • Doug Thorburn • Jason Wojciechowski Colin Wyers • Geoff Young
Copyright © 2013 by Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 978-1-118-45919-5 (pbk); 978-1-118-45920-1 (ebk); 978-1-118-45921-8 (ebk); 978-1-118-45918-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Foreword, Jeff Luhnow
Preface, King Kaufman and Cecilia M. Tan
Statistical Introduction, Colin Wyers
2012: The Year in Sabermetrics, Colin Wyers
Teams
Arizona Diamondbacks
Atlanta Braves
Baltimore Orioles
Boston Red Sox
Chicago White Sox
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Cleveland Indians
Colorado Rockies
Detroit Tigers
Houston Astros
Kansas City Royals
Los Angeles Angels
Los Angeles Dodgers
Miami Marlins
Milwaukee Brewers
Minnesota Twins
New York Mets
New York Yankees
Oakland Athletics
Philadelphia Phillies
Pittsburgh Pirates
San Diego Padres
San Francisco Giants
Seattle Mariners
St. Louis Cardinals
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers
Toronto Blue Jays
Washington Nationals
Sabermetrician Wanted, Must Have MFA, Russell A. Carleton
The Baseball Prospectus Top 101 Prospects, Jason Parks
Team Name Codes
PECOTA Leaderboards
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index
Foreword
Jeff Luhnow, General Manager, Houston Astros
After hiring Mike Fast and Kevin Goldstein away from Baseball Prospectus and into the front office of the Houston Astros, I assumed I would be persona non grata among the BP editors for having stripped them of two incredibly talented individuals. I was wrong. Instead, I was asked to write the foreword for this year’s annual! I immediately accepted. I feel honored, as it is a publication that not only sits on my shelf, but is used frequently as a reference throughout the year. It is a good sign that BP is proud of its alumni and supports these individuals as they seek to accomplish career goals. This is sound human-resource management, and something one should expect from a progressive, forward-looking operation.
So what can I say that can possibly add to the robust analysis and insights consistently provided by this book? I think what most analytically oriented baseball fans want to know is how major-league teams develop and use information to make decisions, and how that is changing over time.
Much has been made about the divide between those people driven by statistics and those people driven by first-hand experience. This type of controversy provides as much fodder for bloggers and sportswriters as a good old-fashioned bench-clearing brawl. Of course, there are people who lean more heavily on their intuition and experience in making recommendations and decisions, and there are those who rely on the comfort of analysis and past performance. In general, though, the gulf between the two sides is exaggerated. All teams have experienced scouts and coaches who use their best judgment to evaluate players and situations. All teams have at least one person—and in most cases several people—dedicated to crunching numbers and providing analysis. Therefore, all teams use a variety of information gathered from a variety of sources and methods to make baseball decisions. That is a fact.
Each team finds itself in a unique position and oftentimes the right decision for one team is not the right decision for another. What makes sense for the Houston Astros in 2013 is not the same as what makes sense for the Texas Rangers. Each team operates in a distinct market with its own portfolio of player contracts and prospects in the system. Even two teams that have similar resources and are in similar markets will see things differently because of the relative strengths and weaknesses of their farm systems and the state of their big-league rosters.
One thing that I think many fans underestimate is how difficult it is to make many baseball decisions. Why? It’s because we are trying to predict the future—and very few things are more uncertain than what is to happen. It’s hard enough to agree on what already happened (hence the vigorous debates about MVP, Cy Young, and Hall of Fame qualifications). It’s an order of magnitude more difficult to predict what will happen—especially in a game with so many variables, that takes place over the course of a 162-game season. It’s so hard, in fact, that it’s easy to get discouraged and give up trying because of how often one will be wrong. People have always said baseball is a humbling game—a successful batter will fail 70 percent or more of the time, and everyone eventually goes through slumps. The same can be said of front offices. Most of us get it wrong—often—and it can be not only humbling, but discouraging.
The first time I saw the BP PECOTA projections, I realized that someone out there understood the inherent variability in attempting to predict the future, but they also understood the value of attempting to do it in a systematic and thoughtful way. What made the PECOTA projections so interesting to me and others was how clearly the system described the different types of outcomes. Clearly the people behind it had a good sense of variability and value and used both to make the predictions. Why? I’ve never spoken to Nate Silver about it, but I’m sure it’s because he looked closely at the past and tried as best as he could to explain what happened and how that affects what might happen in the future. Nate, as we all know, took his show to the political arena and is now widely recognized as the most reliable forecaster of national elections—having run the table last November by predicting all 50 states correctly in the presidential election. If only it were that easy in baseball!
So, as you read this book and watch the upcoming baseball season, keep in mind that what each player will do is essentially a roll of the dice: Some (few) will roll a double six while some (few) will roll the snake eyes. Most will be somewhere in between. The difference between baseball players and dice is that every player is unique and changing all the time. In order to best understand the possible outcomes, you need to have a good sense of what outcomes have occurred in the past, as well as how each player may be changing as he ages and becomes more or less skilled at various parts of the game of baseball. This book is a good place to start, so enjoy it, and we hope to see you at the ballpark!
Preface
Two decades ago, a movie came out called 1991: The Year Punk Broke . The title was amusing to those of us who thought punk broke in 1977 and had been tickled in 1991 when it came back around for our nephews and nieces. Nostalgia cycles are so quick these days, we thought.
If 1991 was the year punk broke, 2012 was the year analytics broke: A huge crowd came on board a ship that had been sailing for a long time. Welcome aboard, world.
Nate Silver, longtime Baseball Prospectus writer and the inventor of the PECOTA forecasting system that’s at the heart of this book, was the breakout media star of 2012, correctly predicting the outcome of the presidential election in all 50 states on his New York Times blog—one state better than his 2008 performance. Silver became the nation’s foremost expert on political polling by applying sabermetrics to politics. He did the math, and it made his analysis much sharper than that of a thousand pundits extrapolating from their assumptions.
Sound familiar, baseball fans?
In baseball, we may have all agreed long ago that the old scouts vs. stats war had been overstated, even as talk of it flared