The cards arrived today, one day earlier than last year.

Are the ABL reliever usage limits realistic? One way to try to answer this is to ask the question: “What percentage of 2008 MLB relief appearances would have violated the 2009 ABL rules?” If the answer is “0%,” then I’d say the ABL rules are too lenient in allowing relievers to pitch a lot. At [...]

The new Triple Play Baseball cards arrived in upstate New York today.

A companion to the average batter card, here is the average pitcher card. This is a bit of a hack—there’s no adjustment between starters & relievers. The pool is 107 pitchers, made up from the best of the draft, the Perfectos, and most pitchers from the teams I’ve played so far. vs L vs R [...]

Both pitching squads were sharp. Simmons homered in the 3rd to provide the edge for the Cards. Yankees 000 100 000 1 4 1 Cardinals 011 000 000 2 5 1 W: McGlothen, L: Medich Series stands at 3-2 New York.

Following up on the previous post about home-field advantage, I got the MLB batting splits for the last five years from BR.com, which are summarized in the table below. (Here are the 2007 splits.) The biggest effect is that the home team strikes out less. The next largest is more walks for the home team. [...]

The TPB/ABL hit & run rules can be confusing, because the various effects are scattered all over the charts & instructions. This is an attempt to gather all the ABL H&R effects into a single “cheat sheet.” (Updated 2008-05-24.)

I adjusted my rating method to take average pitcher symbols into account on the batters’ cards. As expected, the effect is most profound for guys with big walk & HR ranges, as can be seen for a few guys in the table below. “Before” means pitcher symbols were not taken into account; “after” means they [...]

For a calculation, I need to know the symbol content of the average pitcher. I did the starters and relievers separately, using the ABL pitchers. Say that of 53 likely ABL starters, 19 have a B symbol. That means that the average starter has 19/53 (0.36) of a B. The chart below shows the averages [...]

This is a first step toward measuring defensive in terms of offense. The question to answer is: how much good hitting makes up for poor fielding? Or, to look at it from the other side, to what extent does superior glove work compensate for light hitting? There are two components to defense: error and range. [...]

Using the rating data (the best half of the free agents plus the Titusville roster), an average batter card can be calculated. vs L vs R ——— ——— 0 – 10 Crazy 0 – 10 11 – 70 Error 11 – 70 71 – 80 LO 71 – 80 81 – 96 Park 81 – [...]

More data from the Deep Engine. All results are based on ten million trials. Here’s the results for all 30 parks from the TPB 2007 data: power: 5 4 3 2 1 homerun: 48.55% 32.38% 19.18% 9.26% 3.11% caught: 47.55% 63.72% 76.92% 86.84% 92.99% foul: 3.90% 3.90% 3.90% 3.89% 3.90% As expected, no significant changes [...]

For the ABL draft & season I’ll develop some ratings based on the card ranges. The batter’s card is pretty straightforward. The ranges can be used to directly compute things like OBP & Slugging that are independent of pitcher-card rolls. The one vital correction, however, is the power, which will determine how many HR result [...]

The Bill James Handbook lists Range Factor, which is the number of Successful Chances (Putouts plus Assists) times nine divided by the number of Defensive Innings Played. Does this statistic correlate with the TPB range ratings? I picked a couple of the more important defensive positions and compared the 2007 Range Factors for starters with [...]

I found a site with lots of small baseball-card pictures. The guy uses them for display in the Strat-O-Matic software. For a lot of the old TPB cards I can’t remember the guys or have never heard of them. I thought it would be cool to have a searchable database of these photos, so I [...]

It’s October, so let’s have some World Series action, seventies style. 1973: the Oakland A’s take on the New York Mets.    

I’ve got a better idea. I can tile them ten to a page, baseball-card size, and I won’t need any guide lines. 2.5+2.5+3.5=8.5 Since there are different numbers of cards on the page, need to cut them all out first (card_cutter_10up.pl), then paste them together in groups of ten (card_paster_10up.pl). Printing from Preview, the dpi [...]

Goal: convert TPB PDFs to baseball-card size (2.5×3.5) with a layout compatible with batch cutting.

This time I looked at how often runners on first were thrown out at third on a single. Again, no other baserunners. Not counted: Error on the play at third. (Errors allowing the batter to advance past first are OK.) Runner on first out at second or home. Runner safe at home. Baserunner hit by [...]

The ABL simplifies runner advancement on singles. I think the only way to go from first to third on a single is on a hit-and-run. This made me wonder about how often runners advance past second on a single. Here’s what I got from the Retrosheet event files for 2006. (single_first.pl) These are singles with [...]