Ephemera...
My wife is having a slow day at work, so she's come up with a couple of the following...well, sports oddities and/or random bits of trivia...
The following was ganked from Wikipedia...
Kurt Russell is an FAA licensed private pilot holding single/multi-engine and instrument ratings. He is a New England Patriots football fan, attending Super Bowl XLII and sitting in a skybox with Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots team.I suppose this means we can forgive him Tango & Cash for this.
Coach abuse
The official scoring was a 9-0 loss for Kawamoto Technical High School in Japan, but reality was far different. According to this Reuters report, the Kawamoto coach threw in the towel with one out in the bottom of the second inning with only one out while trailing 66-0.
You read that right. 66-0.
He was worried about the health of his pitcher who had already thrown roughly 250 pitches. His statement - "At that pace the pitcher would have thrown around 500 pitches in four innings. ..There was a danger he could get injured."
Nice to see he was so concerned.
Two things to consider here...
One - why didn't the coach bring in a reliever...particularly if he was so concerned.
Two - the kid gave up 26 runs in the first. In the second he gave up 40, and got only one out. He thinks if he left this kid in that he would only have thrown 500 pitches? Was he relying on the opponents tiring out? Assuming for 250 in only an inning and a third, the kid was actually on a pace to throw 940 pitches over five innings.
And for anyone wondering - that's an ERA of 446.62.
The return of my obscure statistic...
Through the first one-tenth of the Red Sox 2008 season, David "Big Papi" Ortiz has been a virtual black hole in the line-up. He has barely hit, and when he has there has been little to no power.
Last year as Julio Lugo had a season that was a complete statistical anomaly, scoring and driving in a fair number of runs in spite of struggling at the plate through most of the season, I chose to look at batter production from a different angle. My thought, presented in a blog post at the end of last June, went as follows...
In light of Baseball's predilection towards the mathematic, production is gaged often in arcane ways - Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched (WHIP), On Base Percentage combined with Slugging Percentage (OPS).While I don't think it's going to reflect well on Big Papi through the end of the Yankees series like it did for Lugo last year, I find it a curious stat and it tells me who manages to cross the plate, or help others cross the plate the most.
I present another way. Something a little less arcane, and maybe a little more accurate in regards to a player's production - Runs Scored and Runs Batted In Per Game, or as I call it; RSBIG. Yes, it does cause for a "production overlap," but it also gives a sense of how much of the scoring the player has been involved in.
All players below have played a minimum of ten games...
1. JD Drew - 1.85
2. M. Ramirez - 1.82
3. K. Youkilis - 1.56
4. S. Casey - 1.00
5. J. Ellsbury - 0.93
6. D. Pedroia - 0.76
7. D. Ortiz - 0.75
8. J. Varitek - 0.63
9. C. Crisp - 0.54
10. J. Lugo - 0.44
Take what you will from this. I just feel it's an interesting way to look at offensive production.
Stumble It!
4 comments:
Three notes, one for each section:
#1) You can't knock Tango & Cash. That movie was great. It gave birth to the term, FUBAR.
#2) I'm completely baffled at that Kawamoto story. That's like taking Tylenol after you've had a headache for three months because you're afraid your headache is going to last too long. I'm just glad I don't have the kid on my fantasy team.
#3) I like the RSBIG. I believe they do have something similar, though. They measure Production by adding RBIs and runs and subtracting out home runs to avoid double counting.
The thing about Production is that I thought I had invented this stat when I derived it trying to come up with a stat that could determine how worthy someone of an MVP award. I sadly found it that this had already existed.
Just so you know, RE 1 - talk to any career military, FUBAR long predated Tango & Cash - from the BBC -
The F of the f-word also appears in various quasi-military acronyms most of which can be traced back to and may even have been spawned by the second world war. There is 'FUBBED up' - 'F****d Up Beyond Belief'; FUBAR - 'F****d Up Beyond All Recognition'; FUNDY - 'F****d Up, Not Dead Yet' - as used on the notes of patients in hospitals who were, well... FUNDY. There is also: 'NFW' - 'No F***ing Way'; and 'SNAFU - 'Situation Normal, All F****d Up'. This last one is reputed to be the origin of 'naff', which was popularised in Britain in the 1970s programme Porridge, and reportedly used by Princess Anne6. In recent years, it has also come into gay parlance to disparagingly refer to heterosexuals - standing for 'not available for f***ing' or, less commonly, 'not a f***ing fairy'.
2) I can't believe the kid was still in there after giving up 26 in the first.
3) What I would like to do with the stat at some point with both that adjustment and adjusting for at bats that don't result in hits, but do result in runs.
The idea behind mine allows for double dipping in as much as the following -
Once I am able to account for sac flies and such, consider this -
Say JD Drew gets on base, Lugo hits into a fielder's choice, Drew is safe at second, then Ellsbury hits a double to the warning track and gets the RBI.
Assuming Drew would not have scored if he was still on first, then what Lugo did, pushing the runner over, was just as important to the hit that got the RBI, therefore Lugo was integral to the production of said run. In the end, that's what I'm looking for from this stat.
Sure, Manny gets 100...130 RBI's in a season, but who put those guys into scoring position? When you wonder about the fact that someone might put one of their teammates into scoring position, how do you quantify it? I think this is a start, but it is by no means complete. Like I said, still trying to refine that.
I stand corrected on the FUBAR thing. I guess I could have assumed that it was of military origin. It seems like almost any term with an athletic or combative association stems from military language.
I see your point with the goal of your stat. I think it could work, but it would be highly difficult to keep track of and calculate. You could simply factor in sac bunts or fielder's choices from box scores, but, then, how do you know which lead to runs? Not all do. You could use quality at-bats, but the same problem applies. Not all quality at-bats lead to runs. Perhaps you could find a percentage of these things that result in runs and universally apply it. For example, if 50% of all sac bunts result in a run, then you could factor that 50% into your calculation. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be progress.
It's a difficult thing because the very nature of what I am looking at requires double dipping.
Just because Ortiz gets the RBI when Ellsbury scores the run, it doesn't mean that Pedroia didn't have a hand in the creation of that run. Ideally, what I am looking for is who has the biggest hand in producing runs in a game.
The hardest part really is going to be refining for the sacrifices and fielder's choices, which requires a lot of time to scour box scores. It might be something that I revisit at the end of the season as a big project, and then next season I try to track it weekly.
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