Baseball

I am a fan of the Boston Red Sox, LA Dodgers, and California Angels, but I am also interested in understanding the game. I have thus done a fair amount of analysis. My work is primarily statistical, but not exclusively. The articles here have all been posted to the USENET groups rec.sport.baseball.analysis or rec.sport.baseball.

Major documents

Frequently Asked Questions about the Strike: This is an attempt to clarify many of the issues which come up in discussions of the 1994-1995 strike, including details of the various proposals and the final agreement, and explanation of the economic issues involved. It is posted to rec.sport.baseball monthly and updated frequently.
The Sabermetric Manifesto: Bill James defined sabermetrics as the search for objective knowledge about baseball. This article goes into more detail, explaining how sabermetrics works, and discussing some of its important conclusions.
The Brock2 system (get both C source and documentation as plain text): The Brock2 system, developed by Bill James, projects a player's career from his recent statistics. It doesn't give a perfect projection (both because of imperfections in the system and because of normal human variability), but it is interesting to see what a reasonable career projection would be. How many home runs might Griffey hit in his career?

Analysis of specific subjects

Most of these articles are posted in the original form in which they appeared as articles in rec.sport.baseball or rec.sport.baseball.analysis. As a result, some of them may include text quoted from an older article to which I had replied.

Clutch hitting: Do some players have the ability to hit better with the game on the line than at other times? The answer is either that there is no such ability, or that there is an ability which is so small that it makes little difference in evaluating players.
Hitting with runners in scoring position: This is similar to the clutch hitting study; are there players who hit better with runners in scoring position than at other times? Again, the ability might exist, but it's less than one hit per season if it does.
Protection: Does it help a hitter to have a good hitter on deck? Obviously, the protected hitter will draw fewer walks (since he won't be walked intentionally), but does it make any difference in the results when he is given a chance to hit the ball? Many sportswriters believe that it does, because the protected hitter will get to see more hittable pitches. American League hitters' bats don't agree with that claim; hitters who were protected only some of the time didn't hit any better when they were protected.
Minor-league equivalencies: Bill James developed the system of minor-league equivalencies, allowing a player's minor-league numbers to be converted to the equivalent at the major-league level, adjusting for the difference in the quality of play and the difference between parks. I did a quick study to see how well this conversion worked. It turns out to work very well; a player who hit the minor-league equivalent of .300 in AAA is just as likely to hit near .300 in the minors as a player who hit .300 in the majors last year.

Other sources of information

Greg's Best Baseball Links Is a collection of the best links about baseball.

Sean Lahman's Baseball Page is another large archive of baseball information.

Fastball is the best source of news about baseball I have found. It includes all Associated Press articles about baseball, which make it a valuable reference for the Strike FAQ.

Stathead Consulting, developed by Keith Woolner, includes the Baseball Engineering Page with a lot of articles similar to mine.

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