Midwinter Grilling

While I was jaunting around southern Wisconsin last weekend, visiting a dog we might adopt, I came across a local meat shop near Darien and popped in to see what they have. I picked up some decent sausage (which became meatballs at dinner that night), but the main thing that caught my eye were their ribs. It was 'warm' that weekend so I was hoping to have an excuse to grill.



I cobbled together a couple of rub recipes and used salt, pepper, paprika, brown sugar, and garlic powder as my rub. The recipe I had called for more or less steaming the ribs in a covered pan with water in the oven for 2 hours before the grill, which I was kind of skeptical of, but the result was just fine. One of the nice things about grilling in winter here is that the snow catches the ambient light so you can see what you're doing a little better when grilling after dark.



Final result:


I also made a loaf of fellow grad student Jason Murcko's excellent Challah bread





I love making braided breads - they look so cool when you take them out of the oven.

The ribs were pure win - this was my first time cooking anything like them. Maybe in the summer sometime (if I'm here...) I'll experiment with full-on smoking and the like in the grill. I'm looking forward to doing these again.

Add it to the pile

I haven't made a new post about books in about 3 months, when I reviewed the most recent Wheel of Tedium book. I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed it, and it really turned my opinion about one of the characters around that I had previously lumped in with some of the shrill harpies that populate this series. Anyway, it was enough to get me to reread them, which meant I had to go out and re-buy them as I had sold my original copies off after the author passed away a few years ago (the series has been passed on to another author, with Jordan's blessing). Our B+N had the first 6 books, so I bought them and I'm most of the way through book 5.

While out on our quasi-Valentine's date today, we stopped by the B+N on the other side of town which had the rest of them and I grabbed the rest of them...but after about 5 minutes I changed my mind and put them back. I've got a big backlog of books that I've been meaning to read, and I did resolve to make a little more effort to read new stuff rather than re-reading things that I've read many times before (but very much enjoy). In the past 3 months I've read those 5 Jordan books and re-read the excellent Tawny Man trilogy (the last book of which is my sentimental favorite for best fantasy novel). But, here's what I have piled up to read:

• The rest of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
• The rest of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
• The rest of Simmons's The Book of Basketball
• Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself
• Bryson's Notes From a Small Island
• Bryson's The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid (You can tell I'm a big Bryson fan)
• #17 on the KLAW 101 Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
• Klaw 101 #15, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• Klaw 101 #42 Brideshead Revisited
• Marvin Miller biopic A whole different ballgame
• Joe Posnanski's excellent The Soul Of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America
• Posnanski's The Machine
• The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers
• The new BP Annual
• The Hardball Times Annual
• The 2010 Cubs 'Anal', with 2 articles by Shawn

I picked up Wind-Up Bird Chronicle after putting the WoT books back. A skim of the back cover makes it seem like it's pretty cool. Not that I agree with Klaw on his rankings in general - I was not a fan at all of his #1, The Master and Margarita, and my wife (who I view as a good authority on this) thinks that Emma, his #3, isn't nearly as good as the other two Austen books (P+P and Persuasion) on the list and isn't as good as one (Sense and Sensibility) that didn't make the cut. A curious selection. He also has Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in there, both of which I despised in high school. He does score huge points for including Lonesome Dove though (at 98),

Anyway, I have my work cut out for me. I'm going to finish reading through WoT #6 and then get back to work on these things...

Congrats to the Saints

Not only did they win their first Super Bowl in franchise history, but they did so by beating Hall of Fame QBs (Warner, Favre, Manning) in three straight playoff games. After the Saints scored the TD and 2-pt conversion to put them up by 7, I told my wife 'if I had money to gamble with, I would bet it all on Manning leading a drive for a TD here'. The lesson is, as always, NEVER GAMBLE (dying laughing).

Commercials were pretty lousy again this year - the only ones I really remember were the Betty White/Abe Vigoda one and the Letterman one with Leno and Oprah. My expectations have lowered so much that it wasn't a big deal though.

Rumblings about FIP

Today we had a discussion over at ACB about what should be defined as replacement level FIP. MB had just done Jeff Gray's projection and it came out to 4.32 FIP, which he claimed to be right around replacement level. This set off all sorts of alarm bells for me. I still wonder if the replacement level FIP for relievers is set too low. Let's take a look at the actual numbers and arguments and see if they disagree with me.

Here's the main argument. Starting is harder than relieving. This I agree with. The replacement level FIP for a NL starter is 5.35, which seems right to me (since FIP is more or less a proxy of ERA anyway). A quick rule of thumb for converting between the two is that a pitcher's FIP should be 1.25 x what it would be as a reliever. This is okay with me too. But given that, then a replacement level reliever's FIP should be 4.28! That seems way too low to me - in my head that's what an average reliever, not a replacement level one should do. How do the numbers bear this out?

Running the numbers, the average FIP in the National league was 4.1, which is indeed lower than 4.28. This gap doesn't seem as big as, say, the gap between an average batter wOBA and a replacement level bat, but I digress.

Where did that replacement level number come from anyway? In a series of posts on Fangraphs, Dave Cameron broke down how replacement level is defined. Basically, it was estimated that with a replacement level starter and average everything else, a team wins 38% of the time, and with a replacement level bullpen and average everything else, a team wins 47% of the time. Next, we look at the number of runs allowed in our league in a year (Dave looks at 2008, since he wrote it after the 2008 season). For example, in the 2008 American league the average FIP based on this should be 4.40, which is what a average (.500) pitcher should generate. Now, what about replacement level? Cameron cryptically says 'running the numbers through the formula gives us a 4.68 FIP'. Here's my dumb hick guess as to what he did

I'm assuming a linear approxmation here, with win% as the variable x. I'm assuming that a pitcher that has a FIP of 0 has 100% win percentage, and a pitcher that gives up 4.4 runs has a 50% win percentage. Since we have 2 data points, we have the linear approximation:

FIP = 4.4(x-1)/-0.5 = 8.8(1-x)

This a 47% reliever and a 38% starter will have

FIP_relief = 8.8(.53) = 4.66
FIP_start = 8.8(0.72) = 5.45

Which are different than what Cameron found (4.68 and 5.63, respectively). Maybe I'm doing things wrong. For one, a 0 FIP pitcher isn't going to have 100% winning percentage since he still gives up hits and walks and stuff (though he does strike a ton of guys out). But since our league average FIP is being scaled to run scoring, we'll have to do it. Maybe there's some other data point that he didn't mention that he's using for the other component of the linear approximation (or he's not using a linear model at all).

At least I learned a thing or two

AL west preview: Seattle Mariners - UPDATED

(See below for update. Basically I changed how I estimated playing time)

Quite possibly the most intriguing division this year will be the AL West. The Angels have long dominated the division, but the Mariners made a lot of upgrades in the offseason, managing to acquire Cliff Lee and Milton Bradley for almost nothing, the Texas Rangers have a surge of young talent reaching the majors, and it's tough to count out the A's.

I'm going to take a look at these teams a little more closely, busting out BtB's WAR calculator from last year to examine things.

First, here's a rundown of what I'm doing: for the players wOBAs and FIPs, I'm taking the average of 5 projection systems that largely have data on all of the teams: CHONE, Bill James, PECOTA, Marcel, and the Fans projections at fangraphs. For playing time, I'm just using the playing time estimates over at BP's depth charts. I should probably change this to the fan projections playing times, but we don't have full data on enough players to do that. The defensive numbers come from Jeff Zimmerman's UZR projections on Beyond the Boxscore, and I ignored baserunning, because I'm lazy and it doesn't have a huge impact anyway.

So without further ado, here are the Mariners. I apologize for the strange formatting - bloggers crappy rich text editor is converting all the newlines in the table html into line breaks. Super annoying.

Hitter	Pos	PA	wOBA	Hit	Pos	Fld	Rep	WAR	FA $	WAR
Josh Bard	CA	324	.299	-2.16	1.25	0	2.50	1.59	$3.7	0.7
Rob Johnson	CA	312	.292	-2.62	1.25	0	2.50	1.13	$2.7	0.5
Casey Kotchman	1B	496	.337	0.12	-1.25	0.50	2.50	1.87	$6.4	1.3
Ryan Garko	1B	211	.343	0.23	-1.25	-0.30	2.50	1.48	$2.3	0.4
Jose Lopez	2B	641	.330	-0.33	0.25	-0.10	2.50	2.32	$10.0	2.1
Jack Hannahan	2B	72	.309	-1.57	0.25	0.20	2.50	1.38	$1.0	0.1
Jack Wilson	SS	513	.303	-1.94	0.75	0.60	2.50	1.91	$6.7	1.4
Jack Hannahan	SS	136	.309	-1.57	0.75	0.10	2.50	1.78	$2.0	0.3
Chone Figgins	3B	667	.341	0.38	0.25	0.60	2.50	3.73	$16.4	3.6
Jack Hannahan	3B	80	.309	-1.57	0.25	0.90	2.50	2.08	$1.5	0.2
Michael Saunders	LF	423	.318	-1.02	-0.75	0.50	2.50	1.23	$3.7	0.7
Milton Bradley	LF	125	.369	2.09	-0.75	-0.40	2.50	3.44	$3.2	0.6
Junior	LF	68	.326	-0.57	-0.75	-0.30	2.50	0.88	$0.8	0.1
Franklin Guitierrez	CF	660	.337	0.10	0.25	1.60	2.50	4.45	$19.3	4.2
Langerhans	CF	70	.319	-0.95	0.25	-0.20	2.50	1.60	$1.1	0.2
Suzuki Ichiro	RF	710	.349	0.85	-0.75	0.70	2.50	3.30	$15.4	3.3
Langerhans	RF	78	.319	-0.95	0.75	0.20	2.50	1.00	$0.9	0.1
Milton Bradley	DH	422	.369	2.09	-2.00	0	2.50	2.59	$7.4	1.6
Junior	DH	148	.326	-0.57	-2.00	0	2.50	-0.07	$0.3	0.0
Garko	DH	88	.343	0.49	-2.00	0	2.50	0.99	$1.0	0.1
Team		6398	.331	-0.25	0.00	-0.24	0.43	2.44	$100.7	22.3

Pitcher	S/R	IP	FIP	LEV	FA $	WAR
Felix Hernandez	S	220	3.45	1.0	$25.6	5.6
Cliff Lee	S	219	3.55	1.0	$24.2	5.3
Ian Snell	S	163	4.54	1.0	$9.0	1.9
Ryan Rowland-Smith	S	164	4.33	1.0	$10.8	2.3
Erik Bedard	S	84	3.76	1.0	$8.4	1.8
Doug Fister	S	93	4.6	1.0	$5.0	1.0
Aardsma	R	60	3.83	1.8	$5.4	1.1
Lowe	R	60	4.05	1.3	$3.0	0.6
White	R	60	4.61	1.0	$0.6	0.1
League	R	60	4.30	0.9	$1.5	0.2
Kelley	R	55	4.18	0.8	$1.6	0.3
Vargas	R	60	4.78	0.7	$0.2	0.0
Olson	R	57	5.08	0.6	-$0.2	-0.1
Starters		802	4.01		$66.6	14.7
Relievers		412	4.40		$9.8	2.1
Total		1214	4.14		$76.0	16.8

Group	WAA	WAR
Hit	-2.3
BR	0.0
Field	3.7
Hitters		21.7
Pitchers		20.0
Total WAR		41.7
Total FA $		$188.6
Win Talent		85.2

So in summary - the Mariners are an incredibly good fielding team (led by Franklin Guitierrez, of course), but they're not very good hitters, and their rotation behind twin aces Hernandez and Lee are not very good.


UPDATE: I decided to change a few things with regards to playing time, especially the pitching. Garko and Bedard have signed with the team since I wrote this so I included them too. I used the fan's playing time estimates from fangraphs instead. Tango has shown that the fans estimates tend to be too high, so you should temper these a little bit. But for the most part they were pretty close to what PECOTA had.I only did this for the regulars position-player wise, and divvied up bench ABs based on pecota and my own adjustments. For the 5th pitcher slot, I'm assuming that Bedard will share it with someone else. Since Fister seems to be the leading candidate to get these starts over all the others on the Mariners depth chart (Vargas, Olson, French) I went with him. Anything they get from Bedard should be pretty valuable.

This new WAR estimate is 2 wins and change higher than the old one, and the main difference is pitching. Rowland-Smith was not predicted to throw as many innings in PECOTA, and replacing Yusmeiro Petit (who no one but pecota has as the 5th starter) with Bedard/Fister was a big upgrade too.

Projections, defense (Baseball?! Wut?)

I've been dumping most of my baseball thoughts/opinions/etc over at ACB for a while now, but I'm still hopeful that I can dump a thought or two that I'm chewing on over here from time to time. I do like to make grandiose plans for baseball stuff from time to time but things (math, dogs, processed cheese balls, general laziness) tend to change my plans. Something I'm still planning is making a project-a-tron of my own. Just off the top of my head, this would require me trying to figure out things like, off the top of my head,

• Minor league, college, and international player stat translations


• Aging patterns (relative to specific players)


• Platoon splits + usage


• Reliability + variance of baseball stats


• Defense-neutral pitching


• Park effects


• Defensive models (more on this below)


• Database management for managing all this data

That's a lot of stuff, for sure, and I'm sure it just scratches the surface. It's certainly too much for me to do anything for 2010! I'll probably say a thing or two about all the players during spring training like I usually do, mostly based off the publicly available projections at fangraphs plus the just-released 2010 PECOTAs, which I now have access to.
Anyway, here are the two things on my mind right now

1. If I do create a project-a-tron, I have to make sure it has a name first (which is obviously the most important thing). The custom seems to be to name it after some sort of scrappy, not necessarily terrible middle infielder from their favorite team (see pecota, chone, cairo, etc). It seems like people have eschewed actually making an acronym from these names now. I know Shawn has already staked a claim on 'Shawon', who would qualify in that he was both a Cub and a medicore middle infielder, but we has before my time in Cubs fandom anyway. I'm leaning towards breaking this tradition though, and naming it after just a player I'm a fan of (see Sosa, Zambrano, Prior). So I pose this question to my ones of readers: what do you guys think? I'm leaning toward the Z's myself.

2, Colin Wyers just published his first article ($) at Baseball Prospectus about the new defensive metric that he is rolling out. I'm excited by the fact that he's going pretty slow with this, since I've never really looked into these metrics and it will be a good opportunity for learning about them. I've found the comments pretty amusing on that article, though. My view of modeling anything (defense, etc.) is that it's precisely that, a model. Yes, you can add more things, but it's important to make sure that the absolute basics of it make sense, which is exactly what Colin seems to be doing.
But the kind of complaints people seem to be giving are pretty dumb, or at least obvious. Most of the complaints have to do with

• Defensive positioning (especially shifts v LHB)
• Hard-hittedness of balls

These are valid questions, and should be included in the Perfect Defense Model™, but it seems foolish to complain about the lack of them when we DON'T HAVE ANY DATA ON THESE THINGS (yet). When hit f/x and field f/x roll out, this stuff can be incorporated into models. But for now, we don't have the data, and you have to build your model based on the available data you have.
One caveat: at least in recent years, there has been more classification on batted balls (i.e. stuff hit 'sharply', 'softly', etc. I'm not really a big fan of this kind of binning though. It's pretty subjective, and I'd rather just wait until we have hit f/x. Not to mention that Colin has pointed out that there's already a significant error in batted ball data as to whether hits are line drives, grounders, or fly balls.

-b

Belated christmas present post

My wife is awesome