Gist for previous posts

The more I use it, the more I understand the benefits and value of Github as a code-sharing resource. The gist found here is the R code for my posts on run scoring trends by league (found here, here, and here).  I will continue to use Github for the code used in future posts.

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Comparing individual team run production

Or, The 2010 Mariners: How Bad Were They?

In earlier posts, I used the statistical software R to plot the trends in league average run scoring since 1901. This was the first step to answering other questions I had on my mind:

1. How poor was the offensive performance of the 2010 Seattle Mariners?
2. Are they showing any signs of improvement?
3. And how can I use R to tabulate the data to answer these questions?

So, to answer Question #1.  It is well-established that the 2010 Mariners were not very good, at least offensively. (For fans of the team the well-deserved Cy Young award won by Felix Hernandez is surely the highlight of the season.) But I wanted a form of relative measure that would be comparable across time, to accommodate the various fluctuations in run scoring that were the subject of that earlier post.

As I started into this, the first decision was to draw a line in the historical record. I opted to use the eras described in Bill James' "Dividing Baseball History into Eras" article (behind a pay wall – but chances are if you're reading my blog, you already a Bill James subscriber):

• Era 1 (The Pioneer Era), 1871-1892 
• Era 2 (The Spitball Era), 1893-1919 
• Era 3 (The Landis Era), 1920-1946 
• Era 4 (The Baby Boomers Era), 1947-1968 
• Era 5 (The Artifical Turf Era), 1969-1992 
• Era 6 (The Camden Yards Era), 1993-2012

Based on these groupings, I opted to use the range of seasons 1947-2012 inclusive. This yields 1,580 team seasons of National League and American League baseball.

The second step was to calculate a runs per game (RPG) for each team, by year. This corrects for the longer regular season in the post-expansion period, the strike-shortened seasons, and will give us a common denominator to compare the results so far in 2012.

To do this, I accessed the 2012 edition of the Lahman database. Once I had downloaded and extracted the comma-delimted version of the files, I read the "teams" file into R.

Latest Lahman database now available

One of the most important resources for baseball researchers, the Lahman database, has been updated with the 2012 Major League Baseball data.  It's an amazing compendium, with complete statistics for teams and players from 1871 to 2012.

You can access the dataset (in a variety of formats) here.

And I encourage you to make a financial contribution through the donations page to help support this endeavour.

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West Coast League baseball coming to Victoria

We're getting closer to the arrival of summer collegiate baseball in Victoria.  The Victoria HarbourCats are one of two new clubs in the West Coast League, along with the Medford Rogues.  The team has been generating some buzz already, seven months before playing a game. The club posted their 2013 schedule yesterday.  And to top things off, the HarbourCats will be hosting the league All Star Game in July, .

The best sources of information about the HarbourCats are the club's official homepage and the fan blog.

Given my own proclivities, I've created a Google map plotting the locations of all the teams in the league.  A zoomed out screenshot is below.

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"Baseball's Timeless Tradition"

Worth four minutes of your time:  Stephen Brunt's "The World Series: Baseball's Timeless Tradition" video, broadcast as part of Sportsnet Canada's World Series coverage.

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Neyer on *that* Infield Fly

As predicted, there has been a great deal of chatter on the application of the Infield Fly rule in the eight inning of last night's Cardinals-Braves NL Wild Card game.

The best thing I've read is Rob Neyer's analysis at SB Nation, "Everything you always wanted to know about the Infield Fly Rule*". Neyer covers the rule in general, its application in this particular case (he thinks it was an appropriate call, and one which realistically did not hurt the Braves), and sums up with the fact that the game turned not on this call, but the Braves' three errors and failure to score when, late in the game, they had runners in scoring position.

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The origins of the Infield Fly Rule

I'm sure lots of ink will be spilled in the hours/days to come, but here's an interesting legal note: "The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule" (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol.123:1474-1481, June 1975.)

The Infield Fly Rule is obviously not a core principle of baseball. Unlike the diamond itself or the concepts of "out" and "safe," the Infield Fly Rule is not necessary to the game. Without the Infield Fly Rule, baseball does not degenerate into bladderball the way the collective bargaining process degenerates into economic warfare when good faith is absent. It is a technical rule, a legislative response to actions that were previously permissible, though contrary to the spirit of the sport.

Here's a discussion of the article at Topography of Ignorance.

(Tip of the Mariners cap to ronb78 who pasted the link at Lookout Landing.)

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