Loading... Please wait...
John Dewan's Stat of the Week
Shifts Continue to Rise
April 23, 2015 This Stat of the Week has become an annual tradition. Back in April of 2013, we shared how teams were well ahead of their 2012 season paces in their defensive shifting. Last season, we did the same. Well, several weeks into this season, teams are once again on pace to [...]
Home Runs and Home Run Robberies
April 15, 2015 Following his quick and impressive run through the minors and an excellent 52-game debut in the majors in 2014, many expected Mookie Betts to have a breakout season in 2015. Monday, Betts demonstrated why he’s such an exciting player. In the first two innings of the Red Sox [...]
What is the Upper Limit of Shifts?
March 30, 2015 The SABR Analytics Conference took place a couple of weeks ago in Phoenix. I strongly recommend attending this annual conference if you are interested in baseball analytics. During one of the luncheons I was talking to Rob Neyer and Brian Kenny about shifts. The usage of the [...]
A Strike on Every Pitch?
March 20, 2015 If Kyle Lohse was pitching to Jose Altuve with Jonathon Lucroy behind the plate and Bill Miller umping, would every pitch be called a strike? Not quite, but this combination would produce one of the highest percentages of called strikes on borderline pitches according to Baseball Info Solutions’ [...]
Could Jonathan Lucroy Be As Good As Yadier Molina?
March 06, 2015 Yadier Molina is considered to be the best defensive catcher in baseball. He’s won six of the nine Fielding Bible Awards since we began them in 2006, and he’s won seven consecutive Gold Glove Awards. Those accolades are well deserved because Molina is an exceptional defender in all facets of [...]
Who Will Be The 2015 Statistical Leaders?
February 26, 2015 In addition to our projected Defensive Runs Saved leaders, which we highlighted in a Stat of the Week a few weeks ago and will be expounded upon in The Fielding Bible—Volume IV to be released on March 1, we provide a spring update to the Bill James Projections each year to account for [...]
Shift or Get Off the Pot
February 13, 2015 Here is an excerpt from the article in The Fielding Bible—Volume IV called Shift or Get Off the Pot: Every team in baseball is shifting way more often than they did as few as three years ago. And it is paying off. But there are 10 teams (a third of [...]
The Best Projected Defensive Infield and Outfield
February 06, 2015 In the upcoming Fielding Bible—Volume IV, set to release on March 1, 2015, we provide both positional leader and trailerboards as well as team breakdowns of our Defensive Runs Saved projections. Here is a preview. It may be surprising to think about because of the struggles that this team [...]
Let's Eliminate The Shift
January 30, 2015 That’s what Rob Manfred, the new commissioner of baseball, said in an interview with ESPN’s Karl Ravech earlier this week: Manfred: "…injecting additional offense in the game. For example, things like eliminating shifts, I would be open to those sorts of ideas." Ravech: "The forward thinking, sabermetric, defensive shifts?" Manfred: "That’s what I’m talking about, yes." Ravech: [...]
The Most Pitcher & Hitter Friendly Umpires
January 16, 2015 As a quantifiable skill, pitch framing has been garnering a lot of attention in the past few years. While most research on that front has focused on a catcher's ability to get extra strikes called, at Baseball Info Solutions we have developed a methodology for dividing the credit among the catcher, the pitcher, [...]