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John Dewan's Stat of the Week
Is the Greek God of Walks Still Patient?
March 31, 2011 We've spent some time recently previewing the Bill James Baseball IQ app for the iPhone and iPad, featuring the K Zone and Pitch Location charts in recent Stats of the Week. In honor of its public release today, we'll take a look at another feature the Baseball IQ app offers: the [...]
Who's the Next Jose Bautista? Predicting 2011's Breakout Players
March 25, 2011 A few years ago, we researched the predictive significance of Spring Training statistics. For the most part, a player's spring stats aren't predictive of regular season success. For example, Ichiro Suzuki hit .257 (19 for 74) last spring but still wound up hitting .315 and leading all of baseball with 214 [...]
Brian Wilson's Pitch Locations
March 18, 2011 Brian Wilson was a huge factor for the San Francisco Giants last year. During the regular season he led the Giants into the playoffs with a league-high 48 saves and a sparkling ERA of 1.81. He didn't allow an earned run in 11.2 postseason innings, permitting just five hits with 16 [...]
Who will be the best defensive teams in 2011?
March 03, 2011 With the 2011 season rapidly approaching, it's time to bust out our new defensive projections. In The Fielding Bible— Volume II, we laid out our calculations to estimate the number of runs a player saves or costs his team with his defensive play. For example, our calculations estimate that Brendan Ryan [...]
Introducing the Bill James Baseball IQ App
February 25, 2011 Today, I’m excited to introduce you to something brand new that several of us have been working on this off-season. Available soon on iPads and iPhones for the 2011 season, the Bill James Baseball IQ app enables anyone to do the kind of research we do at Baseball [...]
How Important is Hitting the Catcher's Target?
February 18, 2011 At Baseball Info Solutions, our video scouts recently began charting the catcher's target before each pitch. This opens up many new avenues for analysis, but first we should examine the difference between pitches that hit the target and those that don't. Considering all final pitches of each at bat from the 2010 season, [...]
Platoon Tendencies
February 11, 2011 Managers play the platoon advantage as often as they can. With a right-handed starter on the mound, the opposing manager will look to play his lefty hitters, to the extent that he has that flexibility. Additionally, every bullpen features at least one lefty specialist whose sole purpsose is to enter the game in [...]
Flat Bat Award 2010
January 31, 2011 Each year we give the Flat Bat Award to baseball's best bunter, and it's time to hand out the 2010 award. First, let's look at the best bunters in sacrifice situations. Here are the best sacrifice bunters in baseball for 2010, listed in order of most sacrifices: [...]
The Super Bowl Prediction System – Steelers in an Upset
January 24, 2011 The betting lines currently favor the Packers, but the Super Bowl Prediction system picks the Steelers. In my Super Bowl prediction system there are 12 different indicators, each one taken by itself predicts the Super Bowl winner 55% to 67% of the time. Taken collectively, the indicators have an even better track record. The [...]
Top Pitching Performances of 2010
January 20, 2011 The 2010 season was dubbed "The Year of the Pitcher", thanks in large part to the six no-hitters (including two perfect games and Roy Halladay’s postseason gem). Bill James devised "Game Score", a metric to rate a pitcher’s dominance in a given start. A Game Score of 65 earns the designation "Gem" as [...]