New York Nine: Pirates making strides to not suck so much

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Pirates making strides to not suck so much

More than any team out there in the past decades, the Pittsburgh Pirates have prided themselves on being the worst of the worst in baseball. Okay, well maybe not outwardly, but since their days of Barry Bonds, there hasn't been a whole lot to be happy about for Pirates fans with 16 seasons of losing consecutively, tied for the record of all time, and chances are they're going to break it this year. However, since the hiring of Neal Huntington, formerly working with MLB there seems to be an attempt to field a competitive team in the future and I'm happy to see it.

Although you may have missed it the Pirates signed their All-Star, Gold-Glove center fielder Nat McLouth to a 3 year 15.75 million dollar deal with a 2012 team option. McLouth isn't exactly a household name, and his fielding metrics say he wasn't exactly deserving of a gold glove, but he clearly had an impressive breakout year and the Pirates responded in kind. At 27 McLouth posted a very respectable .276/.356/.497 line for the year after an incredible start to the year and the Pirates did a smart thing and locked him up for three of his prime years at a pretty reasonable price.

Of course critics could argue its a bad bet, that a guy who has a career year at 27 is bad news and its possible for sure, but I still think this is a move in the right direction. In years past they'd let a guy like McLouth leave or trade him because he was asking for too much in arbitration, but instead they're trying to keep talent around and I applaud them for that. Its a small step and they're taking other small steps to get it to work, so maybe in a few years they'll have a handful of talented young guys like those pesky rays did last year. Never know.

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Some Key Terms to Know When Reading

I throw around a lot of numbers and stats so I figured I should probably explain some of them:

wOBA - a new one I'll be using, short for weighted on-base average is essentially an improvement on OPS. Scaled to average OBP (with .330 the league average) wOBA more properly weighs on-base percentage higher than slugging percentage and more accurately weighs extra base hits (a double isn't worth double of that of a single which is what SLG does) to give a better picture of a batter's worth.

.000/.000/.000 is the industry shorthand for the split stats for batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage, in that order, these are some of the more commonly used stats to indicate how productive a hitter is.

OPS - shorthand for On-Base Percentage Plus Slugging is becoming more in vogue in the mainstream media to get a better idea of the raw production of a hitter, instead of saying how often they get a hit OPS shows how productive those hits are.

BABIP - Batting Average on Balls in play, its pretty much what it says, how often that a batter puts in ball in play that it becomes a hit, its a stat that shows if a hitter is just having a lot of bad luck or a hot streak is just fluky. For instance a BABIP of .200 is considered unlucky its not that he's not hitting, he just isn't hitting where the fielders are not there.

OPS+ - as the name implies, OPS+ is OPS but with adjustments to park effects and other outliers to normalize the data. Indeed, as most people know some parks are harder to hit at than others, which this stat compensates for, 100 being the baseline of league average

WAR - Wins Above Replacement, as its name suggests, provides an exact number of wins a particular player is worth above what your average AAA player, or replacement player would provide in his absence. Although this is a very difficult stat to explain (I don't totally get it personally) the stat is beautifully simple in that it provides a precise value of either a pitcher or hitter to his particular team, which enables teams to monetize their worth and properly assign a dollar value.

ERA+ - similar to OPS+ its a more highly sophisticated way of evaluating a pitcher's performance adjusted for park effects, this also is on a numerical basis with 100 as league average.

FIP - short for fielding independent pitching, FIP measures the only aspects of the game that a pitcher has total control over, strikeouts, walks, and home runs. Scaled to ERA, FIP gives a truer indication of a pitcher's true talent by removing the luck apparent with balls in play.

WHIP - Walks and Hits per innings pitched, a little more well known stat, but a good indicator of how effective a pitcher is. Chances are if a guy is walking a lot of guys and giving up a hot of hits, he's not pitching all that well.

xFIP- a variation of FIP which normalizes home run rates as a way to discount aberrational home run rates that are either too high or too low to reasonably sustain.

UZR- Short of Ultimate Zone Rating, this is the number of runs above or below average a fielder is in both range runs and error runs combined. This is a difficult stat to understand because it's not one of those stats you can figure out at home, because it includes a bevy of factors including park effects and speed. As a consequence, its not a perfect stat, but its the best defensive stat we have. Also seen as UZR/150 is the Ultimate Zone rating per 150 games.

RngR - Range Runs is defined as the number of runs above or below average a fielder is, determined by how the fielder is able to get to balls hit in his vicinity. Also not a perfect fielding stat, but one of the many fielding stats that help as as fans get a fuller picture of a player's defensive prowess.

New York Nine

Baseball the way it was meant to be, down and dirty with brutally honest analysis

Pirates making strides to not suck so much

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