- Posted May 26th, 2011. Comments Off
If you’ve peeked at the Beyond the Box Score footer lately, you may have noticed this:
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything at BaseballTwit. For the last year-plus, I’ve been writing for Beyond the Box Score, providing historical analysis and infographics for the influential saber-slanted baseball site. I started off contributing on a “when I can” schedule, but later officially took on a weekly column.
Writing and visualizing for Beyond the Box Score was a great diversion from the insanity of my personal life. Unfortunately, time to devote to this diversion has been increasingly difficult to come by. So, this week, I reluctantly relinquished my column. (more…)
- Posted March 12th, 2010. Comments Off
Hey, where have I been?
Oddly, I mentioned it on my personal blog, but I didn’t mention it here—I’m now writing for Beyond the Box Score!
For quite a while now, Beyond the Box Score has been my favorite baseball blog. They’ve always had a good mix of future projection and historical analysis. I like to focus on historical analysis, so that’s mostly what I’ll be doing. As expected, I’ll be writing quite a bit about Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Wins Above Excellence (WAE), and Wins Above MVP Level (WAM).
Wait, what’s that last one? (more…)
Last time, I introduced a list of catchers with 30+ career WAR and promised future analysis. Today I want to talk about two methods to analyze them that goes beyond WAR—WAR per 600 plate appearances and my new toy, Wins Above Excellence. (more…)
In addition to Wins Above Replacement (WAR), I’ve started using Wins Above Excellence (WAE) to help analyze career value. So far, I’ve applied WAE to Non-Hall of Fame third baseman. But you know I couldn’t go long without applying it to relief pitchers!
When Sean Smith introduced WAE, he added up any WAR above 3.0. In my third base analysis, I did 3.0, 4.0, and 6.0 to get a sense of both “excellence” and “awesomeness”. Relievers simply don’t pile up high-WAR seasons like hitters, so I’ve included columns for 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. It is pretty rare for a reliever to pick up over 4.0 WAR in a season (unless you’re Mariano Rivera). (more…)
I do love reading articles about the biggest Hall of Fame snubs. Joe Posnanski recently wrote a “Snubs” article featuring players in the Hall of Merit who aren’t in the Hall of Fame. Wait, what’s the Hall of Merit? The Hall of Merit is curated by Baseball Think Factory. The description:
What is the Baseball Hall of Merit? A pantheon conceived of by our founder and commissioner Joe Dimino as an alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame located in Cooperstown. Our purpose is to identify the best players in baseball history and thereby identify the omissions and errors that can be found in the other venerable institution.
Like catchers and relief pitchers, I’ve thought a lot about why third basemen trail behind others in terms of Hall of Fame population. Posnanski’s article actually mentions how third base is the one position that has the most Hall of Merit members not in the “real” Hall of Fame. What gives?
Armed with Wins Above Replacement and Wins Above Excellence as my tools, let’s take a look! (more…)