Research should start with a question.
In an article by Mike Petriello published on April 23, 2019 on mlb.com titled “These 5 players have opened eyes in April,” he states that Braves pitcher Max Fried’s curveball has the “third-most drop” in the major leagues.
From that information, I generated my research question: How big a vertical “drop” does Fried’s curveball have?
Here is how I found the answer.
Continue reading “Getting started doing baseball research”If you like to view baseball statistics, a variety of sources exist. Among them are Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball Savant, and Statcast. Baseball Savant and Statcast are products of Major League Baseball.
Baseball Savant can be accessed here and Statcast through its search page though Statcast info is also available from the main Baseball Savant page.
On Baseball Savant’s homepage is a menu bar containing this:
One of my favorite baseball stats is one developed by sabermetrician Tom Tango and well explained by Patrick Jeter of Redleg Nation. It’s RE24, where “RE” stands for “Run Expectancy” and RE24 for “Run expectancy based on the 24 base-out states.”
In brief, it indicates how many runs, on average, a team can expect to score in an inning depending on the number of outs and which bases are occupied. For example, if a batter’s at the plate with the bases loaded and no outs, from that point to the inning’s end his team can expect to score more runs than if the same batter came to the plate with none on and the bases empty. Continue reading “One of My Favorite Baseball Stats: RE24”
OOTP 17 is a baseball app that enables you to do much more than play baseball on a computer, where OOTP stands for Out of the Park. How much more I did not realize until began playing with the app on my Mac. And though I’d played many times both the APBA and the Strat-O-Matic baseball board games and APBA’s computer baseball game, I was not prepared for what I encountered after installing OOTP 17.
Read my APBA interview.
When you start OOTP 17, a well rated baseball simulation app, these are the main choices available on the first screen you see. Stumbling through the online manual on my first day of exploration, I found the choice that would enable me to begin playing with the current MLB teams: “New Standard Game.”
What I did not know at the time was that in “New Standard Game” OOTP defines game differently than I do, something I did not discover until later. I expected its “game” to mean a typical baseball game, the type I watch on TV. But that’s not how OOTP defines it. It defines it in a broader sense, more like the “game of baseball,” but even then the game played in the Major Leagues differs from the Little League game, and both of them are not identical to the game played in the Gulf Coast League.
In its online documentation’s section titled “Game Universe Terminology,” the closest definition I found was of a “saved game,” which is
one ‘universe’ of baseball in OOTP. A saved game could contain one league, five leagues, one league with multiple ‘subleagues,’ or any other combination of leagues and subleagues.
A “universe” of baseball is such a broad term I’m not going to try to define it; instead I re-viewed “New Standard Game” as meaning “New Game Universe.” And since then, I’ve slowly been learning what that universe includes — and how to play an MLB game the OOTP way.
Bats and Stats 