Are all assists created equal?

No…no they’re not.

In a vacuum, an assist is an assist.  It’s a pass that gets you a bucket, right?  But, as with the hoop itself, there are more efficient assist men than others, guys who set up their teammates with either a high percentage shot at the rim or an uncontested three point attempt.  And obviously, it’s these two shots that are more preferable than say a mid or long range jumper…unless your team features a certain 7-foot, Shaggy from Scooby Doo looking German with impeccable touch in the mid and long ranges and a release point that’s nigh near unblockable.

So…guess which two players are quite good at setting up these kinds of shots?  And, really, this shouldn’t be surprising in the least if you’ve caught an NBA highlight once or twice in the past decade.

Over 75 percent of LeBron James’ assists yield a three pointer or a bucket at the rim, highlighting just how devastating LeBron James can be as a ball-hander.  If he’s not scoring himself, he commands the help defense and double-teams, opening up the high efficiency areas for his teammates.  Actually, 3.9 at rim assists per game understates how many buckets he yields at the rim.  In his last ten games, the Chosen One has dished out 5.7 assists per game at the basket, nevermind every other area on the floor.

Consider for a moment that Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, and Dirk Nowitzki each average fewer than 5.7 total assists per game. And LeBron leads the League in scoring.

Conversely, fellow All-Star Jason Kidd splits his assists between the mid-range and the high efficiency areas, which says as much about him as a distributor as who receives the delivery.   Dirk Nowitzki, the most frequent shooter on the Mavs, lives in the mid-range and chucks up a league leading 8.5 attempts per game from 16-23 feet.

And now…a graph.

(Graph H/T: Hardwood Paroxysm…just go to the link from above)

While the bulk of the MLJ crew heads down to Mexico for the 2nd Annual Major League Jerkoff and Super Bowl Party, Intern Jace is covering the site.

We must admit, baseball S.T.A.T.S. drive us crazy. People keep talking to us about V.O.R.P. and F.L.I.P. and P.O.O.P. and it makes no sense to we. How are us supposed to enjoy a day out in the sun reading the latest issue of our favorite entertainment magazine while a baseball game plays in the background when the only thing people are talking about is a bunch of numbers that don’t mean anything?

From what us are hearing, all of the S.T.A.T.S. that these nerds keep making up show that J. D. Drew is a valuable baseball player and has been for some time. Let’s be honest, any S.T.A.T. that shows Drew to be good at baseball is a S.T.A.T. that us can’t take seriously. We looked up some pictures of Drew on the Internet and the dude is never smiling. I mean NEVER SMILING. The guy plays a professional sport for a living and he never smiles? What is that about?

Last we checked, baseball games are won by hitters who have fun while driving in R.U.N.S. They are not won based who has the highest V.O.R.P. or who has the biggest P.O.O.P. Us prefer our S.T.A.T.S. to end in pretty round numbers like .300 and 40 and 100. Anything else and you’ve lost we. And quite frankly, you’re ruining the enjoyment of the game. Us don’t need fancy S.T.A.T.S. to know that CC Sabathia is a great pitcher who wears his hat crooked and we don’t need fancy S.T.A.T.S. to know that Nick Swisher sucks. Us can tell these things by other methods, such as, oh we don’t know, ACTUALLY WATCHING THE GAME?!?!?

If you want to talk to we about real S.T.A.T.S. that have some kind of context within the game of baseball like R.B.I.’s and W.I.N.’s, let us know and we’ll be happy to engage in some discussion about them. But until then, you can take your V.O.R.P. and your P.O.O.P. and push the hell on. Because us aren’t interested.

This here is a (shitty) screen grab from ESPN’s latest push poll that asks readers what statistics they use to measure the value of a pitcher and I couldn’t help but call attention to the wording they use in their poll. The categories, in case you’re as blind as you are ugly, are as follows:

1. ERA
2. Win-loss record
3. Longevity
4. Peripheral stats (Strikeouts/walks/home runs per nine innings, WHIP, etc.) 25.2%
*emphasis added*

Peripheral stats? Peripheral? What an odd word choice. Peripheral, meaning on the outside, minor, auxiliary. They should have just worded it:

What do you care about when judging a pitcher?
1. Shit that matters like wins and losses?
2. Other shit that only nerds care about?
3. Answer the question, fag.
4. Say hi to your mother for me.

I also love that they differentiate between wins/losses, ERA, how long you did it for, and all that other shit. Everything else falls into the “other” category. Do you allow a lot of baserunners? Who gives a fuck? Are you good at striking out opposing hitters? So what. Do you induce a lot of double plays? Eat my shit.

The only pleasure I take out of this is that only 24.8% (at time of publication) of the respondents think Win/Loss record is the true measure of a pitcher. Only 24.8% of the people who felt compelled to respond to an ESPN poll that was trying to push them in an old timey direction responded that they think wins and losses are the most important measure of how good a pitcher is.

There is hope for the future but we’re fighting an empire.

HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where to begin?  Where to fucking begin?  For starters, I think Bert Blyleven belongs in the Hall of Fame.  As for Edgar Martinez, I don’t feel strongly about it either way.  But none of that is important.  Let’s find some common ground to start off with.

How about this: even people who think neither Bert Blyleven nor Edgar Martinez belong in the Hall of Fame can at least agree with me that Jon Heyman, in all his incredible famousness, has concocted the stupidest and most inane rationale for voting on the Hall of Fame in the history of baseball awards voting.

I consider impact more than stats. I like dominance over durability. I prefer players who were great at some point to the ones who were merely very good for a very long time. And I do recall it’s called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Numbers.

Heyman has obviously studied long and hard at the Colin Cowherd School of Stupid Aphorisms where he majored in Inanity with a minor in Increasing PageViews by stating poorly thought out nonsense. He’s due for his Master’s next week where his thesis argues the finer points of selling one’s soul to the corporate devil for a bigger paycheck and even less self-respect.

It feels good to get that out of my system.

For the record, only the most idiotic sabremetric assholes that even I despise think that you can look at a player’s numbers without ever having watched him play and determine whether or not he was any good. Secondly, numbers are not what are being voted upon. Numbers are merely a reflection of a player’s accomplishments on the field. And in baseball, as opposed to football, the numbers are respected, revered, honored, [synonym for honored], [synonym for revered], and [synonym for respected], not to mention respected! Striking out 300 batters in a single year is no small feat. Do I need to watch each one in order to appreciate to its fullest value? It might help, but just knowing that it happened is fucking impressive.

Secondly, Heyman’s contention that durability is almost a baseball crime because it leads to athletes becoming nothing more than numbers compilers, guys who stick around to pad their numbers for the sake of getting recognition, is absolute garbage.  I’m guessing Heyman hates these guys because he’s unable to recognize the difference between a counting stat and a rate stat and is sick and goddamn tired of getting tricked by all those worthless assholes who quit right after they get to 300 wins or 3000 hits or 500 HRs.  What a bunch of assholes who would, after getting so close during the course of their career, hang on for one more season to cross an historical plateau.  I’m looking at you, Randy Johnson, who should have retired 3 years ago but held on despite injury and growing mediocrity to collect that 300th win even if it meant going to the San Francisco Giants to get it.  Randy Johnson, asshole stat compiler.

But for those of us who are smarter than Jon Heyman, and there are many of us*, we know about stats like OPS+ that measure how dominant a hitter was relative to everyone else each year.  We’re smart enough to realize that looking at this stat provides us with the insight we need to compare a player’s “dominance.”  We might even suggest that a player with a career (!) OPS+ of 147 is the very definition of dominant as he was almost 50% better than the average hitter for the entirety of his career.  That’s dominant right?

While Martinez was a superb hitter, and his career .418 on-base percentage and .515 slugging percentages are impressive indeed, only twice did Martinez even crack the top 10 in MVP voting (he was third once and sixth once). That suggests something less than dominance. And even on his career totals, he comes up short. His final power figures (309 home runs, 1,261 RBIs) are underwhelming for someone whose whole candidacy is based on offense.

Let’s point to one of the times Edgar Martinez cracked the MVP voting. In 1995 Edgar Martinez came in 3rd place behind Mo Vaughn and Albert Belle. Shall we look at the numbers for that year?

Player A: 546 ABs, .317/.401/.690/1.091, 50 HRs, 126 RBI, 5 SB
Player B: 550 ABs, .300/.388/.575/.963, 39 HRs, 126 RBI, 11 SB
Player C: 511 ABs, .356/.479/.628/1.107, 29 HRs, 113 RBI, 4 SB Read the rest of this entry »

There’s this guy in my office who really knows how to look busy.  Whenever he walks around to have a smoke or grab some coffee he always carries a clipboard with him and never looks any of his superiors directly in the eye when he’s walking through the hall.  He’s mastered the art of looking like he’s solving complex problems in his head simply by maintaining this expression on his face which looks like he’s trying hold in a fart.  If he knows I’m staying late he’ll leave a pair of old glasses on his keyboard and leave his lamp on and bail early.  By leaving his desk like that it looks like he just stepped out and will be right back, that way if anyone pops their head in looking for him, they’ll think he’s also burning the midnight oil.  I, of course, turn out the light for him when I leave.

He’s also good at doing enough work for the right people to make it look like he’s getting a lot done.  His favorite projects are the ones that are long with ambiguous results that aren’t easily quantified.  And he’s great at corporate speak to the point where he can hold one of those long conversations that mean nothing but last hours.  When it comes time to make layoffs, his name never gets mentioned, that’s how valuable people think he is despite his complete and total lack of ability.

I bring all this up because Derek Jeter just won another Gold Glove award yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t been over to Deadspin lately, and really I can’t say I blame you, then you may have missed this fucking brilliant piece written on home scorekeepers inflating stats. It’s so good I decided not to put it in NTCH and give it the recognition it deserves. A few excerpts:

The bias is plain to see. Just look at the home-road splits. Last season, home teams leaguewide scored 101.58 points per game; road teams, 98.32. That’s to be expected: Teams play better at home. What’s surprising is that assists and blocks rise disproportionately for home teams — assists by nearly 8 percent, blocks by more than 15 percent. Last year’s Nuggets averaged 25 assists at home, only 19.4 on the road. They recorded 7.3 blocks per game at home and just 4.7 outside Denver. (Hell, Chris Andersen swatted 117 shots in 38 games at home against only 58 blocks in 33 games on the road. It was as if he stepped into the Pepsi Center and suddenly turned into Larry Nance.) The reason? People like Alex.

And:

As Alex remembers it now, Olajuwon had a double-double with nine blocks at some point during the fourth quarter. “Someone in management came to me and said, basically, Thou shalt give Hakeem Olajuwon a triple-double. Come hell or high water, he’s getting a triple-double. I’m like, uh, OK.” The Grizzlies had small monitors on which they kept a running box score. Anyone could see if someone was closing in on a milestone. “If a guy is in vicinity of a record, people are tracking those things. I know those things,” Alex says. “If a guy has an eight-game streak of getting 10 rebounds, I’ll know that. Am I gonna help that? Probably.” The Rockets game, though, “was the one time someone said, ‘You’ll do this.’ And I did.” (For the record, Alex is reasonably certain that the 10th block was legitimate. “If he got a bullshit block,” he says, “it probably happened before the 10th one.”)

If this tells us anything it’s that the NBA is a barren wasteland of dishonesty and all this hype about baseball players being stat centered, steroid users is a media inflated lie perpetrated by a reverse racist cabal!

Based on the strength of my scathing criticism some 2 months ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks wilted under the immense media pressure and sent Chris Young back to the Minors making him the Jeff Francoeur of the West Coast.  Oh Chris Young, we have a lot of memories.  Remember that time I called you a disappointment?  Or that time I compared your 30% infield popup rate to the Holocaust?  Or that time you got caught stealing four or five times in a row and I got kicked out of Chase Field for using the word “abortion?”  Man, those were the days.

After double checking the numbers I would like to congratulate you on regaining the title of worst everyday player in the Majors.  It was a hard fought battle but ultimately Willy Taveras was unable to suck as much as you.  His defense combined with Dusty’s ability to limit his playing time were enough to deny him the title.  It’s now his by default as you, Chris Young, pack your bags for AAA Reno but nobody likes being second best.

And to you, GM Josh Byrnes, congratulations.  (t’s not an easy thing to admit failure by demoting a plalyer you pegged for the future but you did it.  You have made many brilliant moves since becoming GM of the Arizona Diamondbacks and this isn’t even the crown jewell.  Shall we run down the list: Read the rest of this entry »

Great article in the Arizona Republic this weekend detailing Max Scherzer’s apporach to pitching and how he uses statistics.

During a road trip last month, Scherzer was scrutinizing a site that charted umpires’ ball/strike tendencies, viewing it as a piece of information he could bring into his next start.

See that’s just awesome.  There’s tons of resources out there for any pitcher that realizes that baseball has its quirks so it’s nice to know that a player is willing to put in the time to work the system to his advantage…legally.

But are there any stats that Max uses to improve his pitching?  I mean, umpiring sites is just raw data, it doesn’t really require any theoretical baseball—

And earlier this year, he helped rationalize a string of seemingly incongruent performances by citing his batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

For Scherzer, the Diamondbacks young right-hander, the realm of throwing a baseball in the major leagues is more complex than wins, losses and ERA. He embraces baseball’s golden age of information and analysis of advanced statistics.

I think I just came a little.  BABIP?  Really?  That’s remarkable.

Have you ever considered though that a lot of baseball players use but are hesitant to talk about it?  Imagine you’re a big league pitcher after a really tough outing, let’s say you gave up 8 ERs in 4 IP,  and you say something to the effect of, “I’m not worried because these guys got really lucky off of me today.  They can’t keep roughing me up forever.”  Would that make you feel better or worse?

As such, he values the pitching statistics that take fielding out of the equation and recently has become particularly interested in a stat called tERA, which assigns values to every batted ball based on trajectory, velocity and location. He also has taken time to examine his Pitch-f/x data, the information drawn from cameras that trace every pitch thrown in every big-league game.

You would value these things too if you went winless in your first 10 starts because you didn’t get any run support or your defense shat all over you.  True story. Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to start by saying “Hello” to our newest and most dedicated reader, Chris Young of the Arizona Diamondbacks.  I hope you like the place since we renovated; we try to clean up after ourselves*.

What’s that, loyal MLJ audience?  How could I know he reads the site?  Well how else do you explain his sudden surge in offensive output?  Since I posted this article calling him the worst everyday player in all of baseball, he’s gone on a ferocious tear to cram it right back in my stupid face.

That’s right, where he was once producing a line of .174/.220/.313/.533 he is now raking the ball in every direction possible.

In the month of June, in 70 PAs, he is posting a line of  .276/.400/.569/.969.  That’s what real big leaguers do.

In those 70 PAs he has doubled his HR output (from 3 to 6), cut his K rate down, increased his walks (12 in this month alone as opposed to 8 all season before this) and perhaps most impressively, he has stolen 7 bases this month without getting caught, compared to the 4 he had prior to the post.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think it goes without saying that MLJ has become a force in the baseball world.  As such, we’re taking bids on calling a player on your favorite team shitty.  We will light a fire under his ass that makes him perform in a way he has been unable to so far this year (/no homo).

*Just kidding, Clown does all the cleaning.

Yesterday’s 7-0 victory over the Yankees gave the Red Sox a record of 6-0 on the season so far and moved Boston back into a tie for first place. Yes, these numbers alone are impressive but let’s break them down a bit.

As a basis of comparison, the Red Sox as a team so far this year have produced a line of .357/.450/.807 which is second in the league (to the Yankees at .830).  They’re fifth in the AL with 307 runs (about 5 per game) and fourth in home runs (about 1.17/game).

Against the Yankees so far this season they’re hitting:

• .425/.529/.954
• 1.6667 Home Runs per game (10 HRs/6games)
• 7.5 runs/game (45 runs in 6 games)
• They’ve stolen 10 bases (as opposed to less than 1/game elsewhere) while getting caught less often
• Oh, and they’ve been hit by more pitches while playing New York because the Yankees are such sore losers

Talk about getting up for “big series.”  It seems that New York is content to sneak into the playoffs by backdooring weaker opponenets while Boston is ready to take on the best “competition” to prepare themselves mentally and physically for another World Series ring. Read the rest of this entry »