Well That Sucked

I blame this game on Jack Leggett. He started the wrong pitcher with Leone--you start your best pitcher Harmon and you knew Leone wasn't going to have it after the first game. Leggett looked rattled and showed it--Hinson bunting, are you kidding me?? The hottest hitter in all of college baseball? Why is he batting so low in the line-up anyway?

So Roth took it to us...we struggle against lefties, exposed by the Oklahoma lefty who owned us in the second day of that game. What has helped our team the most is getting ahead early and stying loose. When we get tense we press and suck, not taking pitches--horrible approach etc.

The formula is strong starting pitching--staying away from our awful bullpen(which performed ok tonight all things considered) and piling on runs with Leggett desire for small ball. That gets destroyed if we are tense and get behind early.

Good thing we have another game. 2002 can't be repeated. BENCH EPPS!! He should never be at the plate against a lefty, ever...Lamb should DH, he can pitch and DH--he has done it all year. At least DH someone who doesnt whiff at a LH pitcher--the guy was going to go three innings max and we make him look like Strasburg. Nothing out of the infield...

Pathetic...hope Leggett can right the ship. I wouldn't have minded losing to Oklahoma twice and calling it a good season but losing to South Carolina twice and repeating 2002 is unbearable...

Go Tigers!! Win the big one for once...

Clemson/Oklahoma Weather Delay: Game Suspended

So we are delayed right now but Clemson really came out and took it to Oklahoma. This weather delay is bad news because Weissman was doing well and could have gone at least another inning if not two innings. Frederick pitched last night and he is the best in our weak bullpen.

So the game so far was showing the weakness of our defense--Miller dropped a ball that would have gotten the runner trying to steal second. That fatboy for Oklahoma can run--a bunt and chopped infield single, plus a nice run into the gap to take away a double.

The game turned because Oklahoma pitcher Shore lost his control and threw 14 straight balls. Oklahoma scored a run off of Weissman who has been giving up a lot of fly balls, not keeping the ball down enough but getting some strikeouts and swinging strikes to put together a solid start.

I also had no problem with taking that error by the Oklahoma outfielder because the Kyle Paker bomb was clearly a home run--give me a break...Do we not have someone else to play SS--31 errors, give me a break. I'm not thrilled with Epps as the DH, I guess they are protecting Lamb to use in the bullpen or starting but I don't know.

Worst moment of the game--a double steal?? Boyd wasnt even close at home and you take the bat out of Freeman's hands. A Busch League managing move, you have momentum-with 2 outs, risking Keiboom getting caught stealing with a man on third makes little sense and statistically doesn't improve your chances unless you are close to 80% sure he will be able to steal the base.

Anyway, I would imagine Lamb goes tomorrow but its hard to tell and really a tough break when you have that kind of momentum. We are up 6-1 but that can quickly disappear with our bullpen, although perhaps Frederick can now be used. Winning this game means we get two chances to try to get one win to be in the finals with probably UCLA but need to make 12 outs before we can think of that...(oh wait Im already thinking ahead...)

But I should really leave this on a positive note--we are up 6-1 and poised to put ourselves in the drivers seat for the Championship game...KP hit a blast, we chased another starting pitcher, and KieBOOM is more awesome than Bushytail....

ASU Goes Down, Clemson 6-3!

Tigers win 6-3!! My computer melted down so I havent been posting but had to post. Frederick comes in with the bases loaded in the 7th and no outs--gives up one run and saves the game. He handled the eighth and ninth very well. So we avoid the losers bracket--haha South Carolina, in the losers bracket again!! Harmon was solid until the seventh when he lost his command.

The defense was pretty good on our side, ASU had a costly couple of errors especially the throwing error by shortstop Marrero. Very surprising since ASU was known coming in for good defense. Our offense scored six runs but it was mostly from singles here and there. Hopefully our power will return against Oklahoma. I got to say that ol Jack Leggett impressed me today. His team had this rain delay and he had them ready to go and we took down the #1 team in the nation. Weismann will probably go against Oklahoma and if the Tigers can win that we will get Harmon again with a chance to go to the Finals. I think this format favors us, if we can avoid going to that third or fourth starter.

Couldn't have asked for a better start, Go Tigers!!

Final Thoughts, Pre-Super-Regional

Well, I completely got the date wrong for the start of the Clemson-ASU super-regional in my last post. I woke up yesterday morning expecting to watch the game in the evening; didn't realize it started Saturday until I checked espn.com a few hours later. I hate it when I do this, I was all geared up to watch the game last night and then suddenly the rug gets pulled out from underneath me. Oh well, I managed to catch some of the other super-regional games last night so it wasn't a total loss.

A few final thoughts:

• The extra day probably helps ASU more than us given the lack of depth in their pitching staff, although there's been enough rest to probably not give either team any real advantage.


• The MLB draft starts June 9th (I double-checked the date this time), so this is the last weekend to play in front of the scouts. At this point, anything that happens this weekend probably doesn't make a difference, teams pretty much know the strengths/weaknesses of individual players. But as a player, the days leading up to the draft must be nerve-wracking, and I wonder if they don't end up pressing in an attempt to make a last-second good impression, or alternatively if they don't hold back something to avoid a stupid injury. The only first round lock playing in Tempe this weekend is Mike Leake, but I wonder if fringe second and third-round guys like Chris Dywer, Ben Paulsen, and Jason Kipnis wouldn't be affected by this kind of mindset.


• Arizona State starting pitchers landed five times in Boyd Nation's Pitch Count Watch, which requires a start of ~130 or more pitches. I think its safe to say that ASU has ridden their starting pitchers if things are going well, with little regard for climbing pitch counts.


• By contrast, Clemson makes only one appearance on the list, last week's Dwyer start against OSU. I think this might suggest Leggett is a little more "new-school" in favoring pitch count limits. In the post-season, though, I doubt there's a college coach alive that cares about pitch count other than as a proxy for arm fatigue.


• Related to the above, I came across this ridiculous article at MLB.com today. It sounds like some MLB mouthpiece concern-trolling college baseball for not having rigid pitch counts in their post-season play that align with the current interests of MLB. Look, I get that MLB sees college players as future assets, but don't tell me these college kids don't want to win as much as their managers. I'm all for keeping pitch counts down in general, but in the post-season its just a different story.


• A general rant on pitch-counts: I definitely fall in the camp that thinks MLB takes things to a pretty ridiculous extreme. Its no wonder that major league teams find half of their staff injured two-thirds of the way through the season, these guys are being selected for pure stuff and no endurance. The other extreme is equally stupid, though--say in Japanese baseball, where you get high school kids throwing hundreds of pitches on consecutive days in the Koshien Tournament. That system ends up selecting for pitchers that have rubber arms and little else. There's a happy medium where pitchers are extended enough to identify guys that are high injury risks, but still retain guys with excellent stuff.


• Speaking of Japan, if you have a weak stomach you might want to look the other way:
  
  You read that right--Lemon Vinegar KitKat. Yeah, not the first flavor one would naturally associate with chocolate. I hear there's Apple Vinegar, as well.

LET'S GO TIGERS!!!

Weekend Baseball Observations

After blowing the first game against OK St. Clemson needed to win three straight games to advance to the SuperRegional and they have won two of those, needed only to beat OK St. once more tonight to move on. Its tough to play the same team three times but thats the position Clemson put itself in. So a quick rundown of the games for those who missed it.

In the first game against Tenn Tech we almost blew it. We had a runner on second in the 6th, 7th, and 8th innings and couldnt advance any runners. Kyle Parker along with the offense in general had been struggling somewhat sinve the ACC tourney and it bled into the tourney. Delk really struggled giving up four runs early. It took some heriocs on a double by Schaus down the first base line to plate two runs and win the game 5-4 in the 9th. It was good to see Addison Johnson come in and get a pinch hit single to key the rally. Graham Stoneburner come on in relief and pitched a gem, pretty much saving our bacon. Losing the first game in these double elimination things is really tough so its good we came through with that one.

In the first OK St. game, Harman pitched seven perfect innings but then gave up two consecutive solo shots that put the Tigers down 2-0. Which was a shame bc he really was pitching nicely. Clemson in the eighth showed their first sign of life scoring two runs on four consecutive singles off of the starter Oliver. We had runners on second and third (and all the momentum in our favor) with one out and Schaus goes and strikes out and then KP pops up to end the inning. We then made two bad defensive plays, really bad. Boyd basically misses the ball in CF and then Paulsen let a ball bounce off his glove, even if he knocks it down he prevents the run scoring from second. Tough couple of plays and McCurry in relief for the Cowboys was lights out.

We blanked Tenn Tech 10-0, Weismann going eight innings and then exacted revenge on 15-1 against Ok St., with Dwyer going eight innings as well. So the starting pitching with the exception of Delk has been superb--I mean awesome. It wasnt considered to be our greatest strength going in but we have been very good. The offense has finally come around but that is against second and third tier starters, not the best pitchers on the teams. I think it was a good move by Leggett to pull Parker from the lineup, albeit a tough one and he has some serious decisions to make about who to start in this last game, the two freshman Weismann and Dwyer looked good after stuggling a little towards the end of the season--perhaps fatigue. Leggett said he was favoring starting Hinson, which wouldnt be a bad move going forward.

I think tonights game comes down to who Ok St. starts. If the start McCurry will he be able to handle the work load. If he is fresh then its going to be another nailbiter and we dont want to be in a close game with Ok St. relying on their stout relief pitching.

I wanted to recommend and thank MRBO on justintv.com for broadcasting the games. Check it out if you want to watch the games streamed. I think we are the best team in the regional and it would be a shame to finish so early, Go Tigers! Beat those stinking Cowboys!

Thoughts on the Baseball Tourneys

Quick thoughts after digesting the events of the weekend:

• Lot of talk about a flop over in Durham this past weekend. Tough loss to Virginia, to be sure, but I'm not too concerned about a 1-run loss. Studies for games in the majors have shown teams tend to win 1-run games at the rate of their win percentage, but there's a lot of variation in the numbers. This leads to a kind of "luck" for in 1-run outcomes. I imagine these studies more or less hold true for top-shelf college competition (like the ACC variety) and by my count, Clemson is now 7-5 in 1-run games: more or less where we'd expect them to be and nothing to complain about, really.
• The loss to Duke was another story. While Duke got into Dwyer and later McKinney, our balls in play weren't falling against Andrew Wolcott. That's the way Clemson is constructed this year, though. While the pitching staff is far from a bunch of slackers, the offense is the strongest unit--we're out there to put runs on the board, not necessarily prevent them from coming in.
• A lot of people will say that's not a great recipe for post-season success, and the road to Omaha is paved in solid pitching performance. I buy that to an extent, but the good news is Clemson has done just as well, if not better, on weekend games against the best the opposition throws at us. We're not just punishing poor pitchers, but good pitchers as well.
• Regionals should be up in a couple of hours. Here's to praying that Stephen Strasburg, his 103mph fastball, and San Diego State don't land in our regional, and pitying the host team that gets SDSU. They might as well not show up.

Update: haha Virginia!

Baseball Team

It's been a while since i wrote anything about Clemson baseball. Watching the season unfold, though, I don't think you can complain about anything if you're a Clemson fan. I had the team pegged as being a little better than .500, maybe sneaking into the Tournament if a few things broke the right way. Over half way into the season, and its clear I was totally wrong; they will best the .500 mark and barring a total collapse down the stretch, should find themselves in a decent position to make a run in the Tournament. This is no fluke where the Tigers have won a bunch of close games and been blown out by the better teams, either. Clemson is hovering around the #15 mark in simulated RPI standings and Boyd's world has them at #20 in the iterative strength rankings. Not too shabby. To be clear, I don't think this team can necessarily make it to Omaha, but the season has to restore some faith in Leggett's recruiting and coaching abilities.

So how have they done it? I tried previewing/projecting the offense earlier in the season, and this is what I came up with for some of the important counting stats:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Research baseball clemson baseball

Here's what the actual numbers look like so far:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research baseball ben paulsen

Big differences, but its hard to gauge the actual impact from just looking at the raw numbers (good patience at the plate by Clemson's middle infielders, though). If we convert these into wOBA (a measurement of total offensive worth, scaled to be similar to on-base percentage) and the wRAA (runs created above average), we get a better picture. Here are the numbers I was projecting:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research baseball clemson baseball

And here is how the players are actually performing to this point in the season:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research baseball clemson baseball

When I talked about Clemson's chances earlier, I mentioned that they would have to see either small improvements across the board or get a couple of players to step up with monster seasons. I didn't plan on both happening. Ben Paulsen is absolutely having a monster season, and Kyle Parker, while not quite as good as last year, is still putting up great numbers. But looking further down, we see great improvement from Jeff Schaus, Mike Freeman, and even Matt Sanders. On top of this, Brad Miller's rookie season at SS has been an improvement over what we could have realistically expected from Stan Widman. The only players not showing a lot of improvement (Addison Johnson, John Nester) are playing premium defensive positions, and its not like they are killing the team, either. The only real exception is probably Boyd, who hasn't really been performing at DH, probably explaining why he's been the odd man out when someone needs a rest in the field.

All in all, the upgrade on offense over last year has been worth somewhere around 100 runs. Using the old adage that 10 runs netted == 1 win in the victory column, that's a swing of about 10 wins. Add these 10 wins to my earlier guess that the team was a little better than .500 and you have a good estimate of where the team will end up, maybe 13-17 games above the .500 mark? Of course, all the usual caveats apply since this ignores defense and pitching contributions. But if guys stick around for another year or so and keep improving, even if not at the same rate as this year relative to last year, next year's offense is looking Omaha-worthy.

Baseball Season 2009: Offense

The baseball season is finally underway, and I`m more than ready to put last season behind in hopes of a better year. Things certainly got off to a good start over the weekend with the sweep of Charlotte, keyed by some good freshmen play. I'll get to that in a second, but first a little bit of an overview. I`m going to try and present a little different angle while previewing the team relative to some of the other places you might read; in the last few years I have really tried to get into the statistical side of baseball analysis by reading up fantastic sites like Fangraphs.com, USSMariner.com, and BaseballProspectus.com, to name a few. I`m still a rank amateur at this stuff, but I really enjoy it and thought I would take a stab at quantifying what to expect from the Tigers this season--first with a post talking about the offense, then one talking about the pitching staff, and finally one that tries to put it all together. My goal is to get these off in the next couple of weeks or so as the basketball season winds down, and then we'll shift over to baseball full-time, trying to give a brief preview of each series.

Back to the offense and pitching--my goal with these posts is to try and estimate the number of runs we can expect the offense to score, and how many runs we can expect the pitchers to give up. Then we can try and plug these numbers into something called the Pythagorean win percentage, which will give a rough estimate of how many wins to expect this year, since runs scored vs. runs allowed correlates pretty well with overall winning percentage.

Let me just emphasize again here that I am by no means an expert, and due to several limitation in the data, this will end up as very rough, back-of-the-envelope type calculations. In other words, don`t go placing wagers based on any of this. Still, I think in a general sense this will be instructive on what to expect from the Tigers, and what to look for as the season progresses. Please let me know if you see me doing something stupid and/or obviously wrong...

Luckily for me, the Tigers aren`t expected to start a bunch of freshmen all over the field like last year, and there are at least partial-season`s worth of data at every position going back over the past few years which will be used to project this year's performance. Here is the first limitation in the data, I`m going to assume that no freshmen are going to beat out the cast from last year for significant playing time, because it is next to impossible to try and project performance with high school stats (O.K., its also hard with just a year`s worth of college stats, but I`ll get to that in a second). High school stats tend to vary tremendously from school district to school district, and even from year to year within the same district. So I`m just going to plug returning players from last year into the slots that they saw the most time, and also based from the media coverage coming out of practice. So right away, if the coaching staff feels one of the new kids is a better bet to improve production in the field, that likely means that I'll be underrating the overall offensive output.

So how is individual contribution to runs scored at the plate measured? Tom Tango, Andrew Dolphin, and Mitchel Lichtman wrote about this in The Book: the comprehensive guide to playing the percentages in baseball, and came up with one unifying statistic which combines a players ability to get on base and their slugging percentage, in other words, how often they get on base and how many bases they end up taking after getting on base. (This also includes things like base-stealing ability, etc.) They call it the weighted on-base percentage, or wOBA, and it is scaled to fit regular on-base percentage, so you can think of an average wOBA as being around .350, and an excellent wOBA as being .400 or above.

Now in order to get a good prediction of a player`s wOBA, ideally you must have several season`s worth of prior data. Unfortunately, this just isn`t possible in this case. For most Clemson players, we have one or maybe two year`s worth of data. So another assumption I have made is that the performance from last year (or, when available, the average of multiple years past) is a true gauge of player`s ability. This of course is nonsense, last year Kyle Parker may have had a flukishly brilliant year, or he may have been bad by his own standards. But its just an assumption we will have to live with. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that at this stage in a player`s career, its perfectly natural to expect improvement. To be conservative, however, I`m not going to try and work in any kind of adjustments.

So, without further ado, here is the projected wOBA for each Clemson player, alongside their expected position and several of the counting stats:

The next step is to adjust wOBA for park effects and for strength of schedule. This can be done with the help of Boyd Nation's stat page, which has kept track of how individual college parks tend to affect the run environment for several years now. In other words, in some parks its easier to score runs and than others (because of shorter fences, higher altitudes, less foul territory, etc.), so this is a way to normalize so that every player is more or less playing in an equal environment. As it turns out, the Doug Kingsmore stadium rating for 2005-2008 is 109 with 100 being an average park, which means we expect a few more runs to score over the course of a season relative to an average park, something of a "hitter's park". But we're going to use Clemson's total weighted park factor for the same time period which accounts for the run environments of all stadiums that Clemson plays in over the course of a season, this number comes out to 105. This means that Clemson tends to play on the road in parks that are friendlier to a pitcher than Doug Kingsmore. Here are the numbers for player park weighted wOBA:

Next, we adjust for strength of schedule (SOS). This is bit trickier, because we need 2009 SOS for our predictions and of course its impossible to know how exactly the season is going to play out and how good our opponents will be. Luckily, though, Boyd Nation calculates the intended SOS for 2009, factoring in performances of teams over the past several years to get a rough estimate. Clemson is currently projected at a 108.4 SOS, good for 44th in the country. Here, then, are the numbers for player park-weighted, SOS-adjusted wOBA:

Whew, so now we have an idea of each player's wOBA for 2009, but we need to convert this to runs. Basically what we'll do is calibrate every player's contribution relative to an ACC league-average offensive run-producer. This can be done by comparing the projected wOBA to an expected ACC league average wOBA and multiplying this number by expected plate appearances. I calculated the 2008 ACC average wOBA by taking all players logging over 100 plate appearances and running their numbers through the park effect and SOS adjustments described above, with the final league average wOBA for 2008 coming out to .387. Then we can then calculate the total projected runs above or below league average based on total runs scored for the 2008 ACC league teams. Now a couple more limitations need to be mentioned, first, I'm comparing 2009 projections to 2008 numbers, and also calculating the league average runs for 2008. It would probably be better to project these numbers for 2009, or at least to use the past several seasons to come up with a better average. On the other hand, the best leagues (ACC, PAC10, Big12) are known to be pretty stable stats-wise, because the high quality of talent influx that comes in year after year, so I feel pretty comfortable doing this as an exercise in rough estimates.

With the several mentioned limitations in mind, the final numbers come out as follows (with wRAA as the runs above/below average):

Startlingly low numbers, to be sure, but remember its not just how many runs you score, its also how many runs you give up. I'll look at this side of the equation next time when projecting the pitching staff.