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u/UTexas2005

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Curt Schilling: A Sabermetric Analysis of His Career

Writer's note: This post does not dive into the morality of him as a person nor is it a endorsement/condemnation of the writers decisions of voting/not voting for him post-controversies. As the title clearly states, this is purely an on-field look at what he did on the mound during his 20 year career in the majors.

Given how controversial Schilling is, a sabermetrics evaluation of his career is probably the one area that is least up for debate. As I hope to be able to show, Schilling's career was perhaps the pinnacle of great regular season performance, otherworldly postseason success, and one that cannot be fully appreciated without diving into the sabermetrics. His time spent on the diamond was nothing short of legendary.

Going strictly by his on-field performance, Schilling has an extremely strong case as being the fifth-best pitcher of the last 40 years, behind the Big Four of Clemens, Maddux, Johnson, and Martinez (not necessarily in that order). Schilling's off-field views are almost certainly the reason why he is not in the Hall of Fame, but really, they never should have factored in much at all because he should have been an easy first-ballot HOF selection back in 2013, and he didn't really start opening his mouth and talking politics until 2016. In 2013, his first year on the ballot, he received only 38.8% and the next year he DROPPED by a quarter to 29.2%, which is just ridiculous. Back then voters were still enamored with pitcher wins, explaining why Glavine got elected on his first time on the ballot to the tune of 91.9%, even though Schilling, on the field, was far, FAR superior, and that's just in the regular season, let alone any postseason heroics.

You cannot talk about Schilling's pitching without mentioning K/BB ratio. Alongside home runs allowed, those three statistics form the basis of FIP. Why does this matter when talking about Schilling's place among the game's greatest? It is because he absolutely dominated this category, and when factoring in his roughly league-average HR%, the fact that he had such a high fWAR total for his career should tell you something about this guy's pinpoint control. Greg Maddux gets lauded for his accuracy, and rightfully so, but I think Schilling was even better, at least when it comes to K/BB: Maddux's 7-year peak K/BB+ (K/BB ratio adjusted for era) was a staggering 285.58, seventh-best since 1901 by my calculations. Schilling's figure was 315.07, just barely behind Pedro's 316.62 and Cy Young's 316.02. For his career, Schilling tossed to a 268.58 K/BB+, second all-time behind Young's otherworldly 291.28; Schilling's career mark is higher than Clayton Kershaw's seven-year peak figure of 261.41. While not walking hitters is crucial, I think a more holistic view of control is how efficiently you strike guys out as you pitch. Schilling did that just about better than anyone ever has.

Of course, K/BB ratio, while important, is not the end-all, be-all. Schilling's brilliance also has to be contextualized in the era he played, and the ballparks he played in, as we all know. Schilling started his career in a low-offense environment of 1988 but didn't really get significant time on the mound until 1992. While that year was tied with '88 for the lowest runs per 9 in the NL since 1968, starting in 1993, it ramped all the way up to 4.52 and stayed high for the rest of his time in the Sr. Circuit, averaging 4.70 RA and in his 4 years in the AL from 2004-2007 it was 4.89 RA. Since FIP is equated to ERA for the purposes of fWAR, and since Schilling's peak was more FIP-dominant than pure run prevention, I wanted to focus on two years in particular, in which, granted, he only made one postseason appearances, but we'll get to the playoffs later.

While 1997 was Schilling's breakout sabermetrics year, 1998 saw him go to heights seldom ever reached from an fWAR perspective. FanGraphs credits him with 8.25 fWAR, which is really good, but not otherworldly. However, my calculations give him 9.43 fWAR, which while I cannot confirm with 100% certainty, is most likely due to their use of multi-year regressed PFs and my use of single-year PFs, as the 1998 Phillies had a 101 5-year regressed PF and a 106 PF for just that year. Also, my FIP calculation is based solely on an intraleague derivation, not interleague, which is why my 2.69 FIP for '98 Schilling is slightly less than the 2.77 FIP FG credits him with. Using FG's PFs and FIP would result in a derivation of 8.55 fWAR for Schilling as opposed to 9.43, and the remaining 0.3 fWAR is probably due to a combination of immaterial PythagenPat variances between FG and BRef, which I employ the latter for my calcs. With that out of the way, let's dive into what made this season special.

Schilling had 300+ Ks for the second year in a row at a rate 57% better than the NL average. He led the majors in IPs at 268.2 and his 9.43 fWAR was .45 wins more than second-place Kevin Brown's 8.98 fWAR. He was first in pretty much all FG-related metrics this season, both volume and rate, with the exception of FIP, in which his 153.9 FIP+ was fifth. However, because of his pitching in a very hitter-friendly ballpark, his fWAA and fWAR totals get him the gold medal in those metrics. He severely underperformed his peripherals with a 3.25 ERA, and while we can play the "would coulda shoulda" game all day, had his ERA aligned to his FIP and his RA remained at 0.13 runs above his ERA, you are looking at a bWAR of 9.73 instead of what he actually had of 7.62 bWAR (based on my derivations). Again, hypotheticals all day long, but when most think of Schilling, his time with Arizona comes to mind, and while understandable, he was awesome in multiple seasons with Philadelphia and that should not be forgotten to history.

2002 was his magnum opus and one of the most dominant fWAR seasons this century, maybe the single best. I would say only Johnson's 2001 season (in which I calculated his fWAR at 11.00) eclipses it in this millennium. Over 256.2 innings, Schilling's 10.22 fWAR is the best since the aforementioned Randy, same for his 8.10 fWAA and .550 f_Yr. WL% (an approximation of an otherwise average team's winning percentage over a full season if they had this player). His K/BB was 9.58, good for an almost impossible-to-believe 494 K/BB+ figure. 2002 is also the first year with xFIP data and his was 2.20, so if you convert that to his actual FIP and ERA (and maintain an RA of 0.07 above his ERA), we are looking at a 10.63 fWAR and 11.78 bWAR. Schilling's underlying peripherals show a pitcher that, at age 35, was beyond dominant, on par with his Arizona teammate who took home his 4th straight Cy Young. His 2.31 FIP (again slightly off from FG because I use purely intraleague figures to derive it) was 80% better than average, second only to Pedro's 185 FIP+. The reason that Schilling's rate and volume fWAR totals supersede Martinez's is because of Park Factors, where Chase Field had a 108 PF while Fenway's was actually slightly pitcher-friendly at 98.

My methodology actually ranks Schilling 11th all-time, but because it only goes back to 1901, Cy Young is diminished here since I use a combination of rate and volume as well as weight peak at 43% and career at 57%. Schilling's fWAR metrics are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, especially his rate and peak splits. For a pitcher's best seven years (not consecutive), Schilling's 153.2 FIP+ is 5th all-time, his 39.9 fWAA is fourth (behind Randy, Roger, and Pedro), his 53.9 fWAR is sixth, his f_waaWL% (the estimated win percentage an otherwise average team would have in games this pitched participated in) of .679 is fourth, and his .536 f_Yr. WL% is sixth. Yes, peak dominance is not everything, but I think it should count significantly when contextualizing all-time rankings because mere volume accumulation, while impressive in its own right, doesn't swing the needle on a season-to-season basis, and while I admit that it's a preference, dominance deserves a place.

However, I have neglected to mention bWAR-based metrics, and admittedly, Schilling does not fare as well here. In the interest of transparency, here are his bWAR placements for 7-year peaks: a 141.6 ERA+ is 41st, his .666 bwaaWL% is 16th, his .533 b_Yr. WL% is 29th, his 37.2 bWAA is 26th, and his 51.2 bWAR is 33rd. To put it frankly, those do not scream Top-15 pitcher of all-time. But we also have to include career totals as well, as I even admitted that I weight career more than peak for my ranking. On the bWAR side, he fares much better here than his peak. Below are his FG and BRef stats in bold and his 1901-present ranking is in (italicized parenthesis). The reason my WAR totals differ from FG and BRef (aside from the various slight adjustments I made as described above) is because I only included the sum of qualified seasons, not partial ones, nor did I factor in 2020 due to the short 60-game season.

FIP+: 136.5 (7th)

fWAA: 52.9 (8th)

fWAR: 77.6 (16th)

fwaaWL%: .631 (6th)

f_Yr. WL%: .526 (4th)

ERA+: 134.0 (34th)

bWAA: 55.9 (16th)

bWAR: 80.5 (24th)

bwaaWL%: .639 (9th)

b_Yr. WL%: .527 (21st)

It is completely understandable if these numbers still leave one skeptical of Schilling's status of a Top-15 pitcher ever, but if you are open to the possibility of it, I think it is closer than maybe the initial gut reaction would say, which even for me, is pessimistic on such a posit. Now would this hold if the color barrier never existed? Probably not. Willie Foster, Bullet Rogan, Satchel Paige, William Bell, and Ray Brown may have him beat. Kid Nichols has a good case as being above him, although I would draw the line at him for other pre-1901 pitchers (my apologies to Tim Keefe, John Clarkson, and Pud Galvin).

Now, to cap it off, if we are factoring in the postseason, I think it should CLEARLY make him a top-15 pitcher of all-time. His 2.23 ERA is spectacular, but it isn't the best (Koufax has a 0.98 ERA and Mathewson has him beat at 0.97). Adjusted for the era he played in, however, Schilling has a 200 ERA+ over 133.1 postseason IPs, beating even Bob Gibson who has a 182 ERA+ for his 1.89 ERA. Schilling's ERA+ is 8th all-time for starters and no pitcher above him comes within 30 innings of his total, with Mathewson's 333 ERA+ coming over the course of 101.2 IPs. His WPA is the highest ever for SPs at 4.07 WPA, with Andy Pettitte taking the silver at 3.20 WPA. The incredible part about that is Pettitte earned it over 276.2 IPs, so Schilling, in less than half the number of innings, materially supersedes him. Rivera takes the record for postseason WPA at 11.38, but considering that he was a closer and could go all-out for an inning and change at most, I am comfortable saying Schilling ranks higher than Mo among postseason hurlers. Schilling had a 3.05 WPA/100 postseason innings pitched, which is second only to Zack Wheeler all-time among pitchers with at least 10 postseason starts, and Wheeler has averaged only 17.6 outs per games, or ~5.2 innings, while Schilling averaged 21.1 outs/7 innings per outing. In the modern game with high-usage bullpens, Schilling's ability to maintain excellent rate dominance and going deep into games was another big value-add to his teams' postseason successes. While I do not generally use postseason performance in ascertaining the historical placing of a player, when a guy is that dominant over that long a stretch, I think it deserves some recognition.

reddit.com
u/UTexas2005 — 11 days ago
▲ 0 r/Sabermetrics+1 crossposts

Curt Schilling: A Sabermetric Analysis of His Career

Given how controversial Schilling is, a sabermetrics evaluation of his career is probably the one area that is least up for debate. I am not interested in his politics, post-career goings-on, or other controversies, I want to keep it strictly about his on-field performance. As I hope to be able to show, Schilling's career was perhaps the pinnacle of great regular season performance, otherworldly postseason success, and one that cannot be fully appreciated without diving into the sabermetrics. His time spent on the diamond was nothing short of legendary.

Going strictly by his on-field performance, Schilling has an extremely strong case as being the fifth-best pitcher of the last 40 years, behind the Big Four of Clemens, Maddux, Johnson, and Martinez (not necessarily in that order). Schilling's off-field views are almost certainly the reason why he is not in the Hall of Fame, but really, they never should have factored in much at all because he should have been an easy first-ballot HOF selection back in 2013, and he didn't really start opening his mouth and talking politics until 2016. In 2013, his first year on the ballot, he received only 38.8% and the next year he DROPPED by a quarter to 29.2%, which is just ridiculous. Back then voters were still enamored with pitcher wins, explaining why Glavine got elected on his first time on the ballot to the tune of 91.9%, even though Schilling, on the field, was far, FAR superior, and that's just in the regular season, let alone any postseason heroics.

You cannot talk about Schilling's pitching without mentioning K/BB ratio. Alongside home runs allowed, those three statistics form the basis of FIP. Why does this matter when talking about Schilling's place among the game's greatest? It is because he absolutely dominated this category, and when factoring in his roughly league-average HR%, the fact that he had such a high fWAR total for his career should tell you something about this guy's pinpoint control. Greg Maddux gets lauded for his accuracy, and rightfully so, but I think Schilling was even better, at least when it comes to K/BB: Maddux's 7-year peak K/BB+ (K/BB ratio adjusted for era) was a staggering 285.58, seventh-best since 1901 by my calculations. Schilling's figure was 315.07, just barely behind Pedro's 316.62 and Cy Young's 316.02. For his career, Schilling tossed to a 268.58 K/BB+, second all-time behind Young's otherworldly 291.28; Schilling's career mark is higher than Clayton Kershaw's seven-year peak figure of 261.41. While not walking hitters is crucial, I think a more holistic view of control is how efficiently you strike guys out as you pitch. Schilling did that just about better than anyone ever has.

Of course, K/BB ratio, while important, is not the end-all, be-all. Schilling's brilliance also has to be contextualized in the era he played, and the ballparks he played in, as we all know. Schilling started his career in a low-offense environment of 1988 but didn't really get significant time on the mound until 1992. While that year was tied with '88 for the lowest runs per 9 in the NL since 1968, starting in 1993, it ramped all the way up to 4.52 and stayed high for the rest of his time in the Sr. Circuit, averaging 4.70 RA and in his 4 years in the AL from 2004-2007 it was 4.89 RA. Since FIP is equated to ERA for the purposes of fWAR, and since Schilling's peak was more FIP-dominant than pure run prevention, I wanted to focus on two years in particular, in which, granted, he only made one postseason appearances, but we'll get to the playoffs later.

While 1997 was Schilling's breakout sabermetrics year, 1998 saw him go to heights seldom ever reached from an fWAR perspective. FanGraphs credits him with 8.25 fWAR, which is really good, but not otherworldly. However, my calculations give him 9.43 fWAR, which while I cannot confirm with 100% certainty, is most likely due to their use of multi-year regressed PFs and my use of single-year PFs, as the 1998 Phillies had a 101 5-year regressed PF and a 106 PF for just that year. Also, my FIP calculation is based solely on an intraleague derivation, not interleague, which is why my 2.69 FIP for '98 Schilling is slightly less than the 2.77 FIP FG credits him with. Using FG's PFs and FIP would result in a derivation of 8.55 fWAR for Schilling as opposed to 9.43, and the remaining 0.3 fWAR is probably due to a combination of immaterial PythagenPat variances between FG and BRef, which I employ the latter for my calcs. With that out of the way, let's dive into what made this season special.

Schilling had 300+ Ks for the second year in a row at a rate 57% better than the NL average. He led the majors in IPs at 268.2 and his 9.43 fWAR was .45 wins more than second-place Kevin Brown's 8.98 fWAR. He was first in pretty much all FG-related metrics this season, both volume and rate, with the exception of FIP, in which his 153.9 FIP+ was fifth. However, because of his pitching in a very hitter-friendly ballpark, his fWAA and fWAR totals get him the gold medal in those metrics. He severely underperformed his peripherals with a 3.25 ERA, and while we can play the "would coulda shoulda" game all day, had his ERA aligned to his FIP and his RA remained at 0.13 runs above his ERA, you are looking at a bWAR of 9.73 instead of what he actually had of 7.62 bWAR (based on my derivations). Again, hypotheticals all day long, but when most think of Schilling, his time with Arizona comes to mind, and while understandable, he was awesome in multiple seasons with Philadelphia and that should not be forgotten to history.

2002 was his magnum opus and one of the most dominant fWAR seasons this century, maybe the single best. I would say only Johnson's 2001 season (in which I calculated his fWAR at 11.00) eclipses it in this millennium. Over 256.2 innings, Schilling's 10.22 fWAR is the best since the aforementioned Randy, same for his 8.10 fWAA and .550 f_Yr. WL% (an approximation of an otherwise average team's winning percentage over a full season if they had this player). His K/BB was 9.58, good for an almost impossible-to-believe 494 K/BB+ figure. 2002 is also the first year with xFIP data and his was 2.20, so if you convert that to his actual FIP and ERA (and maintain an RA of 0.07 above his ERA), we are looking at a 10.63 fWAR and 11.78 bWAR. Schilling's underlying peripherals show a pitcher that, at age 35, was beyond dominant, on par with his Arizona teammate who took home his 4th straight Cy Young. His 2.31 FIP (again slightly off from FG because I use purely intraleague figures to derive it) was 80% better than average, second only to Pedro's 185 FIP+. The reason that Schilling's rate and volume fWAR totals supersede Martinez's is because of Park Factors, where Chase Field had a 108 PF while Fenway's was actually slightly pitcher-friendly at 98.

My methodology actually ranks Schilling 11th all-time, but because it only goes back to 1901, Cy Young is diminished here since I use a combination of rate and volume as well as weight peak at 43% and career at 57%. Schilling's fWAR metrics are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, especially his rate and peak splits. For a pitcher's best seven years (not consecutive), Schilling's 153.2 FIP+ is 5th all-time, his 39.9 fWAA is fourth (behind Randy, Roger, and Pedro), his 53.9 fWAR is sixth, his f_waaWL% (the estimated win percentage an otherwise average team would have in games this pitched participated in) of .679 is fourth, and his .536 f_Yr. WL% is sixth. Yes, peak dominance is not everything, but I think it should count significantly when contextualizing all-time rankings because mere volume accumulation, while impressive in its own right, doesn't swing the needle on a season-to-season basis, and while I admit that it's a preference, dominance deserves a place.

However, I have neglected to mention bWAR-based metrics, and admittedly, Schilling does not fare as well here. In the interest of transparency, here are his bWAR placements for 7-year peaks: a 141.6 ERA+ is 41st, his .666 bwaaWL% is 16th, his .533 b_Yr. WL% is 29th, his 37.2 bWAA is 26th, and his 51.2 bWAR is 33rd. To put it frankly, those do not scream Top-15 pitcher of all-time. But we also have to include career totals as well, as I even admitted that I weight career more than peak for my ranking. On the bWAR side, he fares much better here than his peak. Below are his FG and BRef stats in bold and his 1901-present ranking is in (italicized parenthesis). The reason my WAR totals differ from FG and BRef (aside from the various slight adjustments I made as described above) is because I only included the sum of qualified seasons, not partial ones, nor did I factor in 2020 due to the short 60-game season.

FIP+: 136.5 (7th)

fWAA: 52.9 (8th)

fWAR: 77.6 (16th)

fwaaWL%: .631 (6th)

f_Yr. WL%: .526 (4th)

ERA+: 134.0 (34th)

bWAA: 55.9 (16th)

bWAR: 80.5 (24th)

bwaaWL%: .639 (9th)

b_Yr. WL%: .527 (21st)

It is completely understandable if these numbers still leave one skeptical of Schilling's status of a Top-15 pitcher ever, but if you are open to the possibility of it, I think it is closer than maybe the initial gut reaction would say, which even for me, is pessimistic on such a posit. Now would this hold if the color barrier never existed? Probably not. Willie Foster, Bullet Rogan, Satchel Paige, William Bell, and Ray Brown may have him beat. Kid Nichols has a good case as being above him, although I would draw the line at him for other pre-1901 pitchers (my apologies to Tim Keefe, John Clarkson, and Pud Galvin).

Now, to cap it off, if we are factoring in the postseason, I think it should CLEARLY make him a top-15 pitcher of all-time. His 2.23 ERA is spectacular, but it isn't the best (Koufax has a 0.98 ERA and Mathewson has him beat at 0.97). Adjusted for the era he played in, however, Schilling has a 200 ERA+ over 133.1 postseason IPs, beating even Bob Gibson who has a 182 ERA+ for his 1.89 ERA. Schilling's ERA+ is 8th all-time for starters and no pitcher above him comes within 30 innings of his total, with Mathewson's 333 ERA+ coming over the course of 101.2 IPs. His WPA is the highest ever for SPs at 4.07 WPA, with Andy Pettitte taking the silver at 3.20 WPA. The incredible part about that is Pettitte earned it over 276.2 IPs, so Schilling, in less than half the number of innings, materially supersedes him. Rivera takes the record for postseason WPA at 11.38, but considering that he was a closer and could go all-out for an inning and change at most, I am comfortable saying Schilling ranks higher than Mo among postseason hurlers. Schilling had a 3.05 WPA/100 postseason innings pitched, which is second only to Zack Wheeler all-time among pitchers with at least 10 postseason starts, and Wheeler has averaged only 17.6 outs per games, or ~5.2 innings, while Schilling averaged 21.1 outs/7 innings per outing. In the modern game with high-usage bullpens, Schilling's ability to maintain excellent rate dominance and going deep into games was another big value-add to his teams' postseason successes. While I do not generally use postseason performance in ascertaining the historical placing of a player, when a guy is that dominant over that long a stretch, I think it deserves some recognition.

reddit.com
u/UTexas2005 — 12 days ago
▲ 9 r/Sabermetrics

WAR Gini Coefficient and Team Success

(This is from a non-Reddit baseball sabermetrics group that I am a member of and posted this back in December 2024. It was made after Soto signed his contract with the Mets.)

My hypothesis going into this analysis was that it would be better for a player (Soto in this example) to frontload his production in order to maximize the probability of the Mets getting the top seed and increasing their chances of winning a pennant and, subsequently, the World Series, I decided to take the plunge and try to find the Gini Coefficient of each AL and NL team since 1901 (excluding the shortened 2020 season). It was a somewhat tedious, but interesting exercise, and one in which I learned some new Excel tricks, so a total win in my book.

Some disclaimers out of the way first: First, I am not great at math by any means, rather just someone who likes to use Excel to conduct baseball statistical analysis to the best of my ability. I am sure many, if not most, in this group supersede my mathematical proficiency, so I all ask is that you don't destroy me too terribly in the comments if you (inevitably) find errors in the methodology/conclusions, lol. Second (and this is the biggest one), since WAR goes negative, and the Gini Coefficient presupposes a population existing of solely positive values, that is an obvious challenge in computing G. (I understand that there are various workarounds to this, having perused the 2019 paper from De Battisti, Porro, and Vernizzi, but due to my lack of proficiency, I was unable to apply it here. I would love to discuss with individuals smarter than me on this and learn how to improve upon my admittedly basic calculations.)

Additionally, to add another layer of difficulty, there were two teams whose total fWAR was negative (position player + pitching WAR) (1963 NYM and 1979 OAK), and 43 teams that had negative cumulative position player fWAR (the 2022 Nationals had -0.011 cumulative pitching fWAR, the only team with negative pitching WAR out of 2600+ seasons). Obviously, this is going to further skew the calculations. What I ended up doing as a piecemeal "fix" (and I use that so loosely that it's moreso teleporting in the ether as opposed to being gripped) was that for when G was below 0 or above 1, I excluded it. I hope to eventually get to a point of mathematical and statistical competency to incorporate them by adjusting the formula, but alas, I am not there as of this time. I am positive many in this group are, so I would love to be able to improve by discussing this further if you would like.

Okay, so one more thing before I include the chart. I incorporated all individual player contributions for a team's season into the calculation for G, regardless of a) if they accrued negative WAR and b) how much they played. The only exception is that I did not include position players with zero plate appearances (so essentially those used solely as pinch-runners or defensive replacements that never hit). The total fWAR combined amongst all position players with 0 PAs was -1.3573, so it would have a statistically immaterial impact on the calculations. However, I did include pitchers with 0.0 innings pitched.

Now for the "fun" part. Below is a chart depicting the relationship between said first place team's regular season winning percentage (I did not include the postseason because I wanted to reduce the noise caused by variance in those small sample sizes). As you can see, for first place teams, there is a negative R^2 of a team's winning percentage and G, -.1257 to be exact (calculated logarithmically, not linearly, with the latter coming out to be -.1247). The "Weighted Average" part was done by taking G of a team's position player fWAR and multiplying it by 0.57 and multiplying the G of a team's pitching fWAR by 0.43, in alignment with how FanGraphs distributes its WAR pool. The second chart breaks out these teams into tiers, with the population of said tied consisting of which teams met or exceeded the WP% of said tier up to the successive tier's WP%. As we can see, most first-place teams in a league have a WP% between .590 and .650, with 162 out of the 249 total (the reason it is 249 and not (123 * 2) is because for three years post-divisional alignment, there were two teams in a league who finished with the same %, but since they played in different divisions, a playoff was unnecessary), 65.06%. Average G for those teams is 0.35547.

So with all that being said, what conclusions can we feasibly draw from this, admittedly only looking at first place teams? It seems that the very best teams in terms of regular season winning percentage do not have a high relative G, so contrary to my initial thoughts that the Mets would want Soto to cluster his WAA/WAR on the front end of the contract to get the best chance of getting the 1 seed, maybe it would be a net benefit to the organization if Soto were to be more consistent as opposed to excelling early on and then being merely average for 60% of the contract. Of course, this assumes it's one or the other, and Soto is absolutely capable of having multiple elite seasons on the front side and then being a consistent 4-5 win player on the back half. What would benefit the Mets the most is, of course, Soto to have elite seasons while other players also contribute a lot of value, such as Lindor continuing to be an all-world SS and Vientos improving. What they cannot do is rest easy thinking "now that we've got Soto, we're good."

Finally, I have this data in a spreadsheet and can modify it to answer such questions as "what is the R^2 between G and winning percentage for all teams within a year/decade/other period of time?". However, for this post, I was interested in how the best teams in a given year compare historically for G.

u/UTexas2005 — 12 days ago
▲ 19 r/Sabermetrics+1 crossposts

Catcher Caught Stealing Analysis

(This is from another baseball sabermetrics group that I am a part of outside of Reddit.)

I was fooling around on Baseball-Reference (as I am prone to do) and went down the rabbit hole of looking at catcher caught-stealing data from the 1950s and 60s (when we first have comprehensive play-by-play data and don't have to estimate based on putouts and assists, at least that's what BRef says). In the 50s, the CS% was incredibly high compared to the modern day, nearly 2x in fact (the caught stealing rate in the American League in 1953 was 48.09%, contrasted with 24.97% in 2022, the last year before the new rules limiting pickoffs and increasing base size took effect). Interestingly enough, the stolen base attempts per game were also far lower back then, with the average SBA/gm between 1950-1964 being a paltry 0.546, far less than 2021's 0.602 attempts a game.

With all this being said, looking at unadjusted CS% is not very helpful in assessing the best at throwing out runners due to the recent leaguewide trend of only a team's best runners being sent in the most advantageous of situations. That's why we have guys like Sammy White and Frank House having obscene caught stealing rates of 47.2% and 47.4%, respectively. While they were good, I don't think any serious baseball fan would say they deserve to be thought of as materially greater than guys like Ivan Rodriguez or Yadier Molina in that category. However, by unadjusted numbers, they should be. So I figured why not do the same thing for caught stealing rates as we do for OPS and adjust it for era.

My methodology was pretty straightforward: I took every catcher season since 1950 with at least 500 innings and got their stolen bases allowed and caught stealings and put it into a spreadsheet. I then separated them by league and got the AL and NL totals for SBs and CSs each year. Then I just divided the individual catcher's CS% by their league's CS% and multiplied it by 100 to get a number indexed to 100, CS%+ (Adjusted Caught Stealing Percentage). Additionally, I computed "Stolen Base Attempts Prevented," (aka SBAP) which I did by 1) taking the SBAs a catcher faced in their time behind the plate and 2) subtracting the SBAs in the league per gm * the "approximate" number of games said catcher played. The "approximate" games were computed simply by taking the total innings said player was at catcher and dividing it by 9. As an example, in 1950, Roy Campanella caught 1,064.1 innings. This corresponds to 118.26 games, calculated by (1,064.333 repeating/9). He faced 56 stolen base attempts, and the NL average of SBAs/gm was 0.538 attempts. If you multiply (0.538*118.26), you will get 63.62, so Campanella "prevented" 7.62 fewer stolen base attempts than the league average catcher. Similar to the CS%, I took an individual catcher's SBAs faced and divided it by the league average per approximates games to get SBAP+ (Adjusted Stolen Base Attempts Prevented). I also found their "Caught Stealing(s) Above Average" (CSAA) by taking their (CS% - Lg. Avg. CS%) and multiplying it by the amount of stolen base attempts that individual catcher faced. Now CSAA is a cumulative stat, so the more attempts said catcher faced, the greater this number will be, ceteris paribas.

Now the latter metric is, of course, completely arbitrary, made up by me in the span of 15 minutes, and does not account for pitchers whatsoever, as we all know some pitchers get run on more than others, regardless of the catcher's ability to inspire fear in baserunners. However, I do find it helpful that in general, the fewer attempts a catcher faced relative to their contemporaries in the same year, the greater it correlated to their adjusted caught stealing percentage, as we can see with the below chart. I think an R^2 of 36.42% is pretty good for a spur-of-the-moment calculation. To top it off, here are the Top 10 catchers in CS%+ along with their SBAP+ and total CSAA with a minimum of 3,500 innings caught since 1950. Hope y'all find it intriguing.

  1. Wes Westrum - 134.3, 121.6, 32

  2. Jose Molina - 134.5, 99.5, 34

  3. Roy Campanella - 136.1, 134.4, 54

  4. Brian Schneider - 137.6, 114.9, 51

  5. Ryan Hanigan - 138.0, 129.3, 30

  6. Gerald Laird - 140.5, 94.4, 44

  7. Henry Blanco - 142.9, 104.6, 58

  8. Yadier Molina - 145.5, 162.8, 114

  9. Ivan Rodriguez - 146.7, 141.0, 206

  10. Kenji Johjima - 147.5, 115.1, 37

u/UTexas2005 — 12 days ago