With 40 games in the hopper, this seems like a convenient time to take a closer look at how the Braves’ offense is stacking up against its NL peers (all numbers through 5/15). Braves OPS by position (w/NL rank): C — 856 (T-1st with PIT) 1B — 829 (8th) 2B — 711 (7th) 3B — [...]
I started this little excursion to try and figure out why baseball has such a small home field advantage. I had a theory that I could explain it through baseball’s differential travel behavior. That hypothesis failed pretty miserably. But I think I learned a fair bit nonetheless, and I’ll take a few paragraphs to sum [...]
Note from Alex: The previous piece in this series, Part 3, was pre-empted by rumors about the Upton trade within hours of publication. I’m linking to it here, so that you can go back and read it. I started this series proposing that baseball should have a higher home field advantage than other sports because [...]
So… if travel doesn’t seem to do much, what about teams? Once we go to teams, we can no longer just look at home and road winning percentages, since those will depend greatly on how good the team was. Instead, we now switch to home-road splits: winning percentage at home minus winning percentage on the [...]
So what does the home field advantage in baseball look like? In my database of almost exactly 200,000 baseball games which didn’t end in ties, the home team won 54.7 percent. But road teams did really badly in the early days of baseball. Before 1900, the home team won 59.1 percent. Post WWII, only one [...]
So some colleagues were discussing PEDs and the HOF, a topic which really doesn’t interest me much at all. (I say let ‘em in.) The inevitable amphetamine argument was broached, you know, Mantle used greenies, what’s the difference? This got one of my more quantitative colleagues to try and figure out if one could estimate [...]
Alex has asked me to do something that scares me a little bit. So I’m going to try it. I am troubled by the size of the home field advantage in baseball — it seems way too small. So I’m going to do a study, but Alex wants me to do it in public at [...]
Not a big year for players seeking big round numbers or moving up career lists. Of course, the Braves are a very young team now. Chipper‘s pretty much settled his spot on the Braves leaderboards — second all-time in most things to the uncatchable Aaron, first in walks, first on most of the Atlanta-only lists. [...]
Okay, make your projections/guesses for player numbers in 2011 here. We will then look back and laugh at you at the end of the season. Here are mine: Dan Uggla: .265/.350/.530 Chipper Jones: 110 G, .280/.420/.420 Jason Heyward: 145 G, .300/.410/.620 Martin Prado: .307/.350/.410 (or what he always does) Brian McCann: .290/.390/.510 Alex Gonzalez: .250/.290/.420
1974 Atlanta Braves Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics – Baseball-Reference.com. Since the Pirates are almost totally uninteresting, I figured I’d talk about something else. First, here’s a video. While checking Henry Aaron’s stats for the season he broke the home run record, I noticed how out of context that season was for the Braves of [...]
