From the editor: Smitty wrote this right after the Upton trade. Also: THE EDIT BUTTON IS BACK. All praise goes to Hap, who doggedly tested the functionality. Please thank him. I am not going to lie. Martin Prado was one of my all time favorite Braves and I am sad to see him go. Prado [...]
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 [...]
When the Braves traded their projected starting third baseman for Justin Upton, they needed to get an infielder back. So they got Chris Johnson, a 28-year old platoon third baseman. As of now, the plan appears to be a lefty-righty platoon of Johnson and Juan Francisco. We saw enough of Juan last year to know [...]
Okay, I guess I’d better eat some crow. I didn’t think we’d get Upton, at least not during the offseason, because we didn’t have the prospects to match the rejected Mariners trade. And, of course, we didn’t have the prospects to match it. But boy, am I happy to be wrong. The Braves acquired a [...]
In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver looked at several different fields of prediction to illustrate both the power and the limits of trying to peer into the future. Some fields, like meteorology, have progressed to the point where you can know with reasonable accuracy what the weather in your town will be like [...]
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 [...]
Mark Bowman, in a mailbag published Jan. 14: As much as the Braves understand how beneficial it would be to add a second Upton to their outfield mix, general manager Frank Wren will not jeopardize the club’s future with a Mark Teixeira-type package. In fact, it seems safe to assume he would not necessarily give [...]
