MVP Predictor update

Here are my MVP predictor updates, as of 7/7/10:

AL:
Player: Score: Change:

Cabrera 197.57 -

Morneau 189.35 -

Hamilton 188.75 -

Cano 182.18 -

Guerrero 182.00 -

Youkilis 179.79 -

Konerko 172.27 -

Beltre 170.86 -

Hunter 170.06 -

Longoria 169.61 - Dropped out: None

NL:
Player: Score: Change:

Votto 184.25 -

Pujols 177.43 -

Wright 175.93 -

Gonzalez 171.39 -

Prado 170.55 +3

Ethier 170.03 -

Rolen 169.12 -2

Huff 167.74 -

Dunn 166.67 -

Holliday 166.48 - Dropped out: Corey Hart

Nick Blackburn

While following yet another disappointing showing by Nick Blackburn on GameCast, I decided to spend some of the time investigating the pitch selection of the Twins struggling starter. Here's what I came up with:

Blackburn threw 62 pitches on Saturday.
53 Fastballs (including 3 cutters)
9 Off-speed

That comes out to 86% of all pitches were of the fastball variety.

Of the 6 hits he gave up (2 doubles and 4 homeruns), 5 of the 6 (83%) were put into play by fastballs, which only makes sense since that's what he mainly threw.

Two things are fascinating to me:
1) Four of the Tiger batters saw only fastballs. Three of them (Ordonez, Guillen, and Avila) hit homeruns. The fourth (Santiago) hit a double.

2) In Nick's first start this month (6.1 IP, 9 H, 7 R (4 earned)) against Tampa, he threw...drumroll please...85% fastballs (& cutters). In his stellar month of May, he threw less than 80% fastballs & cutters and over 13% changeups. This month's changeups...less than 5%.

If you look at Nick's Pitch type and value on fangraphs.com, you'll see that his sinker (fastball) is his best pitch by far (1.7w) and that his changeup is his worst (-1.4) for the month of July. However, if you go back to the month of May when he went 5-0 with a 2.65 ERA, you see that his fastball value was 7.1w and his changeup an unspectacular -1.0w.

To conclude: He's throwing less off-speed, which is making his fastball more predictable, and therefore more hittable. I'm not saying that he needs to get batters out using his off-speed, because his career numbers show us that he gets batters out by throwing his fastball. What he needs to do is throw the off-speed more often to keep hitters off balance, otherwise you're punching your ticket to LA to throw in the Home Run Derby.

MVP Predictor

Alright...move over Bill James and Rob Neyer. I have created the next award prediction tool. For those of you who get your MLB info and stats from ESPN.com, you may have seen the Cy Young Predictor that James & Neyer came up with to predict who has the best chance at winning the league's Cy Young award based on each player's current stats. They developed their tool based on which pitchers won the award in previous years and what baseball writers tend to base their votes on.

Well, after many days and weeks of research (pretty much just last night), I have come up with the MVP predictor to determine which player currently has the best chance of winning this year's Most Valuable Player Award. It calculates a players value based on the following criteria: Team Wins, Hits, Runs, Home Runs, Runs Batted In, On-Base Percentage, Batting Average, and On-base Plus Slugging.

Why come up with such a tool? Doesn't the award go to the best player that season? In fact it doesn't, ala Alex Rodriguez's 2002 season where he accumulated 57 HR, 142 RBI, and an OPS of 1.015 and finished a distant 2nd to Miguel Tejada's 34 HR, 131 RBI, .861 OPS.

Well, the voter's look at more than just the player, as we all know. The team's performance also comes into play. A glimpse at the standings in 2002 shows A-Rod's Rangers finishing in last in the AL West, an incredible 31 games behind Tejada's Athletics, despite the incredible season by the Rangers' SS.

So, can we just take the best player off the team with the best record? Not so fast. Fast forward just one year to the 2003 campaign where we again see Rodriguez having a stellar year, only to see his Rangers again finish at the bottom of the division, 30 wins less than the league leading New York Yankees, who finished 101-61. The great Yankees surely had the MVP that year, right? In fact it was one of the closest MVP races in history, with 48 points separating the top three candidates when the dust settled. This year, Rodriguez received the award, with.....Carlos Delgado (3rd place Blue Jays, 15 games behind the Yankees) finishing in 2nd. Finally, we see Jorge Posada of the Yankees in 3rd, even though his team ended up with the best record in the league and making it all the way to the World Series.

So, what have we learned? The MVP race is somewhat unpredictable, but voters seem to weigh heavily on two areas: your team's finish in the division and OPS. So...I have developed a tool to help predict the winner. I won't reveal the formula for my methods (you never know, it might become famous and I'll make a little money on the side because of it). But I will give you who I believe will win the award as of the end of June.

My MVP's through June are:

Miguel Cabrera & Joey Votto

Scoring is shown below:

AL Rank Player Score
1 Cabrera 188.40
2 Morneau 186.44
3 Hamilton 183.19
4 Cano 183.10
5 Guerrero 180.86
6 Youkilis 176.74
7 Konerko 169.50

NL Rank Player Score
1 Votto 177.01
2 Pujols 175.86
3 Wright 172.05
4 Gonzalez 168.50
5 Rolen 167.57
6 Ethier 162.50
7 Hart 161.22

Dogsledding!

Alright, I finally had enough interesting pictures and stories that I have a reason to write. It's getting late, so I'll have to just say that I don't have the time to tell about the miles of hiking, chopping through the bush, mushing a team of dogs, sleeping in a tent in -25 degree weather, eating moose for multiple meals, or growing a sweet beard. However, I do have time to give you this link for my facebook photo album. Trust me, the stories are much better in person, so make sure to ask me about the adventure that I'll sure be talking about for years to come!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022003&id=110800404&l=661e9f867e

Catch up!

First and foremost, I will honestly tell you that I didn't even realize that I had not posted anything for...64 days. What does that mean?

Well, first of all (being the stat guy I am) it means that there have been 352 visits by people in that timespan that have gone away with zero of our life happenings. Secondly, it means that life has surely been busy!!!

-I must admit that the reason I am blogging is because I felt guilty after being in church yesterday. Should I feel guilty after leaving church....? I think that's a little too deep of a question for today. Anyways, I got a shout out from Uncle Ken during the sermon, and then when we were eating lunch he reminded me that I hadn't blogged since "1 week to go...", and he had expected to see something around the time when the Twins won game #163 against the Tiggers. So here's my shout out to Uncle Ken in the blog post that he inspired.

-School is going well. Definitely a different set of kids this year than last...different interests, different personalities, but that's a good thing I guess. If all classes ended up being the same, I don't think I would teach very long.

-Since I last blogged, I've had the opportunity to hit a number of baseball games. Linds and I went with a couple friends to watch our Kane County Cougars take on the Beloit Snappers in late August. Beloit is the Class A affiliate of the Twins, so I guess I was rooting for the visitors. We got to see a couple Top 5 Twins prospects play...which apparently only excited me, and got to watch an extra inning of baseball, also which excited only me.

-Kirk, Cody, and Tim made the drive out in late September to watch the Twins take on the Sox. We got some pretty sweet seats for a decent price, went home with two batting practice balls (thanks to Matt Guerrier and Jason Kubel), and a TWINS WIN!!! It was the first time I got to see the Twins win in Chicago, so it made the walk through the parking lot a good one. Its amazing how many high-fives and fist-pounds we gave to random Twins fans when we saw them walking out of the stadium.

-There were a couple days in the past few weeks where I was stuck watching games by myself on T.V. Linds has been busy with volleyball, so I had to watch game #163 and Game 3 of the ALDS by myself for the most part. Seriously, I think #163 was the best game I have ever watched from start to finish. I still have it saved on our DVR so I can watch it over the winter.

-Like I said, Linds has been really busy with volleyball, along with work and school. I've gone to most of their games, a couple tournaments, and a few practices. They're doing REALLY well. Volleyball as a whole isn't the most popular sport at school, and I think part of her goal was to make it a bigger deal. The last game I was at there were quite a few students there watching the game, which is good because then I don't have to pump up the crowd by doing backflips during timeouts.

-kidding

-One good story (as it turned out) from the past two months concerns the Beretta. I thought she was dead. Well, not dead...dying in an ungraceful way. It sounded as if there was some sort of fan or belt that was going out (not a mechanic, so I had no idea). But the weird thing was that it happened for 1-2 sec and then stopped for about 5 sec, and then it would start again. It was so bizzare that I wasn't sure how to explain it to the mechanic when I took it in for a routine tune-up. Well, he heard it as well but couldn't figure out what it was from, so I took it home and we started looking for a new vehicle. Now you need to know (and it sounds rediculous), but I really like my car. I've had it for 8 years and 4 months and its the only car I've ever called my own. If it was dead on the side of the road or I couldn't get it started in the morning, then I might've felt differently, but it just wasn't that unreliable. I felt pretty good about getting an Equinox for it, realizing that I would let Linds drive it and I would probably take the Regal to work. Anyways...back to the story... We were driving to school together on a Friday, and the next day we were planning on going to seriously look at vehicles. As we were driving, it was like I had an epiphany (as Mr. Vanderaa would say) and I shut off the defrost of my car. The noise stopped. We sat in silence for about 10 seconds before Linds got the courage to say "There's no way." Then she decided to turn it back on. It wasn't more than 2 seconds later that the noise started again.

Moral of the story? Still kinda excited about getting an Equinox, so is there anyone interested in a '93 Beretta with a duct taped front end, no AC and (now) no defrost? Heater still works for now, so jump on it before that dies too!

-I think I'll probably try and do a Twins season recap sometime. You know me and blogging, so hopefully it happens. I think its more of a "get away from it all and somehow still feel productive" thing.

Just want to leave you with a few stats since I began tracking the visits to the blog.

Total visits since Jan 1: 1,838
High visit day: 19 (January 5 & September 8)
1000 visit day: May 28th

So long everybody...

1 week to go...

Well, summer is almost over. You always wonder where the time went and (maybe more importantly) what you did with all of it. Well, what I did was...

• very little schoolwork
• start refinishing a coffee table
• knock off another MLB stadium off the list (Miller Park)

Now, it may not seem like a whole lot, but here's what I came up with after summer's close...

• i teach for 9+ months out of the year and put in more time than your typical 8-5 job, so I was ready for a break
• i know that this coffee table will eventually end up in the basement of our future house (which i also picked out and found this summer...add that to the list), so there's no real sense in rushing it (this might be procrastination, so I'm riding a thin line)
• i want to see every major league stadium in my lifetime, so one new one a summer is a solid pace (plus the two Chicago stadiums I made it to before the summer began), and now my total stands at 8

The list goes on to include fishing trips, a wedding (maybe I should write it as a fishing/wedding trip), camping trip, trips from friends, trips to friends, trips from family, and trips to family. Minor league baseball, NFL training camp, a Taste of the city, and travels in six different states.

So as summer comes to a close and people ask me what I did, I struggle to come up with a really good answer. Depending on the person, I usually respond with "Nothing...absolutely nothing." to "Little bit of this and a little bit of that..." to "I hit the books and revamped my whole curriculum and view of teaching."--only to school board members, of course...

Hope all of you had as busy of a summer as we did. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty exhausted, I could use a break before school starts...

So long everybody...

A shot of our latest Kane County Cougars game, former Twins draft pick Tyler Ladendorf batting...

Trip, Trade Deadline, Twins

Hey everybody!

Just wanted to update you on our lives and what's been happening the past few weeks. We just got back from a camping trip with my extended family to Lewis & Clark Rec Area by Yankton, SD. The trip was bookended (is that a word? it sounds really literary, or something, so I'm going to use it because it makes sense) by stops at the Van Wyk residence to break up the drive, construct a couple bonfires (one sub-par and one simply amazing), and spend some time fishing. During the trip I managed to play a total of 36 holes of golf, 10 of which were great and will keep me from disowning the sport forever, 26 of which made me want to crack my driver over my leg and run over it with the cart.

I'm blogging from our house again, which means that our laptop is fixed, complete with a new motherboard and a hole in my wallet.

Thanks to the fixed computer, I was able to follow along on one of my favorite days of the year yesterday, the MLB trading deadline. I don't know if its something to brag about or not, but I feel like I was one of the first Twins fans to know about the official accquision of Orlando Cabrera, which wasn't discussed on MLB Network for another 15 minutes, or posted on the Star Tribune website for another 2 hours.

I'm glad the Twins made a move, if nothing else, I hope it keeps Mauer in Minny beyond the end of his current contract, which runs through 2010. He mentioned a few weeks ago that its going to be hard to sign an extension if the team doesn't show that its willing to make the moves necessary to keep up with the other big boppers of the AL. Now I don't think that all the needs were addressed (just look at the bullpen's line last night...4 1/3 IP, 7 H, 6 ER, but none bigger than the game-tying homerun that Guerrier gave up to Mike Napoli leading off the 8th inning)

The Twins' move looks even less significant after watching the Tiggers add Washburn, a solid starter. I must admit though, I don't believe that Washburn will continue to put up the same numbers for the final two months that he has through the first four. Neither do I think that the Sox accquision of Jake Peavy is as great as everyone is saying. He isn't supposed to come back until the end of August from an ankle injury, so he'll get at most 5 starts this year, so I'm not that convinced he'll have that big of an impact on this year's regular season outcome.

A quick look at his Home/Away stats for his career:

Home: 2.83 ERA, 1.09 WHIP

Away: 3.84 ERA, 1.30 WHIP

I am in no way trying to say that he is horrendous away from PETCO Park, but it just shows how playing in a pitcher-friendly ballpark helps out your stats. Not to mention moving to the AL, which is much more hitter friendly with the DH in the lineup.

On a positive note (well, not for Twins fans I guess) Peavy is one of the premier pitchers in all of baseball when he's on. Kinda like Mark Prior was when he was on. Also, he's not a rental player for the coming year, the Sox control him through 2013.

Finally, just a look at his stats against other top AL teams:

Yankees 0-2 3.60 ERA 1.30 WHIP

Red Sox 0-1 5.40 ERA 2.00 WHIP

Rays 1-0 0.00 ERA 0.71 WHIP

Tigers 0-1 4.50 ERA 1.00 WHIP

Twins 0-0 2.84 ERA 1.34 WHIP

Angels 0-1 3.38 ERA 0.75 WHIP

Rangers Never faced

Take the record (1-5) with a grain of salt, because don't forget he was playing for the Padres.

So long everybody!