In 2007 and 2008, I projected the statistics of the Phillies major league players as well as a handful of other players.  My projections do not use any kind of direct algorithm other than a weighted average of past performance, slight adjustments for age and other factors, and a build up performance projections using peripheral statistics.  I use my own knowledge from watching the games, and unsurprisingly, I generally do better projecting Phillies players than other players.  In fact, this past season I projected the performance of 13 hitters (Ruiz, Howard, Utley, Feliz, Rollins, Burrell, Victorino, Werth, Coste, Bruntlett, Dobbs, and Jenkins) and 11 pitchers (Hamels, Myers, Kendrick, Eaton, Lidge, Gordon, Madson, Durbin, Romero, and Condrey).  Using the sum of square errors between actual and projected OPS and ERA (so low numbers are good), here is how I faired on these hitters and pitchers compared to the other major projection systems out there:

HITTERS

Marcel: .0573

Chone: .0610

MattS: .0658

PECOTA: .0676

ZIPS: .0808

Ron Shandler: .0857

Bill James: .0938

PITCHERS

Ron Shandler: 15.51

Chone: 15.86

PECOTA: 16.07

MattS: 16.51

Bill James: 19.69

Marcel: 19.74

ZIPS: 21.89

At least in 2008, I did a pretty good job projecting the Phillies players.  This is not a large sample, and I did worse for players who did not play for the Phillies last year.  It could be noise, or it could be that I have a decent methodology for doing things and a comparative advantage in watching the games.  Regardless, here are my 2009 projections, along with analysis of my previous projections.  Please feel free to add let me know where you think I’ve gone wrong, or any other comments you have on these projections.

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I’ve looked at every player on the Phillies and Rays playoff rosters, and I’ve tried to get as much information as possible about them.  I’m going to report a mini-scouting report on each player.  The things that I’ve highlighted are things that their simple statistics won’t show, so mostly platoon splits.  I’ll do the hitters first, starting with the Rays.  Please feel free to post additional information.  I don’t know the Rays that well, and I only looked at the numbers.  For someone who understands numbers and watches the games, I know that I’m going to attribute some things to chance that are actually based on real tendencies when I talk about the Rays, but I did a lot of research for this.  I’m hoping that people, Rays and Phillies fans both, post comments on this and give more information on these guys.  Here’s my report on the 50 people who don’t know me who will determine the state of my mental health for months and maybe years to come.

RAYS HITTERS

2B Iwamura (L): .274/.349/.380

Noteables: Very good strike zone judgment—swings at many strikes and few balls according fangraphs.com splits.  In fact, he swing% at strikes is 3.55 times as high for strikes as for balls, which is definitely above average (the average seems to be slightly below 3.0, looking through various players).  He tends to have a lower BABIP early in the count, and performs better against groundball pitchers.  He has a very typical LHP/RHP split for a lefty contact hitter, actually putting up a slightly stronger OPS in his short MLB career against lefties, but that is belied by a poorer BB/K rate against them.   He does strike out 21% of the time, but he walks 10% of the time as well.

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I have no idea who will win the World Series.  I am biased for the Phillies, so I feel like they will win, but I have no idea.  Supposed experts throw guesses around, and many will be right and claim they knew it all along.  Others will be wrong, and will claim they failed to notice something crucial they now see.  In reality, there will be luck in play.  There was luck to get here for both teams, and there will continue to be luck on both sides throughout the series.  What I intend to do here is give you information.  Here is what you need to know about the teams, matchups, and players to understand what may happen.  I’ll post first about the teams in general, and break down into a discussion about the players themselves in a subsequent post soon later.

Odds:

Tradesports: Phillies at 43%

Baseball Prospectus: Phillies at 52%

Coolstandings: Phillies at 47%

Now, let’s look at some general team metrics to see how those odds got there.

Record:

Phillies: 92-70

Rays: 97-65

The Rays won more games, a good sign for them.  Now, let’s adjust for runs scored and runs against.

Pythagorean Record:

Phillies: 93-69

Rays: 91-71

It seems that the Phillies outscored their opponents more convincingly.  Does that mean that if luck were removed, the Phillies would have demonstrated that they were the superior team this year?  It depends, but probably not. Why is it that the Rays outperformed their Pythagorean Record by six games?  Is it a good bullpen, good one run strategies, letting blowouts get out of hand while letting guys get in work?  Or is it luck?  That’s a good question.

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Same assumptions (70% Phils>Nats, 70% Mets>Marlins, 60% Brewers>Cubs)...updated odds after tonight's games.

Playoffs: 92.7%

Division: 83.0%

Wild Card: 9.7%

If Phils go...

3-0: 100%

2-1: 98.1%

1-2: 75.7%

0-3: 30.4%

Through Friday if....

Phils Win, Mets Win, Brewers Win: 94.4%

Phils Win, Mets Win, Brewers Lose: 98.9%

Phils Win, Mets Lose, Brewers Win: 98.7%

Phils Win, Mets Lose, Brewers Lose: 99.6%

Phils Lose, Mets Win, Brewers Win: 72.3%

Phils Lose, Mets Win, Brewers Lose: 89.6%

Phils Lose, Mets Lose, Brewers Win: 88.0%

Phils Lose, Mets Lose, Brewers Lose: 94.4%

As yesterday, I am calculating our odds making the playoffs, including several other timing issues.  I'm assuming that there are no rainouts in the next few days, which may or may not be a reasonable assumption, but let's go with it.  I'm sure as hell not doing conditional odds counting meteorological odds too!  I'm also assuming that all three teams have 70% chance of beating any non-Cubs teams and 60% chance of beating the Cubs.

Making Playoffs At All: 95.7%

Divison Winners: 80.0%

Odds after Thursday if:
Brewers & Mets win: 92.7%

Brewers win, Mets lose: 97.4%

Brewers lose, Mets win: 97.8%

Brewers & Mets lose: 99.0%

Clinching on:

Friday: 15.8%

Saturday: 50.6%

Sunday: 24.2%

Monday: 4.0%

Tuesday: 1.1%

Eliminated on:

Sunday: 1.44%

Monday: 1.76%

Tuesday: 1.11%

On Friday:

Magic#3: 42%

Magic#2: 58%

On Saturday:

Magic#3: 5.3%

Magic#2: 30.3%

Magic#1: 48.6%

Clinched: 15.8%

Eliminated: 0.0%

On Sunday:

Magic#3: 0.7%

Magic#2: 7.1%

Magic#1: 25.8%

Clinched: 66.4%

Eliminated: 0.0%

Two-way tie Monday: 7.94%

Three-way tie Monady: 4.40%

Eliminated Monday: 3.97%

Eliminated Tuesday: 1.10%

Going into today, most systems had the Phillies at approximately a 99%+ chance of making the playoffs.  Clearly, with a Phils loss, a Mets win, and a Brewers win, those odds had to go down.  How much?  Coolstandings.com is now saying 98.9%, still pretty good.  BaseballProspectus.com, Sportsclubstats.com, and maybe even Tradesports.com will have estimates tomorrow morning.

Unsatisfied with the cold facts, I've decided to dig a little deeper and give myself a sense of the stochastic roller coaster ride I'm about to take!

Firstly, I'm saying 98.0% chance of making the playoffs.  From there, I'll explain some breakdowns.

{EDIT: I've changed a few numbers due to some calculation errors I made}

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I had a lot of difficulty trying to post the "WE GON' HIT" blog entry, so I left some analysis and some data for this fanpost.

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“We gon’ hit,” Charlie Manuel reassured earlier this season, as the Phillies seemed to be temporarily underachieving.  I concurred, and had a few things to say myself on the matter*:

http://www.thegoodphight.com/2008/7/9/567725/phillies-team-babip

http://www.thegoodphight.com/2008/7/14/571275/phillies-hitters-babips-mo

Yes, it seemed inevitable that the Phillies would turn themselves around.  In the first of my two posts linked above, I pointed out the remarkable similarities between the Phillies walk rates, strikeout rates, homerun rates, and extra base hit rates in recent years, and expressed a belief that the team’s BABIP, inexplicably low at the time, was destined to turn around and our run scoring ability would too.  The logic was simple—teams that are actually performing poorly by some underlying change in ability would have some indication of this in their more robust and stable statistics such as the ones listed above.  Indeed, the lack thereof seemed to indicate performance was coming.  In the second of the two posts above, I took a peak at the players individually and was even more assured that improvement was coming.

It has not.

Looking through the statistics now in more detail, I am prepared to make a confident prediction: “we gon’ hit.”

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About six weeks ago, I posted about a piece about homefield advantage that can be found here:

http://www.thegoodphight.com/2008/7/3/564256/homefield-advantage

Today, I will continue with a few more interesting observations about homefield advantage, and a request for explanations about a few interesting phenomena.

The main discoveries a few weeks ago were that while homefield advantage had very little to do with the specific team or stadium, it seemed to affect nearly every aspect of a team’s game, and games within the same division had smaller homefield advantages. 

I have played with the numbers a little bit more and I have found a very bizarre result.  I checked further and found that looking through ten years of data, from 1998-2007, the result indeed held.  Keep in mind that with ten years of data, the high homefield advantage in middle games of series and the low homefield advantage in last games of series are statistically significant.

Homefield Advantage:

Overall: 53.8%

First games of series: 53.9%

Middle games of series: 54.7%

Last game of series: 52.7%

I have tried to figure out the cause of this peculiar result and I do not have a solid explanation why.  I have several hypotheses and a lot more segmentations of the data, and I would appreciate if anybody has any explanation about this.  If you are interested, read on.

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Last week, I noted that the Phillies team BABIP was abnormally low despite similar statistics in other categories, and hypothesized that perhaps the Phillies were due to see improvement in their run scoring.  After looking through the roster more completely, I have become even more convinced that this is the case.  I have noted previously that the bullpen has been the benefactor of great luck, and that the Phillies can expect some regression to the mean on that front.  This study of BABIP paints a counter-argument to the claim that the Phillies have been lucky thus far. 

A couple things to know about BABIP:

(1) BABIP is considerably higher on line dries than groundballs or flyballs (I believe around .700+ on line drives), and a tiny bit higher on groundballs than flyballs for most hitters.

(2) BABIP improves with plate discipline-- swinging at bad pitches out of the strike zone frequently results in weakly hit balls.

The number of hitters who seem to have unlucky BABIP’s is astounding, and that suggests that the team will improve its hitting during the second half

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