May 18, 2013

On Chris Perez, Tie Games, Save Situations, and Stories

May 9, 2012 by 43 Comments

Jason Miller / Getty Images

You have to believe me: I didn’t know what I was getting into.

I was completely unaware of the narrative surrounding Chris Perez in non-save situations (or is it tie games? Or extra innings? I get confused.).

As the kids say, “I didn’t know that was a thing.”

So when twitter exploded last night after Perez allowed two runs to break a tie game, I wasn’t feeling combative. I was mostly curious. There were so many people suggesting that Perez just couldn’t handle that situation that I wondered how I had missed it. How had Acta missed it? WIth those glasses and everything?

I had to look it up. But how?

Thank goodness Al Gore created a magical series of tubes for just that purpose. In two seconds, I found this link and tweeted it: [Read more...]

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Josh Tomlin: Hoping on a Freak

May 18, 2011 by 18 Comments

If you’ve read much of what I’ve written here in the last 14 months or so, you know that one of the topics with which I’m constantly struggling is how to separate good (or bad) luck from good (or insufficient) talent.

Baseball is fecund territory for these sorts of examinations because we have so much data to pore over.  Every game, every at bat, every pitch comes under our purview, and with all this at our fingertips, all we have to do is check.  We can check, for example, that attributes like not making outs (OBP) are fairly repeatable, and normalize for most players around 100 plate appearances, whereas ERA is a bit flukier and takes a much bigger sample (several years) to get a handle of the underlying talent behind it. [Read more...]

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