Vegas Watch

The 2008 Hall of Fame voting results will be announced at 2pm on Tuesday. This is good, because it means no more articles like this (Stark, ESPN):

"Unfortunately for Morris, even though he's trending in the right direction, he could double his vote total and still fall short. So even though he seems doomed to spend 15 years in ballot limbo, at least there's a greater appreciation now for what this man was in his time: the unabashed No. 1 starter for every team he pitched for."

I don't know what this means. I really have no idea. I do know this:

1978: 90 ERA+
1980: 99 ERA+
1982: 100 ERA+
1988: 98 ERA+
1989: 79 ERA+
1990: 89 ERA+
1993: 70 ERA+
1994: 83 ERA+

He was "the unabashed No. 1 starter" for his team every year, despite being league average or worse in eight of the 18 years of his career. This is good to know.

"That may not make his 3.90 career ERA -- which would be the highest of any Hall of Fame pitcher -- irrelevant. But does that ERA really tell the whole story of a pitcher who won 41 more games than any other starter of his generation during his 14 peak seasons (1979-92)? Not when we're talking about a pitcher who threw a no-hitter, started three All-Star Games, established his acehood on three World Series teams and pitched the greatest Game 7 (Morris versus John Smoltz, 1991) most of us have ever witnessed. So I have no second thoughts about checking his box, every single year."

105 career ERA+. But he gets into the Hall of Fame because:

1. He threw a no-hitter. True. Good sample size there, and definitely not included in his overall numbers.
2. He started three All-Star Games. True. Also meaningless, and included in overall numbers (stats from those first halves, I mean).
3. He established his acehood on three World Series teams. No.

1991 Minnesota Twins
Morris: 246.7 IP, 3.43 ERA
Kevin Tapani (!): 244 IP, 2.99 ERA

1992 Toronto Blue Jays
Morris: 240.7 IP, 4.04 ERA
Jimmy Key: 216.7 IP, 3.53 ERA
Juan Guzman: 180.7 IP, 2.64 ERA

4. Pitched the greatest Game 7 most of us had ever witnessed. He did? I hadn't heard.

To recap, we started with a pitcher with a 105 ERA+. We added these four factors, which range from meaningless to blatantly false. We arrive at this conclusion:

"So I have no second thoughts about checking his box, every single year."

Meanwhile, Buster Olney is pulling a Heyman and voting for Morris but not Blyleven. Rich Lederer went over his flawed logic regarding Blyleven last year. Here's my favorite part:

"I can't find another Hall of Famer voted in by writers with less than three All-Star appearances; Blyleven had two. Blyleven never finished first or second in Cy Young balloting and was never the most coveted free-agent pitcher or the object of a huge bidding war in trade talk, the way that Tom Seaver and even Vida Blue were."

Bert Blyleven did not make the All-Star team in each of the following years:

1974: 281 IP, 142 ERA+
1977: 234.7 IP, 151 ERA+
1984: 245 IP, 144 ERA+
1989: 241 IP, 140 ERA+

Each of these are better than any year Morris had, ever. Morris made five All-Star teams. In his career, Blyleven had a 3.47 ERA in the first half, and a 3.12 ERA in the second half. This probably caused him to miss out on a couple All-Star teams. This is an awesome reason to keep him out of the Hall of Fame.

Also, if Cy Young results are a great measure of dominance (they aren't), guess how many times Morris finished first or second in the Cy Young voting. None.

One final time:

-Blyleven pitched more innings than Morris (4970-3824)
-Blyleven had a lower ERA (3.31-3.90)
-Blyleven had a better ERA+ (118-105)
-Blyleven had a higher peak (more seasons with ERA+ above 150, 140, 130, 120)
-Blyleven struck out more guys (6.70 K/9 for Blyleven, 5.83 for Morris)
-Blyleven walked fewer guys (2.39 BB/9 for Blyleven, 3.27 BB/9 for Morris)
-Blyleven gave up fewer HRs (0.78 HR/9 for Blyleven, 0.92 HR/9 for Morris)
-Morris backers like to talk about the one WS game, but Blyleven was a better postseason pitcher. In 47.1 playoff innings, Blyleven had a 2.47 ERA. For Morris, it's 92.1 innings, but a 3.80 ERA.

Tough choice.

This was a lot of fun, and there's more to look at, so I thought it deserved another post.

First, the final standings. Methodology is slightly different, as I'm using RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) rather than just average error. This penalizes large misses more (sorry, Buster), and is more widely used.

As we'll see, Neyer comes out on to pretty much any way you do this. Notice the top five are all at least based on statistical systems. Be sure to remember that when you're watching Baseball Tonight next March. Your time is probably better spent subscribing to BP.

Just for fun, I also looked at how many of the Vegas over/unders everybody chose correctly. A lot of this is luck- if the line is 83.5, and your prediction is 84, you get the same credit if that team wins 84 or 104. (BTW, Silver is Nate Silver from BP; he's the "PECOTA guy", among other things. As I understand it, he took the PECOTA predictions and just made adjustments where he saw fit.)Again, pretty meaningless, but Caple and Law both jump way up. Gammons is last, but I wouldn't be too worried about that- I'm pretty confident he didn't place any wagers.

Now, the following is very interesting. Sky beat me to this (although I believe he did straight difference rather than RMSE), but if we really want to know how good these predictions were, we should look at Pythag record.

Basically, Pythag record is how many games a team should have won, based on how many runs they scored and allowed. It's a better at predicting future performance than actual record, and thus is a better indicator of team strength. It's great for this exercise, so lets take a look.

These numbers are noticeably lower. This makes sense- there is less variation in Pythag record than actual record (I think). I found this table to be very interesting. Sports Interaction jumps up considerably, which doesn't surprise me. Think about how much money these guys have at stake with this stuff. It's their job to post a number that will entice people to bet equally on both the over and the under. I would hope they are good at it- it's a lot different than Steve Phillips handing in a list of completely arbitrary numbers to some ESPN editor.

Beyond that, the list is once again dominated by the "numbers guys". I am somewhat surprised that Olney did so poorly.

The obvious next step is to see who got lucky, and whose picks were better than they originally appeared. Since the average Pythag miss was 1.39 smaller than the average actual miss, I have taken that into account in the final column. A negative "Adj Diff" means you got lucky.

Phillips' picks were poor to begin with, and he got unlucky on top of that (which is only fair, considering his recent good luck in other areas). Olney had the worst picks according to Pythag by a pretty wide margin, but had luck on his side, which allowed him to almost catch up to Phillips.

The numerical systems all obviously did better than others regardless of what metric I've looked at, but they were also on the lucky side. I would be interested to see if this is also true in previous years (which would indicate that it's not actually luck). The PECOTA predictions for each year since 2003 are readily available, so when I have time I figure I'll look into those.