Way back before this season started, I did my annual wins above replacement (WAR) projection post for the 2010 team. I came away with a projected 83-84 wins for the 2010 Giants. Not a bad projection at all, and it’s possible that if we’re talking about true talent this team might be closer to the mid-80′s, but the Giants excelled… Read more →
The idea behind Chernoff Faces it that you can take data and map it to facial features in order to visually present differences in the numbers. The theory is that humans easily recognize facial features and can notice changes fairly quickly. There’s a lot of debate as to how useful Chernoff Faces are, but they’re a fun diversion and, I… Read more →
(Click to enlarge) Continuing with the heatmap theme, here is a graph using the same concept but with the more advanced statistics. All numbers are pulled from Fangraphs as of 8/28/10. I cheated and used Excel for this particular graph. Aubrey Huff: Still pretty darned good.
A little bit of visual labwork on this Friday. I’ve been playing around with R lately and I’ve been working on ‘heatmaps’. Each square has a number value and that value is ranked within each column by color — ie: all HR’s are compared against other HR totals for that column. White (higher value) -> dark red (lower value). For… Read more →
*From 1901-2010 I’m in love with the new Baseball-Reference WAR data. WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, is the uber-stat that attempts to encompass the total value of what makes a player, erm, valuable. With the development of FanGraphs and other saber-slanted websites, WAR has become a pretty well known statistic. If you’re new to the game, check out the glossary… Read more →
Click for mega-size In 2009, Pablo Sandoval emerged as an offensive force for the Giants. For a team that sorely lacked any kind of hitter that you could qualify as ‘good’ or ‘non-terrible’ Sandoval’s wOBA in ’09 of .396 was one of the best things about the year. He hit for power, walked at a league average rate (for a… Read more →
I’ve always contended that the Giants are a team that, when losing, are going to look really, really, bad. Maybe even worse than they actually are. The Giants style is as follows: Hope that the offense can scrap together enough runs to support the stellar pitching. When the pitching takes the night off, we’re going to have to rely on… Read more →
The Giants drafted Brandon Crawford out of the 2008 First Year Player Draft from UCLA. The talented college shortstop was projected as a first round talent but he fell to the 4th round when he struggled in his final college year. The book on Crawford was as follows: terrific defender at SS but he swings-and-misses a lot — he struck… Read more →
As fans of baseball, we sometimes like to place a huge (or at least disproportionate) amount of importance on the outcomes of April baseball. If a player is hitting the ball around the field with ease — he’s going to have a great year or he’s completely healed from an injury. If a player is struggling — he’s probably not… Read more →
I rarely respond, via the blog, to articles posted online. But I couldn’t let this one slide. Henry Schulman, Giants beat-writer and seemingly all around nice guy, let’s all of us SABR nerds have it in his latest post on the topic of Fred Lewis and sabermetrics. Hank sets up his post with the following blurb: This is going to… Read more →