Analytics

Rickey Being Rickey

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

One of the wonderful things about sports is that the perceived correct strategic formula to winning is ever evolving.  Sometimes the change is subtle, sometimes not so subtle.

No one would dispute that the 3 point line has changed how basketball is coached for better or worse.  But maybe the biggest change has taken place in the last 10 years in baseball.  Analytics, formerly known as sabermetrics, have taken hold.

When these changes go from fad to trend to expectations, records of past year’s accomplishments are increasingly harder to compare to current.  And records may also be easier to be broken (for example three point shots attempted/made in a season), or harder to be broken.

What follows is what we wrote in an article about Joe Dimaggio’s consecutive game hit steak a few weeks back.  It was titled “56” a few weeks back.

The record stands at 56 games, and has now stood that way for 78 years and counting.  We aren’t here to debate if its the greatest baseball record ever for it’s hard to compare pitching feats to hitting feats much less one game to one streak to one season to one career records.  But we are here to say that holding a record for any stat for 78 years is a long, long time and that makes it a great, great accomplishment.

So all of the above makes us wonder about another baseball record.  This one is a career accomplishment.  Analytics has made this one chosen far less as a tool to victory.  The math today says stealing a base is far less statistically appealing today than in years gone by.

The quirky and insanely talented Rickey Henderson was drafted in the 4th round in 1976 by the Oakland Athletics.  He played for them four separate times over an amazing 25 year career when he changed uniforms 13 times in all.  A first ballot Hall of Famer and 10 time All Star.  He leads the majors in career leadoff homeruns with 81.  Second place is not close at 53.  Amazing indeed.

But most amazing of all is how well, and how often he stole a base.  He stole 1406 in all.  Second place alltime is Lou Brock.  His total?  938.  Henderson’s total is exactly 50 % better than second all time.  50%!   Believe it or not, he even stole 66 bases when he was 39 years old.

Statistics can be shaped one way or the other to prove a point.  But, one way to look at this is to compare this feat to Pete Rose’s 44 game hit streak, second to Dimaggio’s 56.  Dimaggio’s record has stood for 78 years and counting.  But Dimaggio would have had to hit in 66 straight games to be 50% better than Rose.  How long would 66 games with at least one hit hold the record if 56 has held it for 78 years and counting?

Never ever say never.  But, given where the game is today, combined with Henderson’s exceptionally long career, put this record on a very short list of the very hardest to even be approached, much less broken.

 

56

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

With so much attention being paid earlier this week to the epic Roger Federer v. Novak Djokovic Wimbedon final and the The Squad v. Trump Twitter war, a 78th sports anniversary slid by.   Do you know what happened on July 16th, 1941?  Joltin Joe Dimaggio singled to extend his hit streak to 56 games.  On July 17th he was hitless which ended the longest consecutive games hitting steak ever.  And “ever” then still means “ever” today.

The record stands at 56 games, and has now stood that way for 78 years and counting.  We aren’t here to debate if its the greatest baseball record ever for it’s hard to compare pitching feats to hitting feats much less one game to one streak to one season to one career records.  But we are here to say that holding a record for any stat for 78 years is a long, long time and that makes it a great, great accomplishment.

Many, many excellent “hit for average” and “contact hitters” and “line drive hitters” have come and gone in 78 years.  And no one, we repeat, no one has come close to The Yankee Clipper’s run.  Second best you ask?  Peter Edward Rose, aka Pete Rose, aka Charlie Hustle got a hit in 44 straight games in 1978.  That tied Willie Keeler who strung together 44 as well way, way back in 1897.

Ty Cobb had 40 and 35 games with at least one hit streaks.  George Sisler had 41 and 35.  Joe’s brother Dom Dimaggio hit in 34 consecutive games himself.  Paul Molitor reached 39.  Think of players like Ichiro Suzuki, Ken Griffey, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Rod Carew, George Brett,  Rogers Hornsby, and Stan Musial just to name a few.  None of them, in long and distinguished careers passed 30.

Rose’s 44 is 78% of Dimaggio’s 56 games 78 years later.  Suzuki had 262 hits in 2004.  That’s 14 years and counting for the most ever in a season.  He has just 64 years to go for the record to stand as long as Dimaggio’s.  Or, stated a different way, imagine in the year 2075 the closest someone has come to Suzuki’s record is 204 hits.

It’s such a feat that he caught Marilyn Monroe’s eye, and had a song written about him that is  big band, old school fun, and three minutes long here.   

Baseball is a game of numbers.  There are a lot of them above.  But, no matter which ones you are counting, there aren’t a lot that rise above 56.

Sports-It’s a Numbers Game

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

Sports and numbers are tied at the hip.  Except we hate ties.  That’s why we ask who won and how on a daily basis?  Last night three teams won in two different sports in very different fashion.   That allows us to dive into the NBA TV market numbers as well as some most unlikely MLB numbers all in one fell swoop.

Last night the Denver Nuggets blew out the Portland Trailblazers by 26 to take a three games to two lead in their conference semifinals best of seven.  This occurred right after the Toronto Raptors blew out the Philadelphia 76ers by 36 to take a three games to two lead in their conference semifinals best of seven.

Tonight the Milwaukee Bucks, with a three games to one lead attempt to close out the Boston Celtics.  Later tonight the Golden State Warriors tangle with the Houston Rockets in the only series that is currently even at two games a piece.

Let’s make some assumptions and look forward to what the NBA and it’s TV partners don’t want to look forward to.  What’s that?  Small TV markets in big games is what is that.

Assume Milwaukee closes out Boston.  Assume that Denver and Toronto can do the same (all be it on the road Thursday) to Portland and Philly.  And, lastly,  assume Houston finally puts a dagger in the Warriors from the Golden St.

Then what?  Then you would have four teams still standing that rank 8th (Houston), 17th (Denver), and 36th (Milwaukee) in the United States per Nielsen.  Oh, and you would have Toronto, Canada.  Oh, Canada!  Oh boy!

Toronto is actually the largest market in Canada and would rank in the top three in metro measured TV sets if it were in the US.  But.  But.  It’s doubtful that any Canadian team in any sport draws the interest of many from the US coast to coast.  If Portland (22nd largest market) were to come back the above only gets worse.

It’s too early to worry about this you say?  Then what’s that sweat pouring off of the brows of NBA league execs this morning all about?  How does no New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco/Oakland, Miami, San Antonio, or Cleveland look to you?  It looks rough.

Speaking of rough while still looking at numbers, how about what Mike Fiers did last evening in MLB?  Never heard of Mike Fiers?  Late last evening Mike Fiers threw a no hitter for the Oakland A’s.  It was baseball’s 300 career no hitter.  It was journeyman pitcher Fiers second no hitter.  This very improbable feat started in Oakland only after a 98 minute delay as 100 stadium lights would not function.  And, he threw it against the Cincinnati Reds who 24 hours earlier hit back to back to back homeruns on three total pitches.

Fiers threw a whopping 131 pitches to get it done.  It’s the most pitches thrown in a no hitter since 2015 when, well, Fiers threw 134 in his first no-no in 2015.  His ERA entering the game after 8 starts sat at a fat 6.81.  According to Elias Sports Bureau research, that’s the highest ERA for any player throwing a no-hitter with at least 25 innings entering the start.  His career 4.11 ERA is the third highest ever for a pitcher to throw two or more no hitters.

Sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story.  Sometimes they do.

 

 

 

Well Beyond “Just Do It.”

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

Opinions on the quality of individual original content programming on ESPN vary.  It ranges from excellent to steaming hot, mid summer Manhattan, New York, New York garbage.  Yep, that’s quite the range.  Two that we feel are on the excellent side are Outside the Lines and 30 for 30.

So, the other night when James Harden’s scoring streak crossed over 30 thirty games with 30 points or more per, we began to wonder.  What “inside the lines” performance, regardless of the sport, is the most excellent of all time?  Harden’s run is indeed impressive.  But, it’s not even the best historically in basketball.  Wilt Chamberlain holds the all-time record at an amazing 65 straight games, set during his astounding 1961-62 campaign, when he averaged an NBA-record 50.4 points and set the single-game scoring mark with 100 points against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962.

The record of playing in 2,632 consecutive games over more than 16 MLB years is held by Cal Ripken, Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles. Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees, whose record of 2,130 consecutive games had stood for 56 years.  Impressive.  But, that speaks, at the least, to good for a long time.  Tiger Woods once made 142 consecutive cuts on the PGA Tour over several years.  Very Impressive.  That speaks, at the least, to very good over a long period of time.

But that’s not what we’re after.  We are after a run of unmatched, high level, measurable success while we scan multiple sports.  Yet its very hard to measure across sports.

Wilt Chamberlain’s run is the type of run we’re looking for.  How about Oscar Robertson’s season of averaging a triple double? In the 1961–62 season, Robertson became the first player in NBA history to average a triple-double for an entire season, with 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists.   Robertson also set a then-NBA record for the most triple-doubles during the regular season with 41 triple-doubles; the record would stand for over half a century when, in 2016–17, Russell Westbrook recorded 42 and joined Robertson as the only other player to average a triple-double for an entire season.  Very, very impressive.  Now we’re getting somewhere.

Is there anything harder to do, though, than hit a baseball consistently for a long stretch?  Yankee Joe DiMaggio holds the Major League Baseball record with a streak of 56 consecutive games in which he got at least one hit.  In 1941, it began on May 15 and ended July 17. DiMaggio hit .408 during his streak (91-for-223), with 15 home runs and 55 runs batted in.  Baseball’s best get out seven out of every ten time they bat over the course of most careers.

Surely one off night, or one dominant pitcher, would prevent any mortal from going 56 straight games.  Ask Pete Rose. “Pressure? Well it ain’t hitting in forty-four straight games, because I done that and it was fun. The playoffs are pressure.” – Pete Rose .  He forgot (or as they say today misremembered) that he was chasing Joltin’ Joe D. and fell quite short.  Forty-four is over 20% less than 56.  You may have heard that Peter Rose, aka Charlie Hustle, sometimes has trouble telling the truth.

Wayne Gretzky was also unstoppable for a run on ice that left all others stone cold. The Great One scored the most points in one season including the playoffs with 255 in 1984-1985.  Nestled inside of that run was four goals in one period and most assists in one game with seven.  There are many other candidates we are sure.

Rocky Marciano never lost a boxing match.  Never.  49-0.  Byron Nelson won 11 straight golf tournaments.  11.

We could go on.  Choosing one across sports is impossible.  But, someone once said “Impossible is Nothing.”  Not for nothing, we choose The Big O, Oscar Robertson’s season of triple doubles by the slimmest of margins over Marilyn Monroe’s ex husband’s hit streak.  What’s your choice?

 

 

 

 

 

The NFL’s Seeds are Sown.

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

The NFL rules committee reviews in painstaking detail all proposed changes to its game and its league once each year.  The definition of what a catch is, a fumble is, and what roughing the quarterback is has changed far too often for well-intentioned but misguided reasons.  Booth reviews became a necessity when the complexity of the rules rose exponentially.

However, one competitive rule that has not changed in many years is how playoff teams are seeded and how the resultant path to the Super Bowl paved.  We think that it’s the best format of any major sport and second place isn’t close.   Why?  We briefly touch on that in a few thoughts below.

  1. In each conference if you make it as a wild card you travel in week one of the playoffs to the two lower seeded (of the four) division champions.  You’re in, but your road is three games long and all three are away from home.  Advantage division champions.
  2. The survivors of wild card weekend travel to the one and two seeded team’s stadiums.  The lowest seed travels to the one seed, the other to the two seed.  Advantage one seed and two seed division champions.
  3. The one and two seeds have the wild card weekend off.  After five months of physical grind this is a very welcome respite. Big advantage one seed and two seed division champions.
  4. The highest remaining seed after the second weekend hosts the lower seed.  If the seeds hold this is the last advantage earned by the number one seeded division champ.

So what happened this past weekend?  Points three and four above is what happened.  The AFC and NFC top two seeds hosted and held serve in all four games.  Their success in the regular season earned them this leg up and they made good use of it.

On average three of the four home teams in the just completed division championship weekend win.  However, this year it was all four.  Many “experts” talked about how competitive the four visiting teams (Indianapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles (Chargers), and Philadelphia) would make those games.  Indy was done by halftime.  Dallas tried, but never climbed back in from a 13 point halftime deficit.  The Chargers were manhandled.  Only Philly was within a touchdown late in the fourth.

Visitors have tired legs.   Home teams have a week off to rejuvenate tired legs.  Speed kills on the football playing field.

Therefore, in the NFL every regular season game matters.  Maybe the committee will figure out what constitutes a catch one day.  Hopefully it will keep them so busy trying to figure that out that they will leave the seeding system and rewards of it exactly as is.

This coming weekend the best four teams in the NFL will decide who the best two teams in the NFL are.

 

 

It’s Better to Take and Not Give!

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

Analytics are woven into the makeup and strategy of major team sports today much more than ever before.  It roots are in baseball way back when and it was designed to give the fledgling hobby of fantasy baseball a more cerebral look at who you were drafting and why.  It was called sabermetrics originally.  The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term sabermetrics was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.

From that seed of a start has grown a forest of stats, now called “analytics,”  covering baseball, football, basketball, hockey, as well as several other sports.   Ivy League savants are employed in many sports franchise front offices coast to coast and even across the pond where they play futbol, not football.

The bbr staff was working well into the evening last week and discussing these new metrics and their merits as well as their shortcomings.   In the background on our fat Samsung was a meaningless Tuesday night NCAA football game.  Buffalo and Miami, OH were trading touchdowns at a rapid pace.  The Bulls outlasted the Redhawks 52-41.  Bonus points to you if you know which team goes with which nickname.

One of the many team stats shown along the way was turnovers.  When shown the announcer referred to them as takeaways.  This prompted some research and debate among us.  Our research turned to the NFL.  Fansided.com. published an article that shows results from 2010-2014 that, while a bit dated, shows irrefutable evidence as to how critical winning the turnover battle really is.  An excerpted paragraph follows.

During that five-year span teams that finished in the top ten in turnover differential finished 521-278-1. That’s a winning percentage of 65.2 percent and equates to about 10.4 wins per season. On the other end of the spectrum, the teams that finished in the bottom ten in turnover differential finished 287-512-1. That’s a winning percentage of about 35.9 percent and equates to about 5.7 wins per season.

And just below from Boydsbets.com you can see what happens per game when you win the turnover battle by 1 through 4 or more turnovers covering all games since 2005.   It shows both straight up(SU) winning and how the stat affects betting against the spread (ATS).

TO Differential SU SU % ATS ATS %
+1 823-376-4 68.6% 801-366-36 68.6%
+2 655-142 82.2% 632-149-16 80.9%
+3 344-33-1 91.2% 330-41-7 88.9%
+4 or more 272-8 97.1% 266-13-1 95.3%
TOTAL (+1 or better) 2094-559-5 78.9% 2029-569-60 78.1%

Suffice it to say that if you hold onto the ball a bit better than your opponent you win.  If you hold on to it significantly better you almost always win.

But, we wonder.  We wonder in this day of advanced analytics if there is a deeper dive still to be taken.  Remember the announcer called a turnover a takeaway as if they were one.  We wonder if there really are two measurements that better depict how you got the ball from your opponent.

Aren’t there turnovers and takeaways?  A turnover could be defined as the offense inflicting damage upon itself.  If for example the QB overthrew, without pressure, a receiver by 5 yards into the waiting arms of the deep safety isn’t that more giving than taking?  If a running back is running free and clear and coughs it up on his own isn’t that more giving than taking?  What if you were DeSean Jackson?  He made a habit of giving not taking.

Conversely, aggressive and smart defenses create turnovers, or as we prefer, takeaways.  If you blind side the QB and he loses control prior to throwing it, it’s a takeaway.  If a cornerback  jumps an out route its taken, not given.

We readily admit that there is grey area in between the clear examples above.  However, there are grey areas in many judgement calls in sports.  An umpire uses his eyes about 250 times a game to decide in his judgement if a thrown baseball is a ball or a strike.   Surely we can split hairs on whether the D taketh or the O giveth.

How you lose possession speaks to how you protect the ball and how the D wants the ball.  We think bad teams give it away and good teams take it away.  We think that great teams don’t give it away on O, but take it away on D.  From the results shown above the most important stat battle that you must win to win a game is turnover differential.

Should there be two stats?  We think so.  Turnovers and takeaways aren’t the same.

In the NFL it’s a don’t give and do take world.

 

The Art of Long Snapping is Now a Science.

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

People that really get into sports spend a lot of time talking to people who really get into sports.  Regardless of your favorite sport or sports, you often offer or are offered the following line, “Did you see the(pick one) play, kick, punt, bunt, goal, throw, hit, catch, run, shot, swing, jump, roll, fake, block, or tackle that so and so made in yesterday’s(pick one) game, match, set, event, or meet?”  It’s what sports fans do.  They live for the next greatest something and they talk about it.  Players one up players, and conversational high points one up conversational high points.

Athletes train smarter and harder than ever before.  Most focus on one sport early and attempt to master it.  Parents, coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and camps all focus on making the next generation better than the past.  In many areas this has taken good to great and great to elite.

One such area is place kicking a football.  Field goals have evolved from a hope to an almost certainty inside of forty yards over the last quarter century.  Similarly, field goal accuracy from fifty to sixty yards has improved to the point of no one being surprised when a game winner is struck from these distances.  The decade by decade percent converted improvement is geometric at all levels of competition.  This is but one example of many areas of improved expertise in athletic endeavors over time.

But one area has improved to the point of so near to perfection that we don’t even talk about it anymore.  Perhaps we don’t even see it when we look at it.  What is it?  Long snapping the football is what it is.  Think back through this year to date.  The NCAA FBS schedule is eight games in.  The NFL is seven games in.   Have you seen a bad snap on a field goal or a punt this year at either level?  Has there even been one?  Not the rain, nor the wind, nor the pressure has had even a marginal effect apparently.  This writer hasn’t seen one in person, live on tv, or on any high(low)lights.

A .43 second Google search for “long snapping” turns up thousands of potential matches.  You can watch “how to videos”(even the setup and approach prior to the snap), sign up for any number of snapping camps run by seasoned pros, or even see who has been offered a scholarship to a FBS school to snap.  Smart college coaching staffs value special teams.  Those that value special teams certainly recruit and sign a great snapper as one of their allowed 85 scholarships.

Great college snappers vie for 32 pro jobs.  Every NFL team has one excellent snapper.  That snapper makes the league minimum at a minimum.  How much is that? Well, for 2018 its $465,000 for a rookie and the scale increases gradually by years of employment.  If you are in your tenth year the min is a smooth $1,000,000.  The best of all make even more.

Long snapping might be the specialty of special teams play.  Every punt has a snap and a punt.  Every place kick has a snap, a hold, and a kick.  We watch the kicks.  We don’t even see the snaps anymore.

It’s great work if you can get it.  But shy of perfection you need not apply.

 

 

MLB is a Numbers Game. Catch the Fever.

Posted on by thependulumswings staff

Do you remember the old MLB slogan?   It was “Baseball Fever.  Catch It!”  As the leaves are turning this Fall 2018 if you don’t like what’s going on in the MLB as it heads to the season’s final games on Sunday, you might not ever catch the fever.  More than a few numbers below explain how, after 157 of 162 games per team this year, much and little has been decided.  It’s a tale of two leagues.

In the American League the Boston Red Sox have clinched the best regular season record giving them the home field advantage as long as they are in the playoffs.  They could win 111 games.  Fear the boys from Beantown.

The defending World Series Champion Houston Astros clinched their division and won their 100th game last evening.  They became the first team since the Oakland A’s in 1990 to have a triple digit win season the year after their WS win.  Unless Correa, Springer, and Altuve kick it up a notch (thanks Emeril!) in the postseason they will go only as far as their league ERA low pitching will carry them.

Speaking of the Money Ball (thanks Brad Pitt!) A’s, they now have 95 wins and counting this year.  That’s the most wins by a team owning the lowest opening day payroll in MLB in the last 30 seasons.   Their reward for this productivity per dollar spent is very likely to travel to the city that never sleeps (thanks Frank!) to face the New York Yankees.  The Bronx Bombers have spent huge at 180 million to the A’s frugal 80 million.  In a one game wild card match up the A’s have a punchers chance to  continue to defy the baseball gods.

Then there is Cleveland.  There they quietly sit by the lake the city was founded on.   The Indians have a starting pitching staff that is very dangerous in a first round, five game max, divisional playoff.  They’ll have to win one in Houston to win three of five. They certainly can.   Houston has only been above average at home, but excellent on the road.  Coin flip anyone?

And, then there are the Tampa Rays, winners of not less than 87 games.  They’ll sit home this post season.  They have tons of young players yet finished 20-9 at home v. the five playoff teams and were only eliminated officially a couple of days back.  They are very deserving of an honorable mention.

And to think the AL was called the Junior League for many, many years.

Meanwhile over on the Senior Circuit as it was called for many, many years, the National League is filled with drama.

Atlanta has clinched their division but will not have home field past round one.  They are an exciting team to watch.  They are young and they play aggressive and loose.  That’s a good combination.  It might be a year too soon for this team that gutted their organization, a la the Astros five years ago, to stash draft picks and prospects.  The payoff is coming soon however.

Now to the quagmire.  Five other teams will fill the remaining four playoff spots available in the next five days.  The possibilites are far too great to list.  The Cubs, Brewers, Dodgers, Rockies, and Cardinals (in that order of win/loss percentage) are separated by just a game or two.  One of Chicago and Milwaukee is in as the division winner.  One of Los Angeles and Colorado is as well.  Going into last night there was even a scenario that four of these five could end with identical records.   Try untying that pretzel.

On paper (a too often used term that never pans out) the Dodgers and the Cubs have the bigger payroll that usually equates to the better talent.  Usually.  It hasn’t yet distinguished itself.  Expected the unexpected.

The Rockies and Brewers are sneaky good.  Just a hunch.

Are you feeling warm on your forehead yet?  Did all of the numbers make you dizzy? You caught the fever.  Take it easy in your recovery.  Recline in your La-Z-Boy and watch it all unfold.