Our review of Baseball Prospectus’ 2011 PECOTA projections continues with the hits and misses of the National League West, a division comprised of top-heavy teams that has seen a different club capture the flag in each of the past three seasons.
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Diamondbacks
In 2011, Upton actually met Doug Thorburn’s expectations, and kicked the crap out of [...]

The sand trap of luck has sucked in a legion of baseball enthusiasts. Lured by deviant BABIP’s, even astute analysts continue to walk into the trap, and proceed to sink as they grasp for statistical explanations to pull themselves out of the muck. Luck has become the default scapegoat for anything that cannot be conveniently [...]

 
The projection game is dicey, with a multitude of systems competing for the accuracy crown, and the inevitability of outlier performances that are bound to make certain predictions look foolish in retrospect. The crew at Baseball Prospectus has undertaken this arduous task for over a decade, developing metrics and building a substantial database, culminating in [...]

Value.
It is a simple word, yet such a complicated concept. The meaning of the term is the source of considerable debate, especially as it relates to the game of baseball, where the subjective perception of value is forced to reconcile with the objectivity of performance stats. The numbers serve as an account of what transpires [...]

As soon as David Murphy flew out to left field to end Game 7 of the 2011 World Series, it seemed a foregone conclusion that David Freese would earn the World Series MVP title.  Who else deserved the award but the hometown player with the single-best World Series performance in baseball history as well as [...]

“Sequencing” is another one of those terms in the pitching lexicon that has multiple definitions. In Raising Aces, I have often used the mechanical definition of sequencing to describe the order in which a pitcher executes the various links of the kinetic chain. This element is intertwined with mechanical timing, in the sense that a [...]

What happens in baseball when a pre-conceived narrative doesn’t really fit reality?  In the case of Justin Verlander, you make it fit anyway.
When it comes to the Oakland Athletics, Moneyball, and small market teams, it seems like the baseball community is still struggling with what the Moneyball revolution really means.
Last year I looked at the [...]

 
The Tampa Bay Rays exhausted their season to the final stroke before clinching the playoffs, and with top starters David Price and James Shields having pitched in the days prior, the Rays turned to a rookie pitcher to start Game One of the ALDS against the Rangers. Tampa possesses one of the front runners for the [...]

I’m not sure I ever thought I’d say this but it looks like the baseball community is suffering from Derek Jeter fatigue.
For perhaps the first time it appears as though the Captain is not getting his due.  How else to explain the lack of recognition for the fact that in his first 50 games since [...]

It has been a year since the last time that we watched an episode of Stras Wars, and while the previous installment was clouded with mystery in the aftermath of the UCL strain heard ’round the world, the re-emergence of Stephen Strasburg on a Major League pitching mound allows us to begin part V with a [...]