The Dope

As you can probably imagine, the Defensive Specialist was shrouded in performance enhancing drug speculation throughout his stellar career – it’s difficult for mere mortals to see spectacular physical tools and sustained excellence on the field and not suspect the use of performance enhancing drugs.  The Defensive Specialist could only ever answer – “it’s all natural” (and then promptly raise his shirt and flex the 8 pack abdominal set up). 

On the 9^th of January, the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) decided that despite a ballot stuffed with at least 8 legitimate Hall of Fame worthy candidates, no one was deserving of enshrinement in 2013. This shutout was even more flabbergasting because only 2 men on the ballot had either been caught using or admitted to using performance enhancing drugs (Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire). In fact, McGwire’s use of PED’s came at a time when they weren’t outlawed in the sport.  In effect, the rest of the ballot was shut out because they were suspected of drug use: guilty until proven innocent. 

Numerous writers have made great points about the Hall of Fame process (The DS particularly liked this piece) but Old Hoss Rayburn (who operates a wildly amusing twitter feed) put it best with this nugget:

“It was nice to hear from journalists who earned Pulitzers for their hard-hitting Steroid Era reporting opine on the HoF vote”.

In other words, the BBWAA are punishing ball players by not letting them into the Hall of Fame when the same writers said and did nothing to expose drug use when it was rampant.

Seven days later, we’re getting ready to learn the true (or as much of the truth that his legal and public relations teams are prepared for you to hear) story behind Lance Armstrong’s performance enhancing drug usage.

Where’s your old pal going with this? Quite simply, why are we surprised?

Top-flight athletes have been seeking a competitive edge ever since, well ever since competition was invented. The strong survive and in this day and age the strong get paid! What continually stuns the Defensive Specialist is journalists and old timers coming out and saying that the cheats shouldn’t be recognised for the achievements. Delve into the Hall of Fame a little deeper and you’ll find players who doctored baseballs and admitted to amphetamine use. Aren’t both of those performance enhancers? Cheating has taken place since Jesus was a lad!

As long as the media and the fans worship at the altar of athletes, these competitors will look for any edge to get to the top and stay there.

The Defensive Specialist would love for baseball and sport in general to be drug free, but how can we expect athletes to not push the limits when so much money is at stake? Advances in equipment and rehabilitation (Kobe Bryant having blood work completed in Germany to aid his knees!) has seen performance levels increase across most sports.

We’re also dealing with a sub section of humanity geared differently than your average Joe from a mental perspective. Everyone has heard the stories of what a maniacal competitor Michel Jordan was. He would use any advantage to beat his opponent (the DS is not suggesting MJ used PED’s) Top flight athletes are more often than not mentally predisposed to winning or beating their opponent. It comes as no shock to the Defensive Specialist that people wired this way would look to PED’s as a means to win or compete.

The Defensive Specialist is in no way condoning drug use. What the Defensive Specialist is condoning is understanding. Top flight athletes will look for advantages - not all will cheat – but all will look for ways to win and stay on top. Lets try and understand that and act less surprised and outraged when those that cheat are caught.

Corey Adamson gettin’ lucky down under: BABIP, Part 1

Despite a sizeable support function, Deep in the Hole has always been a one-man band led by the indomitable Defensive Specialist…until now.  Big data is all the rage at the moment so the Defensive Specialist decided it’s about time that some of the behind the scenes number crunchers at Deep in the Hole got air time – after all, we’ll be reporting to these stat geeks at some point in time. Without further ado, the Defensive Specialist would like to welcome Tom Fee to the Deep in the Hole writing team.  Tom begins his Deep in the Hole sabermetric journey by taking an interesting look at BABIP, over to you Tom.

I suck at gambling.

There’s been a trend at the Heat lately where winning games results in trips to the Casino for much fun and frivolity. What I have found is that not only do I lose my money, I lose it immediately.

Later, when sober, I realise the great connection gambling has to baseball. Sometimes that line drive you hit just happens to dart straight into an open glove. That certain triple down the right field line lands just foul, or Mike Trout is the centerfielder.

Mike Trout - where flyballs go to die

Thanks to nerds, there is a statistic that exists to judge exactly how lucky a player is on the baseball field, and it’s called BABIP – or Batting Average on Balls In Play. The rules of BABIP state that on average, if a ball is hit in play then the batter has a 30% chance of being safe and a 70% chance of being out.

In other words, to calculate the stat you calculate a batting average that ignores at bats outside the field of play such as strikeouts, walks and home runs, but include “non at-bats” that are in-play such as sacrifice flies.

 BABIP =              H-HR          

                        AB - K - HR +SF

So, if a hitter puts 10 balls in play and nine of them are outs, he’s been unlucky. Similarly, a batter is lucky if five of these balls land safe.

Looking for aberrations like these might be able to explain some statistical anomalies that exist in the ABL, such as how a guy who hit .111 through 100 plate appearances this season in A ball is leading the league for average.

I am talking of one of my favourite Heat players in San Diego prospect Corey Adamson. Last week, Adamson was knocking on the door of a .400 season after struggling last year for the Fort Wayne Tin Caps. While only having two hits against the Bite this week has lowered this average somewhat, the 20 year old still leads the ABL with an average sitting at an impressive .352.

Corey Adamson

So while a decent hitter picks up a hit for 3 out of 10 balls in play, how many times out of ten does Adamson get a hit?

3.96 times out of ten.

With a BABIP of .396 this season, Adamson is getting an extra hit in every ten balls he puts in play than the average. Out of Adamson’s 160 plate appearances, 124 of these have been in play equating to an extra 12 “lucky” hits, which adds approximately 70 points to his batting average!

So now I have single handedly pish poshed all over one of my favourite player’s outstanding seasons, I’m going to explain why these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

Plenty of great players have high BABIPs and never have the come down effect. Mike Trout managed a BABIP of .383, which is massive over a 162 game season. Does this mean we should expect Trout to be a one hit wonder and fall back to grace next season? Don’t count on it. Over his four seasons in Professional Baseball, Trout’s averaged a BABIP of .358.

What it means is that some players are good enough to rig the system. Let’s run Corey Adamson through some of the ways a player might be inherently lucky, and why BABIP isn’t the best indicator for all situations:

Corey Adamson might be really fast

If you’re a faster than average runner, you’re going to get to first base safely and beat out quite a few more throws than Prince Fielder. Adamson is known for being zippy around the bases; so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt that Adamson’s elevated BABIP may be partially contributed by some extra speed to gain a few extra hits, but probably not all 12.

SPEED – 3 extra hits this season than average

The ABL isn’t the Major Leagues

Having to endure the 12 errors put up by the Heat’s defence over the four game series this weekend, I can categorically say that the defence of the ABL is not near the standards on display in the Majors.

The Major Leagues BABIP in 2012 = .297

ABL BABIP This Season = .305

Clearly the ABL leaks quite a few more hits on balls in play thanks to a significantly lower standard. This eight-point difference gives Adamson an extra hit this season against the ABL defence than if teams were putting out big leaguers.

POORER LEAGUE DEFENCE – 1 extra hit

Line Drives

It’s doesn’t take a genius to see that hitting a ball really hard is going to get through a gap more often than a roller up the middle. Therefore one of the problems with BABIP is that it doesn’t take into account that a player might be a good contact hitter and be significantly better at hitting line drives over fly balls.

In 2012 a line drive landed safe almost 70% of the time in the Majors, whereas groundballs will only get you to first safely 22% of the time. Unfortunately for batters, line drives are much less common.

In the ABL, only 7.5% of balls in play are line drives, whereas almost 50% are grounders. Adamson’s line drive percentage is much lower than the league average – so you know those four hits I conceded to Adamson above? I’ll have to take a few of them back.

LOWER LINE DRIVE RATE – 3 less hits

	FLY	LD	GB	POPS
League	35.36%	7.56%	48.84%	8.24%
Adamson	33.33%	3.45%	57.47%	5.75%

So to summarise, Adamson’s great league average is not ONLY due to a great amount of skill from a talented youngster, he’s also been riding his luck along the way.But it’s not that bad for Adamson.

The “jibe” I made about him being a .111 hitter in A ball this season should also be brought into context. With a BABIP of only .126 at the Tin Caps, Adamson suffered dearly at the hands of the baseball gods. Not only is labelling Adamson a “.111 hitter” unfair, he’s clearly showing in the ABL why he’s going to be a great player for the Padres this season.

Applying the leveller that BABIP provides, my very rough calculations for Adamson for his polarising luck in America and Australia show a bit more consistency and that at only 20 years old we still have a great prospect on our hands.

	Avg	BABIP	Estimate of Avg if he had a .300 BABIP (Dosage: 1 grain of salt after meals)
ABL	.352	.396	.280
A Ball	.111	.126	.260

And before anyone starts to think the Heat’s been getting lucky with their best hitter, take a look at these BABIPS of some of this season’s luckiest guys:

TEAM	PLAYER	BABIP
CAN	Adam Jacobs	0.556
CAN	Antonio Callaway	0.444
BRI	Hirotoshi Onaka	0.435
CAN	Ryan Stovall	0.413
MEL	Josh Davies	0.408
MEL	Elliot Biddle	0.400
PER	Corey Adamson	0.396
PER	Allan de San Miguel	0.379
SYD	James Robbins	0.378
ADE	Adam Kam	0.375
ADE	Chris Adamson	0.373
CAN	Jeremy Barnes	0.364
CAN	Jack Murphy	0.356
CAN	Kody Hightower	0.353

To come: Who’s been unlucky? Who’s the luckiest team in baseball? Who’s on first?

Names, Names, Names

Did you think the Defensive Specialist was kidding when he said he was going to ratchet up the frequency of posts this week? Enough of this one post per week bullshinto (as they say in Japan), its time to get serious! So the schedule for this week looks something like this:

Wednesday – continue the analysis of team rosters

Thursday – uniform analysis

Friday – season opener preview

Of course this could all change at the drop of the hat and is heavily influenced by incidents like today when the Defensive Specialist put a friendly call in to the Canberra Cavalry office searching for scraps of information about the Cavalry’s starting line up on Saturday only to be greeted by the surliest and most unfriendly voice of all time. Granted things are probably a tad hectic down in the nation’s capital right now as they gear up for their season opener but surely any press is good press! To top it all off, the Defensive Specialist was thinking about donating a sizeable chunk of change out of the Deep in the Hole coffers as well - who knew the Cavalry were so cashed up they didn’t need to treat random phone calls with courtesy? Any other team interested?

Alright, enough of the customer service complaints, let’s take a look at each of the teams rosters and see if we can find anything interesting.

Adelaide Bite

The Bite have invested in 4 US imports to pad out the roster and seem to have aligned themselves with the Seattle Mariners. The pro players include:

Brandon Bantz, a 23-year-old catcher who finished up at the AA level;

Brandon Maurer a 20-year-old pitcher who may in fact be built like a brick shithouse;

James Mcowen, a 23-year-old outfielder who hit .340 last season;

Quincy Latimore, a 21-year-old outfielder from the Pirates organisation who hit 19 bombs at High A last season.

Both the Brandons played limited innings last year while Mcowen is notable for the 45 game hitting streak he put together in 2009 which was the 8^th longest in minor league history.

2004 Olympian Tom Brice also returns to the fold and will hopefully play enough outfield to allow professional hitter Ben Wigmore to retire his concrete glove and remain strictly at DH.

Brisbane Bandits

The Bandits have travelled a different route to other teams and instead of using American imports have gone with an Asian infusion and recruited players from the Nippon League. Their affiliation in 2010 is with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks who have supplied the following players:

Hiroki Yamada – left handed pitcher;

Reo Ckikado – left handed pitcher;

Shuhei Fukuda – infielder;

Ryuma Kidokoro – outfielder.

Unfortunately the Defensive Specialist only speaks conversational Japanese and was unable to decipher the Softhawks Japanese website so no inside information is available on any of the players except that Yamada is in Australia to work on his slow curve. The upside to all of this is that the team will be travelling with an interpreter which means he or she will be the butt of all pranks pulled throughout the season.

Phil Stockman returns to the Bandits providing another big arm to go along with Drew Naylor and Ryan Searle.

Melbourne Aces

The Aces have a couple of Independent League players – Hunter Davis and Brad Hertzler who should provide innings on the mound. The big names that’ll help the Aces in 2010 are Travis Blackley, Justin Huber, Josh Spence and Adam Bright. Loyal readers may remember Peter Moylan stating that he’d pitch in the ABL at some stage this season but it won’t be anything more than a fleeting appearance to get his work in prior to spring training.

The most interesting thing about the Aces roster at this stage of proceedings is the size of the coaching staff – 1 manager and 6 coaches. The Aces had better be well organised!

Perth Heat

The Heat have once again affiliated themselves with the Baltimore Orioles and secured the services of 4 imports:

Brett Jacobson- 24-year-old right-handed reliever who had a solid season in High A last season;

Cole McCurry – 25-year-old left-handed starter who played at High A last season;

Robbie Wilansky – 26-year-old outfielder who swings from the left side and played at Double A last season;

Ronnie Welfty – 22-year-old outfielder who played at High A and slugged 18 homeruns.

The Heat have also added former minor leaguer Evan McCarthur to man third base and welcome back Liam Hendriks and Liam Barron who will bolster the rotation. They still have a horrible logo.

Canberra Cavalry

The Cavalry appear to have stopped by every embassy in the ACT and put an APB out on available baseball players as their roster is made up of an eclectic mix of foreigners. These players include:

Korea

Heo Jun-Hyeok (right-handed pitcher)

Jim Myung-Ho (right-handed pitcher)

Lee Jung-Min (right-handed pitcher)

Jang Sung-Woo (catcher)

Moon Kyu-Hyun (infielder)

Lee Seung-Hwa (outfielder)

Italy

Alex Maestri (right-handed pitcher) – first Italian born pitcher to be signed by a Major League team.

India

Rinkhu Singh (left-handed pitcher) – signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Defensive Specialist urges you to click on the link and read up on his freaking amazing journey to professional baseball!

Netherlands

Didi Gregorious (infielder)

Canada

Ian Choy (Outfielder)

United States

Donald Lutz (outfielder) – 21-year-old Cincinnati Red minor leaguer.

David Washington (infielder). Listed as an infielder, D Wash is back on the scene after a successful stint playing for the upstart South Australian Claxton Shield team last year.

If Steve Schrenk, the Cavalry’s new manager is looking for some team bonding ideas, how about a casserole night? Imagine the culinary treats you’d have with this many international flavours?

On top of these names you can add the likes of Nick Kimpton, Tom Vincent, Michael Collins, Steven Kent and Phil Brassington. The boys from the nation’s capital will be a strong squad in 2010 albeit somewhat short of Aussies.

The Defensive Specialist has poured over the rosters trying to determine where the teams fit for the inaugural season. As mentioned the Canberra Multiculturalists look a hell of a lot stronger than anticipated while the Bandits look to be the weakest of all teams in the competition (having said that, it was difficult to find information on their imports so the Defensive Specialist will need to lay eyes on them before an educated assessment is made).

Remember, on Thursday the Defensive Specialist goes Project Runway and presents a uniform overview. Depending on the mood in the Canberra Calvary offices, Friday should be an opening game preview featuring line-ups and starting pitchers!