If you played fantasy baseball in an AL league last year, you probably already know about Bobby Kielty, the Twins outfielder who’s fighting for at-bats in Ron Gardenhire’s lineup. The Twins are awash in talented young hitters, so Kielty was limited to about 350 PA while posting a .405 OBP and a .484 SLG — a frustrating situation to endure for such a productive hitter. He’s not a defensive liability (he serves as Torii Hunter’s backup as a CF in addition to platooning in RF) and he’s a switch-hitter, so he justifiably should see more playing time in the coming year.

John Bonnes, the Twins Geek, takes a look at some comparisons for Kielty based on Baseball Prospectus’ new PECOTA projection system. PECOTA is designed to predict the chances of whether a player will “breakout” or “collapse” based on age and physical comparisons. I’ve got only passing familiarity with that new system, but it stands to receive a lot of attention as BP rolls out its new book and upgraded, subscription-based website in the coming weeks (about which I’ll write soon). Anyway, Bonnes runs some comparisons and notes that a player such as Kielty who has a high number of walks and strikeouts doesn’t project as well as a traditional stathead would expect. “It’s not clear that low-contact, average-power players will succeed when pitchers start throwing more strikes until they have a lot more at-bats than Kielty has,” writes Bonnes. “Kielty had a monster year last year. But to claim with any kind of confidence that he’ll repeat that effort, it appears he would need at least 300, and maybe 500, more at-bats.” Worth a read.

ESPN’s Jayson Stark penned a column this week in which he suggested twenty-five rules changes ranging from the good (adding instant replay, toughening up the save rule) to the bad (adding a designated fielder to the roster, ditching the phantom DP tag — you want to see a generation of middle infielders ruined by torn ACLs? I didn’t think so) to the ugly (penalizing the intentional walk and limiting pickoff throws). In his inimitable style, Mike C. of Mike’s Baseball Rants takes apart Stark’s list with some handy research regarding intentional walk rates as well as some good old common sense. Check it out.

Not to be out-ranted (did somebody say stark, raving mad?), our friends at Elephants in Oakland have a more bilious take, as well as a few suggestions for Stark.

As for what I’m working on, DIPS 2002 will be up this weekend, and hopefully I’ll return to the land of the occasionally original thought soon…

Lee Sinins, who runs the essential Around the Majors mailing list and produces an annual CD-ROM called the Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia, has a new offering this spring. It’s called the ATM Reports Player Comments book, and it contains the kinds of handy statistical analysis on the order of Lee’s other products: short blurbs about how productive a player is compared to the league average, numerous charts and statistical studies, lists of where the player fits in on a team’s history or on an all-time list, and other interesting facts. Lee has kindly provided me with a review copy of the book (which is available both in a print version and as an electronic PDF), and I’ll be giving it a more in-depth look in the near future.

With slow news days in the baseball world lately (the Yanks are spending money; an idiot ump is on the loose) and plenty of chaos at my j-o-b, I’ve been retreating to the serenity of my spreadsheets lately. It looks as though I’ll be spending a bit more time there, as I’ve taken it upon myself to run all of the 2002 Major League pitching statistics through my DIPS 2.0 spreadsheet.

I don’t take credit for the DIPS (Defense Independent Pitching Statistic) system. It was invented by a man named Voros McCracken, and he’s presented DIPS numbers for the 1999-2001 seasons via his web site while explaining the system on Baseball Primer and Baseball Prospectus. The gist of it is that McCracken did some studies on pitching statistics involving balls in play and concluded that major-league pitchers do not differ greatly in their ability to prevent hits on those balls hit into play (that is, anything that’s not a home run, a strikeout, a walk or a hit-by-pitch). The rate at which a pitcher allows hits on balls in play is due more to the defense playing behind him than to his own skill, and can vary greatly from year to year.

This is somewhat counterintuitive, but it’s also a very helpful way of looking at pitching stats. DIPS takes the elements of a pitcher’s record that are not affected by the defense — walks, strikeouts, hit-by-pitches, homers — and places them in a neutral context for park, league and defense. The result is a translated line of Defense Independent Pitching Statistics, including a DIPS ERA; that is, an ERA based on defense-independent pitching performance. An important thing about this DIPS ERA, McCracken found, is that it correlates better with the following season’s ERA than the pitcher’s actual ERA does.

For one reason or another, Voros decided not to publish DIPS numbers this year, leaving a sizeable void in the sabermetric universe. But he’s already published fairly coherent instructions on how to calculate DIPS (and he encouragingly answered questions about some of the less coherent aspects of it), so I built a spreadsheet that would do the job. I used it for a few pieces about the Yankee pitchers and this year’s crop of relievers figuring the sheet would give me a jump in the analysis department, but that it was only a matter of time before somebody published complete DIPS for 2002, and more power to them.

Insert sound of crickets chirping.

Nobody’s done so, including myself — mainly because I was never able to get my hands on the raw data in a spreadsheet. But via a rather mundane Primer thread, I managed to find somebody (“mathteamcoach” is his handle) who had most of what I needed. We’ve joined forces to share the tedium of entering Intentional Base on Balls and Batters Faced Pitching data for EVERY SINGLE PITCHER in the service of this project. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it, and between the two of us we’re about 2/3 done. The results should be finished later this week.

The Baseball Primer version of my Hoyt piece, featuring 20 additional pitchers (now a total of 55), is now up. It’s even listed on the front page of the site. This is the first time I’ve had an article published at BP, so it’s a proud day for me. I guess this makes me a Primate — a worthy prize for spending so many hours monkeying around with a spreadsheet.

Speaking of Primates and Primers, there’s the Primeys, the results of which were posted a couple days back. No, I didn’t win for Best Internet Baseball Weblog. The result wasn’t even close; the very talented TEAM of Baseball Prospectus writers won in a landslide, claiming over 50% of the vote. I came in a respectable third place, just behind Aaron’s Baseball Blog:

1. 50.8% Daily Prospectus

2. 18.6% Aaron’s Baseball Blog

3. 15.9% Futility Infielder

4. 10.1% Big Bad Baseball

5. 4.6% baseballjunkie.net

Really, I’m not disappointed in the showing at all, though I do feel that the B-Pro team belonged in a different category (one Primer poster, imitating Coffee Talk’s Linda Richman, noted: “Daily Prospectus is neither daily nor a prospectus. Discuss.”) Still, according to the turnout, this means I got about 70 votes. Since I don’t recall paying off that many non-Jaffe family members, that means a good handful of you out there voted for me on your own accord, for which I thank you sincerely. It was an honor to be considered, and a thrill to be sharing space on a ballot which included names such as Bill James, Rob Neyer, Voros McCracken, Doug Pappas, and Joe Sheehan, not to mention Primer legends such as Tolaxor, the Score Bard, the Royals Slogans thread (I’m on there as Royle Stillman) and the Giambi-Mabry thread. And as they say, wait ’til next year.

Finally, while we’re on this prime(r) tip: Aaron Gleeman, whose blog edged me for 2nd place, has an interesting look at 2003’s Top 50 Prospects on Baseball Primer. Check it out.

On February 1st, the best website in the history of the galaxy will celebrate its third birthday. If you’ve read my site regularly, you know that I often sing the praises of Baseball-Reference.com and you may even know that I designed the site’s Babe Ruth banner that gets seen millions (yes, millions) of times a month. But you might not know much about the man behind B-Ref, Sean Forman. Doctor (yes, Doctor) Forman’s an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at St. Joseph’s University who runs B-Ref in his spare time, and he covers the site’s expenses by selling sponsorships of individual pages (I sponsor eight myself). Philadelphia’s weekly City Paper has a worthwhile article on Dr. Forman and his labor of love. Go read the piece and then buy yourself a player to celebrate.

I’m nerding out over revising my Hoyt piece for Baseball Primer and I think I just discovered why my data charts look different depending on which browser I’m using — it’s the invisible tab characters which are artifacts of cutting and pasting from Excel. Might try to redo some of those charts in my piece here for posterity’s sake. In the meantime, know that I’m back working on SOMETHING after another unspeakable week at my job, and should be resuming my regularly scheduled posting soon.

Postscript: Hot damn, my chart fix worked! Expect new and improved charts from this day forward.

Here’s one shameless final plea to consider voting for this site in the 2003 Primeys. My category, Best Internet Baseball Weblog, is #9 on the list, and voting closes today. Thanks!

Relief pitchers are the most underrepresented position in the Hall of Fame. Thus far, voters have deemed only two of them, Hoyt Wilhelm and Rollie Fingers, worthy of admission to Cooperstown. This year’s ballot contained three reasonable candidates — Rich Gossage, Lee Smith and Bruce Sutter — none of whom came close to the 75% necessary for election.

There’s no shortage of reasons for why these firemen are getting closed out:

• Unlike all of the other positions, we have a very tough time measuring the current candidates against those enshrined; a class of two doesn’t exactly make a strong sample size or produce de facto standards for admission. Wilhelm is widely acknowledged as the greatest reliever ever, while Fingers simply had visibility and popularity — in the form of several successful postseason appearances, a couple of big awards, and a distinctive moustache — on his side.

• The tools which are readily at our disposal — wins, losses, and especially saves — do a less than ideal job for measuring the reliever’s impact. This is especially true when comparing pitchers between different eras; Jeff Reardon has over 50% more saves than Hoyt Wilhelm, but anybody who wants to argue that Reardon was as valuable as Wilhelm has an uphill battle ahead.

• The tools which do a better job at helping us measure a reliever’s impact, such as Baseball Prospectus’ Adjusted Runs Prevented or Tangotiger’s Leverage Index, are relatively recent developments based on play-by-play or situational data and thus unavailable for the larger chunk of the game’s history.

• As Mike’s Baseball Rants continues to explore, the role of the reliever has been in a nearly constant state of evolution across baseball history. Several pitchers are often identified as paradigm of the “modern” reliever based upon their pattern of usage, including Wilhelm, Sutter, and Dennis Eckersley.

• Finally, most baseball fans, whether knowledgeable statheads or simply men on barstools (not that the two are exclusive, and that’ll be another round for me, thanks), intuitively grasp that while relief pitching is an important part of the game, the impact of an ace reliever isn’t on par with that of an ace starter or All-Star position player. Several measures of player value — both sabermetric and economic — bear that out.

All of this combines to make a reliever’s road to the Hall of Fame an uphill one. But that doesn’t eliminate the question of where our three candidates fit in with respect to the two already in the Hall, to each other, and other good-to-great relievers who are or will be eligible for the Hall in the not-too-distant future. With Eckersley up for election next year, and a generation of save-happy closers on the horizon (Smith, the career leader, has already arrived), it’s worth looking at some ways to compare them.

Last year Baseball Primer’s Rich Rifkin introduced a measure designed to judge relief pitchers based on a combination of innings pitched and on ERA+ (which is park-adjusted ERA relative to the league). The reasoning behind this is simple: a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs; a good pitcher prevents runs at a better than league-average rate; the more innings a pitcher throws at a better-than-average rate, the more valuable he is.

Based on the widely-agreed notion that Wilhem was the best ever, Rifkin called his measure the Hoyt Scale, and created a simple formula:

(ERA+) + 4*IP/75 = uH (unadjusted Hoyts)

Rifkin then produced a Hoyt Constant such that Wilhelm winds up with exactly 100 Hoyts, and all other relievers are calculated relative to the master. By Rich’s calculations, the best relievers after the ol’ knuckleballer were Kent Tekulve and Rich Gossage (84.2), John Franco (82.8), Dan Quisenberry (81.7), Lee Smith (80.4), Tom Henke (80.2), Sparky Lyle (81.0), and Rollie Fingers (79.3).

This was a quick-and-dirty attempt at getting a handle on the relative values of a select group of top-notch relievers, but it contained a few flaws. First off, Rifkin’s numbers for calculating the Hoyt factor were off; for whatever reason he reported Wilhelm’s total number of innings in relief as 1,890 when it’s in fact 1,870 (still a major league record).

That’s a minor problem, easily correctible. However, a much larger problem exists. Several pitchers in the group we’re examining, including Wilhelm, have significant numbers of innings pitched as starters. Using a pitcher’s total ERA+ and total number of innings favors anybody who racks up the mileage a starter gets; yet we’re trying to measure relievers.

While breakdowns between innings pitched and runs allowed as starter/reliever are not always available, we do have a large amount of data for the thirty-five pitchers in my study. Using Retrosheet and a few instances where ALL of a pitchers appearances in a single season were starts, I was able to completely separate the stats as starter and reliever for eleven pitchers. Another eight obliged me by never starting a single game. That’s over half of the pitchers for whom I was able to use Relief IP and Relief ERA+ to recalculate their Hoyts. We’ll call all of these pitchers whose stats cooperate with our mission Group A. Wilhelm himself is included in this group because if we know his Relief IP, we know his Starting IP. I made an estimate of his Relief ERA+ which I’ll explain shortly.

Here are the Group A pitchers, sorted by Relief Innings Pitched (RIP). GS(d) is the number of games started for which we have data for, and RERA+ is Relief ERA+. The rest should be familiar:

                G  GS GS(d)  W   L   Sv     IP     RIP    ERA+  RERA+

H. Wilhelm    1070  52   0   143 122  227  2254.3  1870.0  146   145

K. Tekulve    1050   0   0    94  90  184  1436.3  1436.3  132   132

S. Lyle        899   0   0    99  76  238  1390.3  1390.3  127   127

L. Smith      1022   6   6    71  92  478  1289.3  1252.3  132   143

T. Burgmeier   745   3   3    79  55  102  1258.7  1248.7  119   120

J. Orosco*    1187   4   4    85  78  142  1261.3  1243.0  130   132

B. Stanley     637  85  85   115  97  132  1707.0  1159.0  118   131

J. Franco*     998   0   0    88  76  422  1150.3  1150.3  143   143

J. Reardon     880   0   0    73  77  367  1132.7  1132.7  121   121

D. Jones       846   4   4    69  79  303  1128.3  1112.3  130   130

M. Jackson*    960   7   7    60  67  142  1141.7  1108.0  127   131

G. Lavelle     745   3   3    80  77  136  1085.0  1077.7  126   128

D. Quisenberry 674   0   0    56  46  244  1043.3  1043.3  146   146

B. Sutter      661   0   0    68  71  300  1042.3  1042.3  136   136

J. Montogomery 700   1   1    46  52  304   868.7   863.7  134   136

D. Eckersley  1071 361 361   197 171  390  3285.7   807.3  116   180

T. Henke       642   0   0    41  42  311   789.7   789.7  156   156

R. Aguilera    732  89  89    86  81  318  1291.3   740.3  117   131

J. Wetteland   618  17  17    48  45  330   765.0   683.0  148   165

T. Hoffman*    632   0   0    45  44  352   701.0   701.0  146   146

Group B consists of pitchers for whom we have incomplete data on their time as starters. For the group, we have data on 55% of their total starts. For Goose Gossage, we’ve got 32 out of his 37, for Rollie Fingers only 8 of 37. I went ahead and removed the known starter stats from their lines, such that we’ve got Relief IP and Relief ERA+ which still include some starter innings (which we’ll adjust for down the road). Interestingly enough, every pitcher in either Group A or Group B had a better ERA+ as a reliever than as a starter, sometimes dramatically. Here are the Group B pitchers, sorted again by RIP (keep in mind that this RIP is not a complete total):

               G  GS GS(d)   W   L   Sv     IP     RIP    ERA+  RERA+

R. Gossage  1002  37  32    124 107  310  1890.3  1659.0   126   139

R. Fingers   944  37   8    114 118  341  1701.3  1656.7   119   122

G. Garber    931   9   1     96 113  218  1510.0  1505.7   117   117

T. McGraw    824  39  15     96  92  180  1514.7  1435.3   116   121

C. Carroll   731  28   9     96  73  143  1353.3  1299.0   120   123

M. Marshall  723  24  19     97 112  188  1386.7  1285.0   118   124

J. Hiller    545  43  35     87  76  125  1242.0  1012.0   134   135

Group C pitchers are the ones for whom we have no data on separating Relief IP and Relief ERA+. Five of the eight are older pitchers, contemporaries of Wilhelm who spent most of their careers as relievers. Perranoski and McMahon combined for only three starts; we could have ignored the lack of data and thrown them into Group A, but I chose to keep them here once I decided to add Nen and Hernandez to the study. Sorted by IP:

               G   GS  GS(d)   W   L   Sv     IP    RIP   ERA+  RERA+

L. McDaniel   987  74   0    141 119  172  2139.3   n/a    109   n/a

S. Miller     704  93   0    105 103  154  1694.0   n/a    115   n/a

E. Face       848  27   0    104  95  193  1375.0   n/a    109   n/a

D. McMahon    874   2   0     90  68  153  1310.7   n/a    119   n/a

R. Perranoski 737   1   0     79  74  179  1174.7   n/a    123   n/a

R. Myers      728  12   0     44  63  347   884.7   n/a    122   n/a

R. Hernandez  696   3   0     48  51  320   775.0   n/a    143   n/a

R. Nen        643   4   0     45  42  314   715.0   n/a    138   n/a

Here’s a quick comparison of the three groups:

        G   GS   GS(d)   W    L    Sv     IP      RIP    ERA+  RERA+

A    16769  632  580   1643 1538  5422  26022.3  21851.3  130  136

B     5700  217  119    710  691  1505  10598.3   9852.7  121  126

C     6217  216    0    656  615  1832  10068.3    n/a    119  n/a 

In general the trend seems to be that the more data we have on these pitchers, the better that data reflects on them. Note the improved RERA+ for the A’s and the B’s.

Back to Wilhelm. Poring over his stats, I became concerned about the impact his one year as a regular starter (1959, 32 GP, 27 GS, 226 IP, 173 ERA+) had on his overall stats. So I decided to cobble together an estimate of his Relief ERA+. Knowing his total number of starts and innings as a starter, I calculated his number of innings pitched per start (7.39), and then resolved his pitching lines for each year he started games:

      G  GS   IP     SIP    RIP    ER    SER   RER  IP/GR

1958 39  10  131.0   73.9   57.1  34.0  19.2  14.8   1.97

1959 32  27  226.0  199.6   26.4  55.0  48.6   6.4   5.29

1960 41  11  147.0   81.3   65.7  54.0  29.9  24.1   2.19

1961 51   1  109.7    7.4  102.3  28.0   1.9  26.1   2.05

1963 55   3  136.3   22.2  114.2  40.0   6.5  33.5   2.20

                    384.3              106.0

Not a bad estimate; his ERA as a “starter” here is 2.48 compared to his career ERA of 2.52. But the one thing which troubled me about this was the last column, the estimated innings pitched per relief appearance. For 1958, this comes out to over 5 innnings pitched per appearance. I decided to rerun the numbers using a higher estimate for that season (8.0 IP/GS) and a lower estimate for all the others (6.75):

      G  GS   IP     SIP    RIP    ER     SER    RER   IP/GR

1958 39  10  131.0   67.3   63.7  34.0   17.5   16.5    2.20

1959 32  27  226.0  216.0   10.0  55.0   52.6    2.4    2.00

1960 41  11  147.0   74.0   73.0  54.0   27.2   26.8    2.43

1961 51   1  109.7    6.7  102.9  28.0    1.7   26.3    2.06

1963 55   3  136.3   20.2  116.1  40.0    5.9   34.1    2.23

             384.3                      104.9

My extra work eliminates only one more run, but it does get his innings pitched per appearance down to a more uniform range. I then removed the totals from his line and recalculated his ERA+ as a “reliever”: 145, compared to his overall 146. Not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but enough to satisfy a few nagging doubts I had about the impact of that 1959 season.

Using Wilhelm’s Relief ERA+ and Relief IP, we can now calculate a new Hoyt Constant so that the man winds up with an even 100. In Rifkin’s original study it was .4051 (100/246.8), here it becomes .4086 (100/244.73).

One more hurdle remains: how to avoid overestimating the number of Hoyts for the Group B and Group C pitchers. I decided to dock them a small amount for each missing start as a percentage of their total appearances, settling on the following formula:

Hoyt = G – (1.5*(mGS)/G) * uH * Hc

G is Games, mGS is missing Games Started (the ones we DON’T have data for), uH is Unadjusted Hoyts, and Hc is the Hoyt Constant. I tested the factors of 1 to 3 in increments of 0.5, and 1.5 provided a good equilibrium; anything more and you penalize the old swingmen too much, anything less and you reward them too much for piling up the innings as a starter. For what it’s worth, I also ran the calculations another way, using a very reasonable 6 IP/GS for the missing Games Started; the results are almost identical.

Anyway, and without further ado, here is new Hoyt list:

              IP     RIP    ERA+  RERA+  Hoyt

Wilhelm     2254.3  1870.0  146   145   100.0

Gossage     1809.3  1578.0  126   139    90.5

Smith       1289.3  1252.3  132   143    85.7

Tekulve     1436.3  1436.3  132   132    85.2

Franco      1150.3  1150.3  143   143    83.5

Quisenberry 1043.3  1043.3  146   146    82.4

Wetteland    765.0   683.0  148   165    82.3

Lyle        1390.3  1390.3  127   127    82.2

Fingers     1701.3  1656.7  119   122    82.0

Orosco      1261.3  1243.0  130   132    81.0

Henke        789.7   789.7  156   156    81.0

McDaniel    2139.3    n/a   109   n/a    80.9

Garber      1510.0  1505.7  117   117    79.7

Stanley     1707.0  1159.0  118   131    78.8

Sutter      1042.3  1042.3  136   136    78.3

Marshall    1386.7  1285.0  118   124    77.9

Jackson     1141.7  1108.0  127   131    77.7

Jones       1128.3  1112.3  130   130    77.4

McMahon     1310.7    n/a   119   n/a    76.9

McGraw      1514.7  1435.3  116   121    76.9

Burgmeier   1258.7  1248.7  119   120    76.2

Eckersley   3285.7   807.3  116   143    76.0

Lavelle     1085.0  1077.7  126   128    75.8

Perranoski  1174.7    n/a   123   n/a    75.7

Hiller      1242.0  1012.0  134   135    75.5

Carroll     1353.3  1299.0  120   123    75.5

Hoffman      701.0   701.0  146   146    74.9

Hernandez    775.0    n/a   143   n/a    74.8

Montogmery   868.7   863.7  134   136    74.4

Reardon     1132.7  1132.7  121   121    74.1

Nen          715.0    n/a   138   138    71.3

Face        1375.0    n/a   109   n/a    70.9

Aguilera    1291.3   740.3  117   131    69.7

Myers        884.7    n/a   122   n/a    67.4

Miller      1694.0    n/a   115   n/a    67.3

Even with the slight deduction for five missing starts, Gossage clearly leaps into second place in this study. Smith edges Tekulve for third place and Franco’s alone in fifth. The next seven pitchers are separated by a mere 1.5 Hoyts. Rollie Fingers is right in the middle of that pack. In his original piece, Rifkin used Fingers’ score to define the cutoff for Hall of Fame relievers. By this measure, Smith, Tekulve, Franco, Quiz, Wetteland, and Lyle should get the nod, while Orosco, Henke, McDaniel, Garber, Stanley, Sutter and a whole bunch of others fall by the wayside.

Intuitively, this isn’t a bad conclusion, but it’s worth remembering that Fingers’ exact position might be considered somewhat fluid. We’re missing 29 of his starts, and additional data (say, Retrosheet splits for 1970, when he started 19 games) could shift his position. If I’d used a different deduction factor, say 2.0 instead of 1.5 per missing start, it would have knocked him below Orosco and Henke at 80.7. A deduction factor of 1.0, on the other hand, would slide him past Quiz, Wetteland, and ol’ Sparky at 83.3. Admittedly, one of the reasons I settled on 1.5 was because he fit into the middle of this grouping rather than significantly beyond or behind it.

It’s just as well that we don’t depend too much on Fingers’ exact position, because as a barometer of what makes a Hall of Fame reliever, it’s the definition of a slippery slope. But more importantly, the question is, is the Hoyt Scale alone enough to tell us who belongs in the Hall and who doesn’t? I don’t think so. It ignores postseason credentials, awards, and other factors. But it’s of great help in pointing us in the right direction.

Let’s remember what the Hoyt Scale does and doesn’t do. The Hoyt is a measure of career value for relievers based entirely on runs and innings and the pitcher’s performance relative to the league average. It doesn’t take into account peak value. It dismisses any performance a pitcher had as a starter. It ignores the relatively trivial aspect of the reliever’s W-L record, and somewhat helpfully shades us from being influenced by save totals. It’s worth noting how the all-time save leaders rank:

            S   Hoyt  rank

Smith      478  85.7   3

Franco     422  83.5   5

Eck        390  76.0  22

Reardon    367  74.1  30

Hoffman    352  74.9  27

Myers      347  67.4  34

Fingers    341  82.0   9

Wetteland  330  78.1   7

Hernandez  320  74.8  28

Aguilera   318  69.7  33

Nen        314  71.3  31

Henke      311  81.0  11

Gossage    310  90.5   2

Montgomery 304  74.4  19

Jones      303  77.4  18

Sutter     300  78.3  15

Most of the more recent closers don’t fare so well on this list, given their low number of innings pitched; Wetteland is the exception. On the contrary, the Hoyt rewards yeomen who racked up quality innings amid little fanfare. Tekulve, Orosco, McDaniel, Garber, Burgmeier, and Lavelle aren’t exactly tip-of-the-ongue names when it comes to relief aces, but those guys were very good for a long time. Not Hall of Famers, perhaps, but no slouches either.

I should add somewhere in here that among the lower reaches of our “Top 35 (Guys Whose Hoyts I Bothered to Calculate)” there are probably pitchers I’ve omitted who would score just as well, especially among active players and players whose splits I don’t have. Today’s free-agent signing Steve Reed, a guy I suggested the Yanks find a spot for, rolls in at a respectable 71.5. Among older pitchers, Ron Reed, Dave Smith, and Steve Bedrosian are around 70 as well. If anyone finds a pitcher above 75 who’s not active and who’s missing from this list, let me know.

Among our three candidates for BBWAA election this year, Gossage has a clear edge on Smith, and Sutter’s even further back. I still want to examine what Win Shares and the Leverage Index tell us about these relievers, but rather than dragging this out even longer, I’ll hold that for another day.

Pitchers have their Cy Youngs, scientists have their Nobels, and movies have their Oscars. Now we internet-savvy baseball buffs have our own award: the Primeys. Sponsored by Baseball Primer, the Primeys reward serious commentary and silly humor, great posts, great discussion threads, and great websites. Some of the people nominated for these awards are pros like Bill James, ESPN’s Rob Neyer and Jim Baker, and Salon’s Allen Barra. Others are amateurs who simply do it for the love of the game and of connecting with their fellow fans.

I’m proud to announce that yours truly has been nominated for one of these Primeys: Best Internet Baseball Weblog! I’m up against four other fine blogs: Don Malcolm’s Big Bad Baseball, Aaron Gleeman’s Baseball Blog, the Ryan Wilkins/Ben Matasar/Tim Kraus Baseball Junkie site, and the Baseball Prospectus staff’s Daily Prospectus.

It’s truly an honor to be mentioned in such fine company, and I offer my hearty and sincere congratulations to the other candidates. At the same time, I know that off the top of my head, I can reel off at least twice as many weblogs equally worthy of being nominated. Just check out the guys (and gals) listed at left. You bloggers know who you are, and the readership we likely all share does as well.

Needless to say, and despite some long odds in going up against the Prospectus hydra, it would be quite a thrill to win this award. So I’m asking you, dear readers, to consider voting for this site when you fill out your ballot (my category is #9 out of 11). The voting ends on Monday, so please take a few minutes today to register your opinion. My sincere thanks and undying gratitude to you all for your continued support of this website.

I’m swamped with work right now and pretty damn ornery as well, stuck on a three-month-long math project at work which has made my life a living hell. I’m Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winfield character in Pulp Fiction when he’s on brain detail, a “mushroom-cloud-laying m*****f*****.” It ain’t pretty.

Needless to say, I haven’t had the chance to do much writing lately. I’m working on my Hall of Fame analysis for relievers, which will hopefully be up later this week. Three or four other things I wanted to write about have been stashed on the back burner, if not rendered completely irrelevant. That’s life as a blogger when you’ve gotta pull down a paycheck, too.

So for now, I’m going to have to settle for passing on a few links, not all off which are fresh:

• Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Zumsteg has a worthwhile take on the possibility of Fox selling the Dodgers now that their five-year window for writing off player contracts is closing. For those unfamiliar, the five-year rule allows half of a franchise’s purchase price to be allocated to player contracts and depreciated over that span, creating an artificial loss which reduces the owner’s tax liability. So if I buy the Dodgers from Fox for $400 million, I can write off $200 million of that, which is $40 mil a year. When five years are up, I, just like other owners, particularly the corporate ones, bail on the Dodgers and find a new tax shelter. See: Disney’s Anaheim Angels, anything Jeffrey Loria has touched, and the entire history of the Florida Marlins (Huizenga to Henry to Loria, Oh Shit!).

Incidentally, the guy who came up with this grand scheme is the same guy wearing the ugly toupée. From a CNN/SI piece last spring:

“This legal rule was actually generated by a major tax law victory won by Bud Selig in his former baseball role, as a new owner when Selig bought the Seattle Pilots for $11 million in 1969 and moved them to his hometown of Milwaukee,” says [Harvard law professor Paul] Weiler, author of Leveling the Playing Field. “It was a terrible legal verdict that was won by a guy 30 years ago in a different world.”

No wonder those owners love Bad Rug Bud.

• Also at Prospectus, Will Carroll’s first Under the Knife column is worth a read. For the uninitiated, Carroll has been running a free email list of the same name which details player injuries and their outlooks from an informed sports-medicine standpoint. He gets a lot of good inside stuff about the game in general as well. The first BP column discusses the now-quashed Bartolo Colon-Brad Penny deal involving the Expos, Marlins, and Reds. Of Penny, Carroll writes: “Rumors circulated fairly regularly last season that Penny’s elbow was not the only concern, but that his shoulder had come up abnormal during an MRI. While tears were not seen, sources indicated that Penny had some lesions inside his shoulder capsule and according to some reports he may have the dreaded Hill-Sachs lesions that would imply rotator cuff problems.” If that kind of talk is your cup of joe (and if you own a fantasy-league team it had better be), then you’ve got a new columnist on your reading list, particularly once the season hits.

• Mike C. over at Mike’s Baseball Rants has been working on a lengthy, multipart analysis on the history of relief pitching. It’s now five parts and thick with numbers, but it’s definitely an interesting look at the development of an important, if nebulous, facet of the game. Start with Part 1 and then go scroll crazy…

• Christian Ruzich has one of the best baseball sites around. He’s got a weblog devoted to the Chicago Cubs called The Cub Reporter, an article on the Ex-Cub Factor, the most comprehensive list of retired baseball numbers on the web, a baseball bookshelf feature which has me green with envy, and a little doodad in the upper-lefthand corner of the Cub Reporter which tells you how many days until Pitchers and Catchers (today we’re at 31!). If that’s not worth a look during the dark days of January, I don’t know what is.

Christian’s been stewing about the Cub-related Hall of Fame candidates — Sandberg, Dawson, Sutter and Smith — none of whom received the magic 75% during last week’s voting results. As if being a Cubs fan isn’t hard enough already. He’s also done a fair bit of research related to another Cub candidate, one who should have been in the Hall long ago, Ron Santo. “Number of players dubbed ‘the next Santo': 3 (Gary Scott, Kevin Orie, Cole Liniak). Career games for the three next Santos: 251.” Hmmm…

• Introducing a new blog devoted to baseball analysis and rotisserie advice, called At Home Plate. It’s done by a guy named Jonathan Leshanski. I’m not sure I agree with his suggestions for speeding up the game, but they’re worth a look, and so is the rest of his site.