Pirates 2014 — Bullpen

All the graphs are pulled from this Fangraphs leaderboard. The Pirates bullpen has a been a source of problems and criticisms for the Pirates this year. At the beginning of 2014, the bullpen had almost the same personnel as the 2013 season. Bullpens can vary wildly from year to year, and the Pirates relievers pitched […]

MLB — Bases Loaded. No Outs. No Runs.

Bases loaded, no outs is one of the most tenuous points of a close baseball game. If you are rooting for the team at the plate, you feel confident your team will score here. Anything else, would be a huge disappointment. If you are rooting for the fielding team and your pitcher gets out of […]

Pirates Do Not Need Help Against LHP

Stats in this post are current up to right before the July 31, 2014 PIT-ARZ game. The MLB non-waiver trade deadline just passed. I’m not interesting in debating what teams should or should not have done except to say the price for quality players was very high this year. The whole supply & demand, free […]

Probability and Sunday Night Baseball

There’s nothing I like more than a bases-loaded, no-outs situation in baseball. This might be my favorite situation/stat no one realizes. There’s around a 15% chance that the team who has the bases loaded will not score at all that inning! 15% might not seem like much, but over the course of the season it […]

Pirates 2014 — Take Your Finger Off The Panic Button

EVERYONE TAKE THEIR FINGER OFF THAT PANIC BUTTON. The Pirates did really, really well last year. They won 94 games, the NLWCG, and took the Cardinals to 5 games in the NLDS. Expectations for right or wrong reasons have been raised for the following year. With April coming to a close the Pirates are looking […]

Charlie Morton — PitchFX

I’m in a predictive modeling class for my grad program at NU, and we are learning a statistical programming language called SAS. One of the things we are trying early on is cluster analysis to determine if variables are related. I decided to play around with data that’s a little more interesting than housing prices. […]

Pirates — Run Probability

Presented without much commentary or analysis. This is how the Pirates fared last year given a certain number of outs and with runners on specific bases. So for example with no ones and nobody on base the Pirates had a 26% chance of a scoring a run from that point in the inning on till […]

Pirates — Pitch Count

At the Pirates, we like to try to guess what the pitch count will be for the Pirates’ starting pitcher. In honor of opening day today, I present a cheat sheet! The graphs might be a little bit overkill, but it’s cool all the different ways you can visualize the this simple data. The number […]

2013 Pirates R/RA Graphs