The First BABS In-Season Update

On the other side of the links below, you’ll find the first BABS spreadsheet update of the young season.

It is important to point out just how young 2016 really is. If a single baseball season represented someone’s full lifespan, today would herald the onset of puberty. And for those of us who’ve gone through puberty, you might remember how many changes are still yet to come.

So we can’t put a lot of credence in the statistical landscape right now. There are still a few places devoid of hair and BABS, well, she is only starting to display the contours that we found so attractive over the winter.

In short, the first update still has a bunch of growing to do.

May 1 Update [EXCEL] [VIEW/PRINT]

These new files take on a bit of a different format. The details:

1. Batters and pitchers are presented separately, but in the same spreadsheet. Batters are ranked at the top, pitchers are ranked in a section beneath.

2. I’ve omitted the Liabilities section of the balance sheet, making it somewhat unbalanced, I suppose. But the pre-season Liabilities ratings were all historical. Injury-proneness is important on draft day; today, a player is either hurt or he’s not, and there are plenty of places to find that information. Experience is fluid; I’m not going to designate a specific date when a certain player is going to graduate from [EX] to [e]. You can always refer to the original BABS reports for those risk variables.

There is also no Marketplace section. Every league’s FAAB market is different, drive by the needs of the individual owners.

3. The exceptions are the AV and ER Liabilities. These have been incorporated into their corresponding Asset categories. Any player with a batting tool or pitching tool Liability (bottom 25% in that skill) is noted as an “x”.

For hitters, the ratings hierarchy is now:

AV+         Significant batting average, plus on-base impact (top 25%)
AV          Significant batting average, on-base neutral (top 25%)
AV-         Significant bat average, negative on-base impact (top 25%)
a+          Moderate batting average, plus on-base impact (top 50%)
a           Moderate batting average, on-base neutral (top 50%)
a-          Moderate bat average, negative on-base impact (top 50%)
+           Batting average neutral, plus on-base impact
(No rating) No batting average or on base impact.
–           Batting average neutral, negative on-base impact
x+          Negative batting average, plus on base impact (bottom 25%)
x           Negative batting average, on base neutral (bottom 25%)
x-          Negative bat average, negative on base impact (bottom 25%)

For pitchers, the ratings hierarchy is now:

E+          Extreme ERA impact (top 10%)
ER          Significant ERA impact (top 25%)
e           Moderate ERA impact (top 50%)
(No rating) No ERA impact
x           Negative ERA impact (bottom 25%)

4. These charts present each player’s current Asset ratings and draft Asset ratings, side by side. In this way, you can see which players are over-performing or underperforming as compared to a month ago. Again, since it is early in the season, there are many players whose Assets have yet to stabilize, so there is nothing here that can be considered gospel. (No, Aledmys Diaz – above – is not the best player in baseball.) Use the comparisons to validate current performance and to get a very preliminary sense of players who might be improving or declining. The baseline is still the draft ratings.

Players with a grey box in their draft section did not have a pre-season rating.

5. Players are sorted by their overall skills profile, regardless of playing time. Since the opportunity for playing time can change quickly with a single pulled hamstring, I’ve opted to present all like-skilled players together. In this way, it’s easier to see potential replacements within a skills tier.

For instance, the [P+,AV+] tier has many familiar full-timers, like Mike Trout, Josh Donaldson and Bryce Harper. But it also has mid-timer Mark Reynolds and a whole bunch of speculative part-timers, such as Matt Joyce, Carlos Ruiz, Trevor Brown and Sean Rodriguez. As this latter group accumulates playing time, many of the names will get filtered back to more reasonable skills profiles. But Joyce and Rodriguez are the only two who had power in their draft profile [p], meaning that there could be something more here. It might sound trite to say, “Time will tell,” but that is exactly what we need to see which players are for real.

Players are still designated as full-timers, mid-timers and part-timers in these charts, but these are strictly to identify the pace at which these players are accumulating plate appearances and innings. They are not predictive. For our purposes, especially here in early May, their major benefit is to tell us which players’ BABS ratings might be more grounded in reality. “F” trumps “M” which in turn trumps all the part-timers.

I am going to try to carve out some time in the next few days to do a deeper analysis of this charts, hopefully to post by Friday. As far as future updates, the plan is to post a new set of charts at the beginning of each month. I’ll go more frequently if I think it’s necessary.

 

Photographer: Doug Murray/Icon Sportswire