I received a copy of the Bill James Gold Mine in the mail about a week and a half ago and have been meaning to share some nuggets from the book with you. Hope you enjoy.
Carl Crawford has steadily increased his batting average on fly balls each year since 2002. I’m not sure why, but it’s an interesting number. Here is the breakdown by year:
2002 - .075
2003 - .098
2004 - .162
2005 - .190
2006 - .262
2007 - .307
Staying on the Crawford front, did you know that over the last three years no one has a better stolen base gain than CC? He’s a +100 which works out to be an 85% success rate. Granted, he doesn’t have any many steals as guys like Reyes, Pierre and Figgins, but he does know how to steal bases and is an asset in that aspect.
Last season, Al Reyes had just 23 ground-ball outs and absolutely no force outs. James compares him to Chad Bradford who had 101 ground-ball outs and 9 force outs. Both faced similar amounts of hitters with Reyes at 254 and Bradford at 289.
Scott Kazmir tends to pitch better as he faces better teams.
vs. .600+ teams - Four games / 1-0 / 1.65 ERA
vs. .500 - .599 teams - 50 games / 18 - 16 / 3.20 ERA
vs. .400 - .499 teams - 40 games / 14 - 13 / 4.23 ERA
vs. sub .400 teams - 4 games / 2 - 0 / 4.91 ERA
James Shields retired the first hitter in the inning 74% of the time. That was the best conversion percentage in all of baseball among pitchers who qualified for the ERA title.
On the flip side, Kazmir led the majors in innings throwing more than 20 pitches with 67. Ouch!!!
That’s just a snapshot of some of the good things in the new book. If you’ve not picked it up yet, it’s well worth the money. Do the publisher a favor and pick it up from them using this link. I don’t get anything out of it, but it’s better to support the little man rather than places like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
