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Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 04-11-2018

Should Brandon Beck replace Eric Miller in the weekend rotation? 

Re: Question for the baseball fans - BobK - 04-11-2018

No, or not yet.  :D

Re: Question for the baseball fans - JJJ - 04-11-2018

For now, I agree with BobK.

How about Esky's willingness to think "outside the box" mixing up positions? Gives him a whole lot of versatility and extra arms on the mound.

That I can recall off the top of my head: 3B=Kuet, Tawa, Handley, and someone else I don't remember. Matthiesson hitting when not pitching. Bakst and Stowers pitching when not fielding. The Ohtani Effect? :)

Re: Question for the baseball fans - StanfordMatt - 04-11-2018

Brendan Beck has also played 3B but I'd rather see him on the mound on Sundays.

Re: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 04-11-2018

I'm for waiting.  Let Miller pitch his way out of this.  If he doesn't accomplish that in his next two starts, everyone will understand the demotion.



Re: Question for the baseball fans - JJJ - 04-11-2018

(04-11-2018, 12:47 PM)StanfordMatt link Wrote:  Brendan Beck has also played 3B but I'd rather see him on the mound on Sundays.
That’s the one. Yes, Sundays will follow soon.

Re: Question for the baseball fans - Phogge - 04-11-2018

And Braden Beck should kick the field goals.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - JJJ - 05-01-2018

And we may have just experienced "the transition" as Miller is expected to start today vs USF.

http://www.facebook.com/stanfordbaseball/photos/a.424589649765.210657.289908679765/10156414098589766/?type=3&theater

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-01-2018

Coach can't keep B Beck out of the starting rotation if he keeps pitching as he has.

Having Miller as a reliever gives us a nice balance in the bullpen:

Weirmiller: left handed, long
Matthiesen: rright handed, long
Miller: left handed, long or short
Grech: right handed, set up
Palisch: left handed, set up
Little: right handed, closer

And Miller gives us a reliever who, like Little, can go in and get strike outs.

Also Love having a wicked right handed side armer like Grech. It's one more look that takes getting used to, and it's not easy to get the ball in air against him. Little's ball merely looks like it rises; Grech's really does.
That's the best bullpen in college baseball. Florida, by the most obvious comparison, only has three guys you'd confidently throw into a close, key game.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - CTcard - 05-01-2018

(05-01-2018, 01:50 PM)JJJ Wrote:  And we may have just experienced "the transition" as Miller is expected to start today vs USF.

It does appear that we have witnessed "the transition", though really when Brendan Beck pitched the Thursday game vs cal. 

As noted in this thread, broadly the transition is no surprise. The timing indicates it was probably a decision made some time ago for which Esquer was looking for a convenient spot in the schedule - the Th, F, Sa series provided it.

The reason I say that is that Miller's last outing, a win vs Arizona, was his best game of the season. He went 5.0 innings, gave up 0 earned runs (1 run overall), and only 1 walk. He finished strong retiring the last 7 batters he faced, and 11 of the last 12 (with the one walk the guy who got on base). Generally he appeared in control throughout.
So the switch certainly wasn't a response to that performance itself.
(05-01-2018, 02:13 PM)Hulk01 Wrote:  Having Miller as a reliever gives us a nice balance in the bullpen:

Except it appears Miller's primary role will be as mid-week starter. 
That is not completely exclusive to bullpen work, but Brendan Beck hadn't come in from the bullpen during his time as a midweek starter. His only relief appearances were twice vs Arizona as Esquer was getting him ready for the start vs cal. 

Of course come tournament time, roles get mixed around. 
In the regionals, and first week at Omaha, you might need four starters but could get by with three. 
Obviously in super-regionals and the final series at Omaha, there's only three starters. 
So, in that situation, presumably the fourth starter will become a fixture in the bullpen.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-01-2018

I' think Miller will be used in relief on weekends, particularly when the competition gets stiffer.

My bet is that Miller gets short (~ three inning) stints starting in our remaining weekday games before Esquer comes in with Matthiesen, Weirmiller, Rudd and/or Bakst in short stints.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - CTcard - 05-02-2018

(05-01-2018, 03:06 PM)Hulk01 Wrote:  My bet is that Miller gets short (~ three inning) stints starting in our remaining weekday games before Esquer comes in with Matthiesen, Weirmiller, Rudd and/or Bakst in short stints.


You were right on, at least about the first part. Of the rest, only Weiermiller came in.

The surprising (to me) development was that Miller's three innings were followed by three innings from Brendan Beck - putting them on roughly equal footing for rest before the next Sunday start.
Though Beck got through his three innings in only 35 pitches while Miller threw 52 - both faced 10 batters.

AND - the win over USF has pushed Stanford back over Florida to #1 in RPI. Almost regardless of results, this next weekend will probably push Florida back on top as they have a road series against Texas AM (33-12) whereas Stanford plays Utah (12-29).

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-02-2018

Spot on: Miller had a nice outing against Arizona. That's another reason, along with Miller's obvious talent and wicked late movement on his fastball, that told me that Esquer hadn't lost faith in Miller. He wants to optimize him for the regionals.

Miller has too much talent to sit. He gets steams of strike outs, which makes him attractive in short relief, especially against lefties, yet he give up very few home runs, which makes him attractive in longer relief.

We can beat everybody. Especially if Jonathan India returns to being human.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - StanfordMatt - 05-02-2018

To give you an idea of just how crazy the RPI calculations are, consider that as of today Boyd's World has Stanford and Florida in a virtual tie for the top spot with identical 0.629 ratings. However, when you look at the "RPI Needs Report" on the site, you find this:

Florida
Remaining: 4 home, 6 road, 0 neutral
Current RPI: 2
ROWP: 0.634

Top 45:
No more wins needed.

Top 32:
No more wins needed.

Top 16:
No more wins needed.

Top 8:
0 home wins, 1 road wins
1 home wins, 0 road wins

Stanford

Remaining: 6 home, 9 road, 0 neutral

Current RPI: 1

ROWP: 0.497



Top 45:

0 home wins, 0 road wins



Top 32:

0 home wins, 2 road wins

1 home wins, 1 road wins

2 home wins, 0 road wins



Top 16:

0 home wins, 7 road wins

1 home wins, 5 road wins

2 home wins, 4 road wins

3 home wins, 3 road wins

4 home wins, 2 road wins

5 home wins, 0 road wins



Top 8:

1 home wins, 8 road wins

2 home wins, 7 road wins

3 home wins, 6 road wins

4 home wins, 4 road wins

5 home wins, 3 road wins
6 home wins, 2 road wins

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-02-2018

Any system is bound to be imperfect, but. . .

RPIs end up being overwhelming dependent on games played in the first month, when the out of conference games are played. And there aren't many meaningful OOC games--unless you're Stanford, and play Rice, Michigan, and Texas. Out of conference, the Power Five teams tend to schedule teams that won't offer much resistance.

So it seems that RPI not only is early-season focused, but it tries to conclude too much about a team from too little information. But maybe this already has been said so often that I'm revealing how late I am to this game.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - CTcard - 05-02-2018

(05-02-2018, 09:47 AM)Hulk01 Wrote:  So it seems that RPI not only is early-season focused, but it tries to conclude too much about a team from too little information.    But maybe this already has been said so often that I'm revealing how late I am to this game.


Lots of problems with RPI, but I would put at the top of the list that it is at the same time both too heavily weighted towards strength of schedule (75% of the RPI) and has far too simplistic a method of determining SOS (only has second-order considerations, i.e. it counts opponents' record [50%] and opponents' opponents' record [25%]). 

Somewhere in the Boyds World archives is a substantial mathematical description of how the RPI's algorithm drive's a program's value toward the center if they play in a region with fewer teams (basically, by playing a high fraction of possible opponents, the 75% SOS component gets driven towards 0.500). Obviously that tends to hurt the RPI of better western teams while helping the RPI of bad western teams. Problem is, it's the better teams which are in contention for the NCAA tournament, and nobody cares so much which teams are in the 250-300 range.   

I am not quite sure if Boyd's ISR system has a bias that somehow works for the western teams, those teams definitely do better in that system. It's certainly not from Boyd's personal biases, he's a Mississippi State guy. 
http://www.boydsworld.com/baseball/isr/currentisr.html

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-02-2018

A specific huh? with the RPI

At #67, Tennessee ranks ahead of seven Pac-11 teams.

Tennessee has lost to Middle Tennesse, East Tennessee State, and Morehead State, and 2-20 to James Madison. And they've been swept by LSU and South Carolina, the 11th and 12th ranked teams in the SEC. And they're ranked well ahead of Oregon and Cal.

What about Tennessee, and its record this year, justifies that?

And the only explanation that seems to make sense is that they're in SEC, so they no worse than a top 70 team.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - BostonCard - 05-02-2018

Yes, Hulk; it is the fact that they play in the SEC.  At an extreme, consider a team that loses every game against teams with a perfect records.  They would get 0 for their record and .5 for their opponent's records (let's leave out the opponent's opponent's record).  In contrast, a team with a perfect record against winless teams gets .25 for their own record and 0 for their opponents.

The only real virtue of RPI is that it is fairly easy to calculate and transparent.  But it is a bad model for determining how good a team is.

If I were creating a simple system, for every win, you add the opponent's winning percentage and divide by a tally of your losses against 1 - the opponent's winning percentage (that is, their losing percentage).  Consider the following team:

resultopponent recordpoints
W7-3+0.7
W6-4+0.6
L8-2-0.2
W4-6+0.4
L2-8-0.8

That gives you an effective record of 1.7 points for wins versus 1 point for losses, a modified RPI of .629.  You could further this by doing a second order calculation.

The conventional RPI would give the team the following
record: 3-2, 0.6 (worth 25%)
opp record: 27-23, 0.54 (worth 50%)
opp opp record (depends, but probably will cluster around 0.5, worth 25%)

overall RPI .545

BC

RE: Question for the baseball fans - Hulk01 - 05-02-2018

I also like to look at games as having multiple clues.  As a general proposition, does the team show itself capable of scoring and of keeping its opponents from scoring?  An 8-1 game win means more to me than a 6-5 win.  In the first, both halves of that team's game were clicking,  In the other, neither half was; the team just happened to be a bit better than you opponent that day.

So in trying to compare teams. I look at the number of games in which the team scored more than six runs and/or allowed fewer than three.

By that measure, Florida deserves to be number one:

Six-plus runs scored games + minus-three runs allowed games - total number of games:
Florida:  50 - 46
Stanford:  41 - 40
NC State:  38 - 42
Texas Tech:  42 - 46
UCLA: 35 - 40
Arkansas:  36 - 45
N Carolina:  36 - 45
Ole Miss:  35 - 45
Oregon State: 30 - 40
Clemson: 33 - 45

I'd say there's actually a larger gap after Texas Tech because UCLA has played a much weaker schedule than the teams above it, and all but Oregon State behind it.  And the Beavers have played a schedule so weak that they may not belong on this top ten list.

RE: Question for the baseball fans - CTcard - 05-02-2018

(05-02-2018, 11:06 AM)Hulk01 Wrote:  A specific huh? with the RPI

At #67, Tennessee ranks ahead of seven Pac-11 teams.

Tennessee has lost to Middle Tennesse, East Tennessee State, and Morehead State, and 2-20 to James Madison.  And they've been swept by LSU and South Carolina, the 11th and 12th ranked teams in the SEC.  And they're ranked well ahead of Oregon and Cal.  

What about Tennessee, and its record this year, justifies that?  

And the only explanation that seems to make sense is that they're in SEC, so they no worse than a top 70 team.


You might want to check out Boyd's World ISR rankings that I linked to above. At one point I had read through how he constructed his algorithm and thought it was reasonably mathematically sophisticated, but to tell the truth I do not remember the details right now. 

I also don't know enough to comment specifically about Tennessee - for middling baseball teams specific bad losses don't really tell you that much. In Boyd's ISR Tennessee (25-22) appears at #77, behind #45 Arizona (25-17), #55 cal (25-17), #69 UW (21-19), and #73 Oregon (21-21), but ahead of #93 $C (19-21) etc. 

Of course if you really want to see what the computers say generally, you can check out the Massey composite of rankings. A few of those are questionable. 
https://www.masseyratings.com/cbase/compare.htm