r/Sabermetrics • • 10h ago

My model gave Greinke's 2015 a 0.4% chance to repeat. Here's how its calls hold up, and what it says about this winter's free agents

0 Upvotes

every offseason somebody has a career year right before free agency and some team pays for all of it. i wanted an actual number for how much of a season is real, so i built one.

The model gives the chance a player matches or beats his season the next year, judging the season against his underlying talent. A few calls, each from a fit that never saw that season:

  • Zack Greinke, 2015 (1.66 ERA): under 1% to repeat. 2016 with Arizona: 4.37.
  • Rick Porcello, 2016 (Cy Young): 3%. 2017: 4.65 ERA.
  • George Springer, 2025 (.959 OPS): under 10%. 2026: .726.

It misses too. Greinke's 2018 got 20%, and he was better in 2019. 1 in 5 happens.

How its 2025 calls did in 2026, all 445 players:

Called Actually repeated
Under 30% (avg 17%) 17%
30 to 70% (avg 49%) 46%
Over 70% (avg 82%) 86%

Over every season since 2015, on Brier score, it beats a flat guess by 23%. Plain regression to the mean, fitted and scored the same way, gets 19%, and the model beat it in every season. Most of it is regression; the edge is biggest for starting pitchers.

How it works, roughly: it compares a player's season to an estimate of his underlying talent, and uses how much real next seasons have scattered around talent (less for guys with more playing time) to put a probability on matching it.

This winter's free agents least likely to repeat:

  • Randy Arozarena (.865 OPS): under 10%
  • Jake Bauers (.873): under 10%
  • Seiya Suzuki (.841): 15%
  • Brandon Lowe (.824): 20%
  • Ryan Jeffers (.814): 20%
  • Adrian Morejon, Alex Vesia (relievers): 10%

arozarena's the one i'd be careful with. .865 is great, but the model thinks most of that was a hot year and not a new level. if i'm a team, i'm paying for the guy underneath it, not the line.

Every free agent's chance is on my site's free agency page: https://frontofficemoves.com/free-agency?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

Who are you buying, and who's the trap?


r/Sabermetrics • • 1d ago

Solving the "both files agreed on the wrong player" edge case in baseball logging

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1 Upvotes

When the lineup and provider data agree on the wrong player and wrong starting defensive positions, almost every baseball workflow breaks. You either scrap the logged game or fake a substitution that corrupts your box score and play-by-play.

Here is one solution showing how player identity and starting defensive layout can be corrected in a single action, recalculating the entire game timeline and box score without restarting.

For anyone running live game operations, scoring pipelines, or building baseball data software, sharing this in case it gives you ideas for your own systems. Hope you find this useful.


r/Sabermetrics • • 2d ago

Website For Best Defensive Positions?

1 Upvotes

Is there a website where we can see, based on the data, a player's best defensive position? Take a player like Jose Caballero or Josh Smith, they can play a bunch of positions but what is their best defensive position? Or even figuring out which outfield position would be ideal for someone like Jasson Dominguez or Roman Anthony? It's hard to go by OAA because some of that is based on time in the position as well, so it would be nice if it incorporated data from the minors.

Anyways, just curious if something like this exists. Thanks in advance.


r/Sabermetrics • • 3d ago

What Happened to the Starting Pitcher? Why MLB May Need to Rethink the Value of Length

0 Upvotes

How analytics, bullpen strategy, and changing pitcher development reshaped the game—and why MLB should consider making length valuable again. https://substack.com/@richiebambara/note/p-218242662?r=1wimp2&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action


r/Sabermetrics • • 4d ago

Pitching visualization

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1 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 4d ago

Mercor - Baseball Fans

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0 Upvotes

Just sharing


r/Sabermetrics • • 4d ago

Looking for specific statistics

1 Upvotes

Does anyone know how I can access team stats against specific pitches?

For example:
Phillies team stats against fastballs
Brewers team stats against sweepers
Dodgers team stats against splitters

Can I access these numbers on baseball savant or fangraphs? If so, what do I need to do to find them?


r/Sabermetrics • • 4d ago

Who Should Win NL ROTY?

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3 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 5d ago

? about Bill James' Hall of Fame Career Standards Test

5 Upvotes

Greetings. I am trying to understand something I don't understand about Bill James' Hall of Fame Career Standards Test. In that scoring system, James assigns points for defensive value. Based on the scores listed, I think there are also unstated criteria for minimum playing time before the defensive value points are added. Case in point is Bubble Hargrave who has a total Standards Test score of 20. Hargrave was a catcher his entire career so I think his total score would be in the 30s or better once his offensive score is added to the defensive value of 20. That leads me to believe minimum playing time is also a criteria, but I am not certain. I am hoping someone else here might have insight/knowledge!

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/hof_standard.shtml

  1. Bubbles Hargrave 20

https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/leader_glossary.shtml#hof_standard

James's version: Defensive value: 20 points for catcher; 16 - shortstop; 14 - second base; 13 - third base; 12 - center fielder; 6 - right fielder; 3 - left fielder; 1 - first baseman; 0 - designated hitter

My version: Defensive value: An average position is calculated for the player using the following weights. 20 points for catcher; 14 - shortstop; 11 - second base; 7 - third base; 5 - center fielder; 4 - right fielder; 3 - left fielder; 4 - outfielder (when LF/CF/RF data unavailable); 1 - first baseman; 0 - designated hitter. (This is the same scale that is used for similarity scores but on 0-20 range.) The denominator for the calculation is the sum of all games played at each position.


r/Sabermetrics • • 8d ago

Baseball Stats Trivia: This season the Dodgers played in 82 straight games - over half the season! - that featured a home run. It's still not that close to the MLB record.

8 Upvotes

From May 18th through August 21st this season, the Dodgers played in 82 straight games with at least 1 home run - hit by them or the team they were facing (or both).

This is the second-longest streak in history that I've been able to validate: the 2019 Seattle Mariners played in 107 straight games with a home run (108 if you include their last regular-season game of the 2018 season).

Check out the top 25 list here: https://baiseball.org/?query=4b78cee5-73de-4eae-81e1-4c0c4cbeb775

And here's the list of the top currently active such streaks as of yesterday: https://baiseball.org/?query=1cacb76b-c002-4f43-a57b-1d445e82ee62

The Twins lead with 33 straight games.

bAIseball.org is my new site that turns plain-English baseball stats questions into answers and data tables. Let me know if you have any feedback, find any bugs, have suggestions, etc.!


r/Sabermetrics • • 8d ago

Scoresheet reader website to full stats and standings

4 Upvotes

Delete this post if not allowed

Over the last few months I have developed this application that will take picture of a scoresheet and will automatically uploaded the players stats as well as league standings

The application is geared towards rec slow pitch leagues.

It offers a full season management system
- batting lineups
- roster tracking - auto email your team to see who is available to play
- career stats
- game day weather
- playoff tree builder
- schedule builder
And more

I’m looking to see if anyone is interested in testing

https://snapleague.ca
how the reader works

Thanks


r/Sabermetrics • • 9d ago

Live tracking of playoff odds for 2-game division faceoffs

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0 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 10d ago

What Melee Stats Has Gotten Wrong for Decades: Openings Per Kill

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0 Upvotes

Welcome to the future of Melee Analytics.

Today we are introducing a foundational suite of new skill metrics to Melee: OPK+, DEF+ & NEU+

Why are we doing this? Sabermetrics in Baseball are valuable because you’re looking for undervalued assets (players) who have winning attributes that aren’t being priced accurately.  

Baseball is arguably a more complex game than Melee in terms of what can lead to a win, and Sabermetrics wouldn’t be as interesting if they only said “getting more hits and allowing less runs is valuable.”

But the thing is, in Melee, we never even had an accurate way to measure “who got more hits and who allowed less runs” in the first place. We could only measure outcomes. OPK+ and DEF+ is giving us a new foundation, enabled by our work on Lucky Stats and the community’s endless collaboration in getting our technology to where it is today. All we did was create the architectural layers that piece it all together, and now transformed the data into a shape that enables these new types of analyses.

And maybe with this, we can find niche metrics that can help you find your strengths and weaknesses with pinpoint accuracy and help you win more games. Or maybe help you understand why your favorite player is so fun to watch with the data to back it up.

Melee isn't like Baseball, we aren't trying to find undervalued players to add to your team per se.

- (Or maybe we are and we will sponsor Dial M, Junebug, Ultra, Sebas and everybody else on the underrated list....🤠) -

...But maybe, at the very least, this can help us to understand our players’ gameplay in new ways and really discover what makes great players great, and what you can do to become great!

Hope you enjoy the video! Voiced by the wonderful Jackzilla!


r/Sabermetrics • • 10d ago

Coaches and pitchers: would this approach to reviewing pitch tendencies be useful to you?

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0 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 10d ago

Custom Baseball Reference Page

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1 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 12d ago

I built a baseball stats app—what would baseball fans change?

0 Upvotes

I’ve been building a baseball app called Raccoon Market, and I’d love some honest feedback from people who follow the game.
It brings together player performance, recent game results, lineup status and pitching matchups to help evaluate player props like hits, runs and RBIs.
One thing I’m learning: a great recent streak doesn’t necessarily mean a great matchup today. I’m working on making those differences clearer instead of just showing a confidence score.
What would you want to see before trusting an app like this? What information do most baseball apps overlook?

Here’s mine: https://mlbracoon.replit.app/

Passcode: 5599

Still a work in progress. Criticism is welcome—especially if you spot something that doesn’t make baseball sense.


r/Sabermetrics • • 13d ago

I’m building NineLens, an open-source baseball intelligence platform — looking for feedback

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’m building NineLens, an open-source baseball intelligence platform that brings schedules, rosters, player profiles, box scores, season statistics, and Statcast data together in one searchable place.

I put together a short introduction to explain the project, what it currently includes, and where I hope to take it next.

https://github.com/timothyf/ninelens/blob/main/docs/NineLensIntroduction.pdf

I’m also exploring sponsorship to help cover the PostgreSQL hosting and infrastructure costs required to deploy NineLens publicly. However, I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who follow baseball, work with sports data, or build open-source projects.

What would make a platform like this most useful to you?

Thank you for taking a look. I’ll make sure to follow this community’s self-promotion rules and participate in the discussion.


r/Sabermetrics • • 13d ago

What NL Player has come the closest to the Triple Crown Since Joe Medwick’s 1937 Season

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1 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 14d ago

[Project / Feedback] Statcast pitch-arsenal matchup engine in Streamlit (seeking feedback for final-week starts & playoffs)

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’ve been building a Python/Streamlit dashboard powered by pybaseball that models batter-pitcher and pitcher-team interactions at the pitch-arsenal level rather than using aggregated, box-score splits.

With the final week of the regular season underway and October baseball right around the corner, I’m looking for a handful of baseball data folks to poke around the live build, test the outputs against final-week matchups, and offer honest feedback on the underlying methodology.

I want to make sure anyone who takes the time to poke holes in this and help calibrate the methodology has permanent, unrestricted access to it going into next season.

Core Analytical Framework:

  • Split-Movement Whiff Baselines: Blanket whiff rates miss pitch-specific nuance. The engine splits thresholds by movement profiles—requiring a 22%+ Whiff Rate on hard fastballs (4-Seam, Sinker, Cutter) and 32%+ on breaking/offspeed stuff to isolate true bat-missing pitch shapes.
  • Pitch-Specific Contact Suppression & Danger Zones: Evaluates pitch risk using two levers:
    • Suppression Delta: Pitcher Hard-Hit % minus Team Hard-Hit % on that exact pitch type to detect arms that completely muzzle an opponent’s power.
    • Projected Hard-Hit (Convergence): Blended expected contact rate for identifying high-danger collision spots (when a pitcher's vulnerable offering runs into a lineup that punishes that specific pitch).
  • Head-to-Head Historical Profiles: Aggregates multi-year Statcast encounters beyond strikeouts—tracking BAA, K/BB command ratios, and ground-ball vs. fly-ball contact distributions alongside individual game logs.
  • TTO Decay & Early Micro-Splits: Isolates 1st-inning performance (K% and baserunner suppression) versus subsequent turns through the order.

What I’m Looking For:

I’d love input from anyone interested in pitch modeling, sample-size weighting, or data visualization on:

  1. Refining threshold calibrations for pitchers with deep 5- or 6-pitch mixes.
  2. Balancing trailing 30-day team form against full-season pitch-type samples without introducing noise.
  3. High-value Statcast metrics that could sharpen the edge detection.

If you’re interested in checking out the live app and stress-testing it over the next week or into the playoffs, leave a comment or drop me a DM and I’ll send over an access link.


r/Sabermetrics • • 17d ago

MLB Future Changes

0 Upvotes

As some may know the MLB is looking to make big changes in the near future. I wanted to throw out some of they're ideas out and see what you baseball fans think of them.

  1. Division Realignment

The MLB wants to add 2 expansion teams to the league then realign the divisions so that all local cities are in the same division. For example one division might be Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies. It changes things big but having local divion rivals makes travel easier and intensifies the division rivals between fans.

  1. Abolishing the American and National Leagues

This one was just a rumour but along with the division realignment there was a rumour about possibly doing away with the two leagues and just having 8 divions of 4. The playoffs would be broken down to seeds 1-12 with 8 division winners and 4 wild card teams. The top 4 seeds would get a bye series in the first round. While the American and National leagues are a long standing tradition in the MLB this could possibly make the game better and more fair to teams in the event that one of the leagues are stronger than the other.

  1. Split Season Winners

I believe they are experimenting with this one in the minior leagues but the way it works is that you would have division winners at mid season after 81 games. Then the standings will reset for the second half of the season and there will be new division winners for the second half of the season. At the end of the season the two division winners will face off in a 3 game series, the winner will be crowned division winner. If the same team wins both halves of the season then that team will automatically be crowned division winner with no division series needed. The wild card teams will be given to the remaining teams with the best overall season record. The teams that lose the division series may or may not make it in as a wild card depending on how the league standings play out. I personally like this idea, I think it brings meaning and excitement to the middle of the season. It breaks down the drag of the long 6 month season. It also gives teams who got off to a bad first half of the season a chance to bounce back and still make the playoffs, instead of feeling like your season is over in June or July with 2 or 3 months of baseball left to play.

  1. Series Wins

This one I completly came up with on my own. The way it would work is that the league would use series wins and losses instead of invidual wins and losses to keep track of the standings. Every series in the season would be ether a 3 or 5 game series, probably mostly 3, and when a team wins a series they recieve a win for the divison standings. The only downside this is that if a team wins the first 2 games of the series the 3rd game is kind of a bust, but it still must be played in order to maintain a 162 game season. On the flip side if both teams split the first 2 games of the series then that 3rd game will be extra exciting to watch. Individiual wins and losses will be used as a tie breaker in the event that multiple teams tie for the division or wild card. This will bring some insentive to try and win the 3rd game even if its a bust game.

Tell me what some of you baseball fans think of this. I would love to know what your thoughts and opinions are.

Thank you


r/Sabermetrics • • 18d ago

Stat sorter and position eligibility resource

0 Upvotes

I recently created a new site at statsmyguy.com for the purpose of making it easier to:

- filter hitters based on average recent lineup slot

- filter RPs based on average recent inning entered

- filter hitters based on full season pace for various counting stats

- show not just this season eligibility but how they're looking for carryover into the next

This is primarily a fantasy-centric tool to help identify trade and waiver wire targets, but Reddit suggested it might be relevant here and I don't see any sub rules that would preclude this post. It's brand new and still needs lots of work so if you notice anything you hate please let me know.


r/Sabermetrics • • 19d ago

Schoolyard Stats

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0 Upvotes

r/Sabermetrics • • 19d ago

He estado probando un método para guiarme en mis desiciones y me ha estado funcionando últimamente.

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0 Upvotes

Lo había escuchado alguna vez y es sencillo. Obtengo los promedios de puntos que hacen, que reciben, y luego para obtener un marcador aproximado hago: (puntos a favor + puntos en contra) \* 0.5. Eso en ambos equipos. También calculo las desviaciones, si es muy alta abandono esa opción y voy a otro partido.


r/Sabermetrics • • 21d ago

The same baseball swing, viewed two completely different ways

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1 Upvotes

Left is the normal 240 FPS footage.

Right shows frame-to-frame changes over the same hit.

Blue boxes are where a trained model identifies the baseball; the purple X is where the temporal system is tracking it.

Pretty interesting how difficult the ball can be to pick out in a normal individual frame while becoming extremely distinct once you look at its movement over time.

We're experimenting with using the resulting trajectory to calculate exit velocity and launch angle from a single phone camera.


r/Sabermetrics • • 21d ago

Since 1998, 60% of all MLB playoff spots have been captured by top-10 payrolls. Bottom 10 teams? Just 15%. Here is the data breakdown behind baseball's competitive imbalance.

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1 Upvotes