Jimmy the Greek Handicaps the ABL

"The Greek" took a look at the teams in the ABL playoffs to see if there was any advantage.  The immediately surprising stat was for all the press about best this or best that, the number 1 offensive team in the ABL (at least considering runs scored) is not in the Playoffs.  So maybe pitching and defense do matter somewhat.  (NOTE: It may also surprise some to know that 2 of the top 4 offenses in the RCL didn't make the playoffs, while 3 of the top 4 offenses in the TML made the playoffs).  On the pitching side all four of the top pitching teams in the RCL made the playoffs and 3 of the top four pitching teams made the playoffs from the TML.

There are clearly many ways to victory and this is not about the best approach but perhaps the most effective approach.  The measure is simple.  The offense is measured by runs scored, the pitching is measured by runs allowed and defense is measured by Defensive Efficiency (DEF).  Now certainly the DEF impacts runs scored, so the pitching effectiveness does to some respect include the team defense.  Also, the short series format is a different dynamic than the overall season, since to some respect, team weaknesses can be hidden.  The table at the end of the article shows the relevant data.

Offensively, it is assumed that the RCL is much more effective in scoring runs that the TML, and this would be generally true with one exception.  Despite all the HR and SB, SoCal is only 6th in the RCL in offense.  San Francisco, the TML's best offense would exceed SoCal's run total making them the 4th best offense in the playoffs.  (Note: that the difference between San Francisco (4), SoCal (5) and Kansas City (6) is only seven runs, so it should be viewed that these are equivalent offenses,

Conversely, the TML is viewed as the pitching/defense league and thus is assumed that the better runs allowed totals and DEF would be in the TML.  But in runs allowed, this assumption would actually be false.  The least number of runs allowed belongs to Nottinghamshire, followed by Kansas City and closely San Francisco.  The fourth spot among playoff teams is a tie between SoCal and Eureka.  In DEF the TML does have 3 of the top 4 spots, but the top spot is again a RCL squad, Nottinghamshire.

The final measure of effectiveness to look at is the differential or Per Game Advantage (or margin of victory),  The clear advantage here goes to Nottinghamshire which essentially is 2 runs better a game then their opponents.  This is a half run better than the two second best teams, San Francisco and Kansas City.  With only Eureka and Cabo San Lucas being less than a run per game better.  Their margins of error for victory will be slim indeed.


The Kansas City v San Francisco match is clearly a toss up, but there is a good chance the TML representative will come from the winner of this series.  Pitching and defense seem to heavily favor Nottinghamshire as the RCL representative, but given the challenges of a short series, any of the other RCL challengers seem strong enough to claim an ABL title.

	Runs scored	League Rank	Runs alllowed	League Rank	Per Game Advantage	DEF
Nottinghamshire	990	2	684	1	1.9	0.688
SoCal	925	6	730	2	1.2	0.665
Monreal	942	5	771	3	1.1	0.656
Seattle	982	3	808	4	1.1	0.681
San Francisco	928	1	709	2	1.4	0.677
Eureka	855	5	730	3	0.8	0.683
Cabo San Lucas	895	4	796	5	0.6	0.687
Kansas City	921	2	701	1	1.4	0.683

Five Years of War: Part 2, The Good, The Well-to-do, and the Successful

So here is Part 2 of my five year study of how the first 10 players for each team fared.   If you haven't seen my intro and caveats, please read them in Part 1.  They may answer some questions about about where the numbers came from, not to mention for comparison purposes.

This time, we'll look at the top 12 teams.

Team War

Rank	Team	2012-2015 Team WAR	Record from 2012-current	Playoff appearances
1	Montreal	163.8	534-412	4
2	Las Vegas	162	521-425	4
3	Nottinghamshire	132.1	529-418	3
4	Seattle	131.2	552-395	3
5	Minnesota	118.3	487-459	1
6	Georgia	117.1	458-488	1
7	Dallas	110.8	468-478	1
8	Fort Worth	110.5	403-543	0
9	New York	109.4	506-442	2
10	KC	107.2	476-470	0
11	Cabo San Lucas	106.7	546-400	4
12	Maple	100.7	488-458	3

Notes:

• Playoff appearances:  We reviewed this in the last one, but here's a refresher.  Of the 40 playoff appearances over five, 26 were from teams on this list, 14 from the bottom half.   Half of the appearances from this list are made up of the top 4 teams.   Only two teams on this list failed to make it ever.  Getting high value players in those first ten rounds pretty was pretty much a guarantee of long term success.

• Cabo San Lucas and Maple:  Both of these teams are near the middle of the pack and have 4 and 3 playoff appearances respectively.   Do they prove the top 10 picks were not significant?  Based on looking at a couple of things, I'm going to say no.  In fact, I think it answers some of the questions about Boston from last time.  Without taking anything away from these teams and their success, especially Cabo, I think there's a deeper question here about the difference in the draft success, and maybe even the overall strength, of the TML and RCL.

• RCL vs. TML:  The RCL holds 7 of the top 9 spots in WAR.   The grand total of the RCL WAR is 1309.4.   For the TML it is 1139.4.   This is the five year equivalent of three to four of the games most elite players.  Overall, it means that the TML got over 1/2 a WAR less per player.

• Picks:  Going into the draft, I ended up in the middle and my preference would have either been near the very top or near the very bottom (due to the serpentine nature).  Interestingly,  the two teams whose top 10 picks have pretty much blown everyone out of the water are Montreal and Las Vegas.  Anyone want to guess where they picked?  24th and 1st.   Seattle (#4 on the list) went 3rd.  Nottinghamshire went 17th and broke the mold a bit, but Sir William's draft strategy was well suited to a more middle position.

• The Outlaws: Speaking of NOT, the winner of three titles and a favorite for a fourth, a lot of us might have assumed he'd be higher in this category, or maybe not.  
• But the bottom line is they sort of "lost" two years while those players got older and better.   I'll also point out that the overall strategy employed here was obviously successful, and in no small part thanks to the first 10 rounds.  However, when I looked back I expected a lot more payoff.
• In fact, Nottinghamshires' WAR comes just from four very successful picks (see the link at the bottom for more info) in those first 10, so the strategy was definitely hit and miss, at least in the first 10 rounds.   The other teams in the top tier of WAR in this study may have had a superstar or two but they had value that was much more spread out across their first 10 picks as well.
• Now, NOT does have more players over 25 WAR in this list than anyone else and is fourth overall after basically being patient for two years, so the "hit and miss" was really a home run.

Individual Efforts:  Also, These Guys Have a Lot of All-Star Appearances

There are very likely players that will exceed the efforts of players here that have come up, but these are the players that have produced the most since the inaugural draft.  I chose 25 WAR as a cutoff because that would equal 5 WAR/year and, coincidentally, was right around where Jacksonville was!  

I thought this list would actually be longer.  It just goes to show how difficult it is to sustain this kind of talent year after year, and then for a half-decade.  22 players have averaged five WAR or higher since they were picked in the first 10 rounds of the inaugural draft (even if some of them haven't been up that long).

Team	POS	Player	Total
Las Vegas	SP	Maurice Gould	51.7
Seattle	RF	Steve Frend	44.3
OKC	RF	Lorenzo Rodriguez	42.9
Montreal	RF	Tom Becker	36.1
San Fran	CF	Tom Klein	36.1
Montreal	SP	Raul Perez	35.1
Minnesota	1B	Peter Blanchard	32.2
Nottinghamshire	CF	Leslie Whitney*	32.2
The Georgia	MR	Kent Rose	30.2
Cabo San Lucas	1B	Dan Smith	29.5
Dallas	SP	Rich Bussell	29.4
New York	CF	Joe Herman	28.8
Washington	RF	Joe Leftwitch	27.9
San Diego	1B	Miguel Ortiz	27.9
Montreal	C	Tim Shields	27.7
KC	SP	Antonio Gomez	27.6
Dallas	2B	Jessie Clark	27.4
Eureka	OF	Mike Bergeron	27.4
Nottinghamshire	SS	Jim Crawford	27.3
Nottinghamshire	2B	Danny Burris	27.1
Carolina	RF	Chris Barrett	27
Jersey	RF	Stan Cheslin	26.3

• Maurice Gould: Likely one of the most valuable players we will ever see in the ABL, averaging over 10 WAR per season and failing to reach that mark just once.  He'll do it again this year and has shown he can even dominate the hitter heavy RCL this season.   Still just 31, he'll continue to rack up the WAR as long as he stays healthy.

• Many of the players on this list are from Round 1.    (The highest pick not on this list is Evan Warner at #6).   Most are from Round 5 or higher, with one exception: Kent Rose, who was taken with the 150th pick in the 7th Round of the draft.  that makes him the biggest steal, at least in the first 10 rounds.  Unfortunately for Rose and a few others, this seasons seems to be a tipping point as many have produced at a much lower level this season.

• Miguel Ortiz had one of the biggest differences from high to low and then back up again.  A lot of players had significant drop-offs that never came back or were due to injury, but Ortiz has never played less than 150 games (though he may come close this season).  Ortiz had a 7.1 WAR in 2013, a 1.7 in 2014, and then 8.3 in 2015.

Put Me In Coach!

As I did last time, I'll take a look at a few teams that whose top 10 picks have seen the most ABL seasons.  Once again, we have 50 total possible seasons (5 seasons 10 players) that these players could have made contributions.

• Remember that 80% (40 of 50 seasons) seemed to be a threshold as just 3 teams have less than that % of seasons played from their top 10 picks.

• No one was perfect, but three teams had just one missed season: Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and New York.   While it's interesting, it doesn't appear any more significant as a predictor of success than WAR for those top 10 picks as they've had a range of success.  However, teams that didn't get as many seasons, as we saw in the last article, clearly struggled.

Absolutely Final Thoughts (at least for the article)

• I think the results here pretty much speak for themselves.   It's no surprise that 14 of the league's 40 playoff appearances are held by the four teams who have had the most production out of their top 10 picks and speaks to how much easier life is when getting value there. 

• My own team, Minnesota, is probably one of the most disappointing on the list.  Despite having pretty good success in the first 10 rounds, I've been to the playoffs just once.  Part of that is due to the fact that the three teams that dominate the playoff scene in the RCL had more success than I have in the first 10 rounds of the draft, and most seasons that means they've left just one spot open for another team.

• The mysterious Greg Irwin.  I'm not sure if I have his name wrong or what, but I couldn't find this player anywhere.  He was drafted by Cabo and I even have him producing WAR in the first year, but of the 200 players I looked for, he could not be found.

• The top three team individual seasons for WAR among their top 10 picks  went as follows: MON 40.4, SF 40.2, MON 40.1.  These were the only teams that managed over 40 WAR from their top 10 picks.  It's notable for two reasons.  It was in the first three seasons of the league and even hitting thirty was rare.

•  I'm not sure if I'll run this again, but if I do it will be another five seasons from now as not enough will change at this point from season to season.   A lot of the original talent will have declined and those that went young (dare I say Jacksonville?) may have gained some.

• Finally, here's the worksheet I used.  The Top Ten Picks page shows all of the players and their WAR for each ABL season with team's yearly total and half-decade totals.   The Team WAR page shows a summary of all the data for posting purposes here.   The third page was not updated this time around.

Outlaws Quest for Four

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE (Times) - The 2017 season has ended with two single game elimination matches left to set the final ABL tournament roster.  Nottinghamshire will start it's defense against the winner of the Minnesota v Seattle match.  The Outlaws certainly had some things about the season to be upbeat about.  They set a new ABL record for team wins with 111, breaking the mark of 109 they set last year.  They also saw the emergence of rookie pitcher sensation Zi-Xing Feng who went 14-3 with an ERA of 4.00 and an OAVG of .256, which were top 10 finishes.

It was also a squad which changed thru the season, mostly to cope with injuries, but also to deal with some upcoming salary issues.  Key additions were former Dallas ace, from Maple, Rich Bussell, and underperforming OF from Mile High, Patrice Delhaye.  Lost in those deals were two long time contributors to the Outlaw legacy, 2B Daniel Burris and C/IB/DH Byron Bryant.

We asked Sir William about his view of the squad as they prepared the "Quest for Four".

"Certainly, the short series format is one that gives you concern.  One hot pitcher or cold batter and you can be home in a hurry.  We have been fortunate with that in the past.  Still, I feel we come into this season's matches at less than full strength and not really playing our best ball.  Our best pitcher, Antonio Gomez, has been out for the last third of the season, and will miss the entire playoffs.  Hopefully he can be fully fit by next spring.  LF Leslie Whitney has been out a lot this year.  Leslie gets our offense going and his loss since the all star game has clearly affected our offensive play.  He may be able to get back for the League matches, but I suspect it will be difficult for him to get his timing back quickly"

"On the plus side, it looks like Patrice Delhaye has passed his fitness and should be available for the playoffs.  Again it will be can he get his timing going?  So we may get some help in the playoffs.  As we finished the season, our hitting has dropped, our pitching has been a little less effective and even our defense has been inconsistent of late."

"I believe the rest will help us a bit, plus we do have the advantage of having the experience in these matches.  The lads are excited to get another opportunity at a championship and look to give it their full go.  We can only hope that the ball bounces our way at the key moments".

Certainly the supporters will be in full voice at what has become a traditional fall outing, the Nottinghamshire attempts to complete it's "Quest for Four"

Five Years of WAR: Part 1, The Not-So-Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

After the 2012 Season, I took some time to look at the first 10 rounds and tried to evaluate the success of each team's draft based on the amount of WAR produced.    I intended to follow it every year, but life got busy and it's a lot of work, so there hasn't been a report until now.   It's a nice time to do it, though as it will cover five years since the inaugural draft.

So, here's Part I of your half-decade report.  This part will focus on the bottom half of the teams.

I'll link my full spreadsheet after Part Two, which will focus on the top half of teams.

As usual, a couple of caveats:

• These are still based off of the original team's draft choices.  So when you see phrases like "NOT has x WAR" it really means that NOT's inaugural draft selections have produced x WAR, not they they've benefitted from all that as they may have traded players away.
•  I briefly considered trying to follow trades to see what teams got back, but that became convoluted quickly.  Consider this analysis what each team would have had if no trades were made, which brings me to my second point....
• Most of these players have actually, amazingly, remained on the same teams.  I don't have an exact number, but I'd say roughly 80%, however, some big names have moved that would alter numbers, though some not until this season.
• These numbers do not include this season and all numbers refer to the ABL production (minor league is not included) of the  top 240 picks in the inaugural draft (10 from each team) from 2012-2016.  This means that when I refer to Boston below as not having a player to produce 20 WAR in that time, they may have had one (and probably do), they just didn't have one in their top 10 inaugural picks.

Team WAR

Without further ado, here are the twelve teams whose top ten picks produced the lowest WAR from 2012-2016, along with their (current) franchise records and playoff appearances:

Rank	Team	2012-2015 Team WAR	Record from 2012-current	Playoff appearances
13	San Diego	96	434-511	1
14	Eureka	94.8	517-429	2
15	Jersey	94.6	438-508	0
16	Oklahoma City	93.8	513-435	2
17	San Francisco	88.8	482-465	1
18	So Cal	85.9	452-494	1
19	South Carolina	85.7	413-534	1
20	Carolina	85.3	444-502	1
21	Mile High	81.5	447-499	1
22	Boston	74.2	497-449	3
23	Washington	72.3	400-545	0
24	Jacksonville	26.1	350-596	0

Notes:

• There were 14 total playoff appearances from the bottom half and seven of those came from three teams.   There were 26 from the top half.  Still, it's clear that not getting a lot of production from the first 10 picks wasn't insurmountable, though it clearly made things tougher.  It's worth noting that none of the bottom half of teams have produced a championship either.

• Boston Cardinals: While you'll find that there are far more playoff appearances in the top 12 teams, Boston has made three playoff appearances despite getting just 74.3 WAR from it's top 10 picks.  The Cardinals are just one of three teams that has three playoff appearances. (There are also three teams with four).   Boston has also managed to do this without a single player to produce more than 20 WAR.

• Jacksonville Jacks: This week, Glenn mentioned redoing the inaugural draft as a joke and saying he probably couldn't do worse.  He's probably right.  26.2 WAR amongst 10 players over 5 years is pretty abysmal.  There are 21 players in the first 10 rounds that produced more than Jacksonville all by themselves, and one player nearly doubled that (he needed just 0.5 more WAR to do so).

Individual Efforts in Futility

While overall, this is focused on teams, here are the players who produced a negative WAR over that period of time:

Team	POS	Player	Total
Mile High	SP	Manuel Lopez	-2.9
San Fran	LF	Ken Wade	-2.8
Jacksonville	C	Cal Godleman	-1.8
So Cal	SP	Chris Clark	-1.8
Mile High	SP	Kurt Taylor	-1.7
Nottinghamshire	2B	Peter Kelly	-1.3
S.C	SS	Angelo Casas*	-1.3
Carolina	CF	Lawrence Buchanan	-0.7
Mile High	LF	Danny Hardy	-0.6
Washington	CF	Nate Davis	-0.5
Carolina	SP	David Cole	-0.3
Cabo San Lucas	CF	Mark Bennett	-0.2
Jacksonville	OF	Ivan Ortiz	-0.2
San Diego	SS	Trevor Warner	-0.2

• Of that list, OF Nate Davis and SP Manuel Lopez managed to make an appearance in all five seasons, and, for now, Lopez holds the honor of biggest bust amongst the players I looked at.   It's worth noting that there was another Manuel Lopez who was also worth -WAR (-1.1), so I'd stay away from guys with that name.

• OF Ken Wade was allowed to be terrible just two years ('12 and '13) before being sent back down and he is now retired at the age of 28.

• Additionally, there are three players who have not appeared in a single ABL game that were top 240 picks (as of the end of 2016):

OKC	2B	Dave Nichols*
Jacksonville	SP	Kirk Snyder*
Montreal	C	Alfredo Villalobos

All three of these players happened to be 10th round picks.

• Nichols is 25 in AAA.

• Snyder was also a 10th round pick and is actually up and having a very good year with Jacksonville this season as a 23 year-old

• Villalobos is also 23 and is in AAA.

Wasting Away in Margaritaville (Least ABL Use)

Finally, as I was going through this, it was also interesting to see how much ABL use the teams had gotten out of their top 10 picks.   Each team picked 10 players over five years.  That's 50 total years of service that each team could have seen out of its first ten picks.   I'm not going to examine every team, but some teams picks have seen far more ABL use than others.  I'll bring it up the teams that got the most use out of their players in the ABL in part 2.

• Most of the teams used the players in this study 80% of the time, meaning that there were really only a handful of seasons of 50 that their top 10 picks didn't see the ABL.

• Only three teams top 10 picks saw 80% or less of ABL time in the last five years.  That's essentially two whole picks that have, so far, gone unused.

• It's probably no surprise that Jacksonville's top 10 picks have seen the fewest ABL seasons, netting a grand total of just 30/50, or 60% of the time in the ABL.  This is a staggering four total picks worth of seasons that were not used during that time.

• The only other teams to have 10 or more "missed" seasons were San Fran (10) and OKC (14).

Final Thoughts

• While it clearly wasn't necessary to draft well and get production out of the top 10 rounds, as shown by OKC, BOS, and EUR I think you'll see that teams that did draft well and got more production there, unsurprisingly, had a much easier road to success.

• At some point I'd like to further study the development and success of both OKC and BOS.  OKC was in the bottom half in WAR and and usage of players, while BOS was only ahead of two other teams in WAR, though they did get a lot of use out of their players the last five seasons (44/50 total seasons).   EUR is an interesting case, too, but they were much more a bubble team in this analysis and had far more use for their top 10 picks, so they didn't have both the challenges that OKC did.  Did these teams make good trades, get more out of their later picks, have random talent increases, or something else?

•  I realize that Jacksonville features pretty heavily, and thankfully it looks like they're turning things around in Year 6.   However, I'd be curious to know if Glenn would change his approach in drafting, which seemed to focus on younger, long shot prospects and require a lot of trust in his scout and their development. Or  did he he set up for long term future success starting now and thinks the five year wait was worth it.

• There are five ABL teams that haven't reached the playoffs.  Frankly, I expected to see them all on the list for Part 1.  However, there are two teams that got significant production out of their top 10 picks and still have yet to reach the playoffs.   We'll find out who they are as well as the teams that had the most production out of their top 10 picks in the next installment.