Crosstown Series Mega Recap

June 11: White Sox 10, Cubs 5
White Sox MVP: A.J. Pierzynski, .259 WPA
I don't know what it is about Wrigley Field that turns A.J. Pierzynski into Johnny Bench, but the White Sox should find out what it is and bottle it. Pierzynski had a monster game, going 4-5 with three run scoring hits, including a late home run. Not too shabby for the catcher with a .649 OPS and .283 wOBA, both career lows.

Cubs' MVP: Alfonso Soriano, .114 WPA
Soriano tied the game at 2-2 in the second inning with his 300th career homer, and also "drove in" two more in the eighth inning on Jayson Nix's error. He finished the game 1-4.

White Sox LVP: Jayson Nix, -.080 WPA
Nix went 0-4 with four flyouts, and also reached base on an intentional walk in the fifth. Apparently a guy with no bat was on deck, because it's really the only excusable reason to want to not pitch to Jayson Nix, who is sporting a robust .219 wOBA in 53 plate appearances for the White Sox this season. He also committed the aforementioned error that allowed two (meaningless) Cubs runs to score late in the game.

Cubs' LVP: Randy Wells, -.326 WPA (-.301 pitching)
Wells yet again had major first inning issues, allowing four straight two out hits to open the game. He pitched five innings, giving up five runs and ten hits, walking three, and striking out six. Wells' ERA now sits at 5.15, but his FIP is a mere 3.47. He's striking out batters more frequently than his impressive rookie campaign, walking about the same amount of batters, and giving up home runs at nearly an identical rate. So what gives?

Wells' BABIP is a hefty .359. Some might call that an unlucky figure that will regress, but then you have to look at his 25.9 LD% as the culprit. Batters are making very solid contact against Wells' this season, and it's something that the Cubs might want to look into.

One last note about Wells: there are rumors swirling around the interwebs that Randy was out partying with the Blackhawks all night before his start. As far as I know there is no actual evidence to this beyond anecdotal, but as we all know hearsay and conjecture are acceptable forms of evidence in the Cubs' blogosphere.

So Randy Wells was DEFINITELY out partying all night, and on top of that my sources tell me he took home an uggo. I wish it weren't true, but I am afraid it appears to be so.

Biggest Hit of the Game:
With no outs in the fifth inning, Paul Konerko hits a two-run double to give the Sox the lead for good. (.182 WPA)

Biggest Out(s) of the Game:
Already trailing by two runs early, Ryan Theriot grounds into a double play in the first inning after Kosuke Fukudome had reached base. (-.077 WPA)

June 12: White Sox 2, Cubs 1

White Sox MVP: Mark Buehrle, .308 WPA (.395 pitching)
Buehrle was solid, although hittable, in the second game of the series. He pitched 6.2 shutout innings, striking out seven and walking none. The Cubs were able to get eight hits, but couldn't get a run on the board.

Buehrle is having another solid season by his standards, but there are a few things to take note of. His ERA is just shy of 5.00, although FIP has him at a respectable 4.07. His strikeouts are down this year (4.34 K/9, down from his 5.16 career rate), and his WHIP has jumped to 1.46, the highest of his career. Teams are manufacturing more runs against Buehrle this season even though his batted ball numbers are pretty much the same. He might be due for some regression.

Cubs' MVP: Marlon Byrd, .119 WPA
The ByrdMan went 3-4 with two singles and a double. Kudos also to Ryan Theriot (.082 WPA) for driving in the only Cubs' run, and to Carlos Silva (.117 WPA pitching) for throwing a solid game despite getting stuck with the loss.

White Sox LVP: Carlos Quentin, -.113 WPA
It's been a miserable season for Carlos Quentin thus far, and Saturday was no different. Quentin went 0-5 with two strikeouts. His OBP for the season has now dipped under .300.

Cubs' LVP: Alfonso Soriano, -.191 WPA
Soriano went 0-4, striking out twice. He also ended the eighth inning with a runner in scoring position.

Biggest Hit of the Game: 
With two outs in the seventh inning, Paul Konerko "singled" to right field to drive in the eventual winning run. Xavier Nady briefly uprooted himself to make an attempt to catch the ball, one that Kosuke would have pitched a tent and camped under, with enough time to start a fire with his bare hands and make s'mores for the whole team. (.121 WPA)

Biggest Out of the Game:
In the ninth inning and the White Sox holding a 2-1 lead, Bobby Jenks strikes out Chad Tracy to end the game. (-.100 WPA)

June 13: Cubs 1, White Sox 0

Now that's what I'm talking about!

Cubs' MVP: Ted Lilly, .385 WPA (.456 pitching)
This one's a no-brainer. Lilly pitched eight no hit innings before giving up a leadoff single to Juan Fucking Pierre to start the ninth. He was his usual fly ball self, inducing fourteen of them throughout the night. Lilly only struck out three but his control was excellent all night, and the White Sox just could not manage any solid contact whatsoever.

Lilly's fastball and sinker averaged 88 and 87 MPH, respectively, and Lilly was close to 90 with his fastball throughout the game:

As far as I'm concerned, Lilly's velocity issues are a thing of the past.

In case you're counting at home, the Cubs have now supplied Ted Lilly with an unimaginable sixteen runs of support in his ten starts.

Honorable mentions also go out to Carlos Marmol (.281 WPA) who managed to get out of a massive ninth inning jam of his own creation, and to Chad Tracy (.154 WPA) who finally did something useful since his callup from Iowa.

White Sox MVP: Gavin Floyd, .230 WPA (.236 pitching)
Floyd threw a helluva game himself, going eight strong innings allowing just three hits, and striking out nine. Coincidentally, David Golebiewski wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Rotographs about why Gavin Floyd was a solid candidate to show improvement as the season progressed.

Cubs' LVP: Starlin Castro, -.100 WPA
Castro went 1-3 with an inning-ending double play in the fifth, and was also caught stealing in the eighth.

White Sox LVP: Carlos Quentin, -.301 WPA
Quentin had his second straight 0-fer, with three flyouts and a strikeout. He could have played the hero in the ninth with two out and the bases loaded, but Carlos Marmol got him to pop up to shallow center to end the series.

Biggest Hit of the Game:
With two outs in the seventh inning, Chad Tracy singled in the only run of the game. (.201 WPA)

Biggest Out of the Game: 
Carlos Quentin ends the game on a flyout with the bases loaded.

Most Bizarre Play of the Game:

Seeing as how this is a Chicago baseball blog, I suppose there will be more content posted from this series, perhaps a few tidbits about what we learned over the course of the weekend from both sides.

Number of Wins for the White Sox to Clinch The Beloved Crosstown Cup: 2

How President Obama Feels About the Ideo of his Favorite Team Hoisting a Trophy With a BP Logo:

June 4: Cubs @ Astros (Game 54)

Cubs' MVP: Marlon Byrd, .174 WPA
The Byrdman finished 2-4 with two doubles, one of which knocked in the Cubs' only run in the fifth inning. Byrd's been in a big-time slump lately; he has a .539 OPS and .260 wOBA the last two weeks, and those two doubles he hit were the first extra-base hits for Byrd since May 16. He also has three walks since May 4. Naturally, Lou batted him leadoff last night. It's a way of life.

Astros' MVP: Felipe Paulino, .281 WPA (.333 pitching)
Paulino got his first win of the season last night after starting the year 0-7. In fact, in eleven starts this season Paulino has received a whopping sixteen runs of support, which for the Cubs is a solid offensive month. Paulino's peripherals, even traditional ones, indicate that he's been an OK pitcher: ERA of just 4.01, K/9 over 8, a FIP of 3.41 (but an xFIP of 4.46 due to his 2.8% HR/FB ratio, well below his career rate of 12.7%). Paulino had to get a win sometime, he might as well do it against the Cubs.

Cubs' LVP: Ryan Theriot, -.188 WPA
I don't know if words can describe how much I want Ryan Theriot off this team. I mentioned how Marlon Byrd has been slumping as of late. He looks like Honus Fucking Wagner compared to Theriot. Theriot's last thirty days: .213 OBP (zero walks, none since May 1), .196 SLG (zero extra base hits, none since May 4), and a .198 wOBA (Ryan Dempster's in that same time period is .217).

Theriot continued his ways of fail last night with an 0-4 night, which included his failure to drive in any runs in the third inning with men on second and third and just one out.

Astros' LVP: Pedro Feliz, -.096 WPA
Feliz went 1-4 in the game but ended two innings with the bases loaded.

Biggest Hit of the Game:
Jeff Keppinger hits and RBI single in the bottom of the fifth to give Houston the 2-1 lead. (.125 WPA)

Biggest Out of the Game:
Ryan Theriot pops out with runners on second and third and one out in the third inning. (-.092 WPA)

It was over when...
Kosuke Fukudome led off the ninth inning with a groundout.

Bush League Play of the Year (so far)

Toying with BABIP

People always cite BABIP as a means of easily telling how lucky or unlucky a hitter has been. .300 is generally accepted as the average to which most (if not all) hitters regress with their BABIP. If you're over .300, you're lucky. If you're under .300 you're unlucky. Clear as day.

Quite frankly, it's an easy way to sound smart when talking about baseball. You're acknowledging that luck can play a large part in skewing a player's stats one way or another.

But not all BABIPs are created equal. For example, this season, Dan Uggla has a BABIP of .302. Pretty average. But he's only hitting line drives at rate of 10.1%, well below the league average of around 18-19%. So his average BABIP is in fact, pretty lucky. Contrast that with a guy like Derrek Lee, who has a below average BABIP of .275 but is hitting line drives at 23%.

I've always said you can't look at BABIP and draw accurate conclusions unless you couple it with line drive percentages. The same goes for judging the luck of pitchers.

There was discussion on the 126th best Cubs blog today about what Aramis Ramirez's woeful batting lines would look like if you regressed his BABIP and batted ball percentages to the average. Harry Pavlidis, Lord of the Internets, was quick to point out that regressing hitter's power numbers to the mean may not be the best idea because unlike pitchers, that's an individual skill.

I would tend to agree. But there's no reason to think that something as simple as batting average couldn't be normalized by taking a deeper look at BABIP and LD%.

The standard I've always heard to calculate expected BABIP (xBABIP) is LD% + .120. I've never completely comprehended the thinking behind that, but I'm sure someone much smarter than me came up with it. So we'll use that.

I also came across what I think is a better system on the Twins' blog Twinkie Town this afternoon. Essentially, you multiply the batted ball type (line drive, ground ball, flyout, pop fly) by the percentage that those batted balls typically fall for hits. The calculation for this expected BABIP, which we'll call eBABIP to avoid confusion is then as follows: (LD% * 0.720 + GB% * 0.231 + FB% * .171 + PF% * 0.019)

Using both of these methods, we'll take the average and find a new BABIP (nBABIP) that might be more representative because they're based on what types of batted balls the players are hitting.

With a new BABIP, we can calculate the new number of hits that player should have, based on the number of balls they put in play (not counting strikeouts, walks, or home runs, but adding in sacrifice flys). By adding home runs and strikeouts back into the equation, we can get a new batting average (nAVG), a number that we can use to easily compare how lucky or unlucky a batter has been in terms of not getting out when they hit the ball.

I've also included dBABIP and dAVG to represent the difference between the current numbers and my adjusted numbers.



Using these numbers, you can see that Xavier Nady has been the unluckiest hitter on the team. He's batting .222 on the season but in a normalized situation he should be batting .313, 91 points higher.

It should be noted that Nady only has 72 at bats on the season, so these numbers aren't as reliable as other regulars on the team. The more at bats a player gets, the more representative his batted ball percentages will be, and the more accurate these adjusted numbers become. Take note of the aforementioned Derrek Lee, who by these calculations should be batting near .280.

The luckiest hitter so far for the Cubs has been Marlon Byrd, who's .299 average drops to .268 when we normalize his batted balls. Kosuke and Starlin Castro appear to have been lucky in the early going this season as well.

I'm not going to bother trying to normalize these player's power numbers, or try to adjust using UZR or park or anything like that. This exercise is purely looking at batting average, admittedly a flawed stat. This is something I'm going to try and update throughout the season. We'll see how these numbers change as the season goes on.

10 Epic Wrigley Home Runs, 1-5

See 10-6 here

#5 Marlon Byrd
4/30/10 off Kevin Mulvey
True Distance: 463 happy feet


#4 Milton Bradley
5/12/09 off Jake Peavy
True Distance: 464 mercurial feet


#3 Prince Fielder
9/16/08 off Ryan Dempster
True Distance: 465 feet


#2 Adam Dunn
4/16/08 off Kevin Hart
True Distance: 467 feet


#1 Adam Dunn
7/10/08 off Jon Lieber
True Distance: 486 feet

The 10 Most Epic Wrigley Field Home Runs, 2008-Present (10-6)

Courtesty of Hit Tracker, here are the 10 longest home runs at Wrigley Field since the start of the 2008 season. Why 2008? Because that's the earliest year where I can pull video of the actual home runs, and let's face it, nobody wants to read about really long dingers. People want to see really long dingers.

Hit Tracker uses atmospheric and observational data to determine how far a home run would have gone if its path was unobstructed and landed back at field level. The method to their madness is detailed here.

So nobody has a brain aneurysm from all the gifs, I've split the post into two. Here's 10-6. Follow the link at the bottom for 5-1.

Click on the player's name to see the full video. Click on True Distance to see Hit Tracker's flight representation of the home run.

And away we go:

#10 (tie). Carlos Lee
7/27/09 off Carlos Zambrano
True Distance: 451 feet


Chris Young
10/2/09 off Tom Gorzelanny
True Distance: 451 feet


#9 Alfonso Soriano
5/14/08 off Jake Peavy
True Distance: 453 happy feet 


#8 Derrek Lee 
7/02/09 off Chris Smith
True Distance: 455 happy feet


#7 Marlon Byrd
April 15, 2010 off Jeff Suppan
True Distance: 457 feet


#6 Lance Berkman
5/16/09 off Kevin Gregg
True Distance: 460 feet


5-1 here

Things That Are Just Weird

We're starting a new series at Crosstown Cup where we bring attention to certain stats or splits that, for lack of a better term, are just plain weird.

Exhibit A: Marlon Byrd.

Anyone who actually watches baseball games and doesn't spend all their free time with their nose in spreadsheets knows how good Marlon Byrd has been this season. He's batting .340 with 7 home runs and 25 RBI in 39 games.

People who do spend good amounts of time actually watching baseball games AND analyzing spreadsheets have an even better understanding of how good Marlon Byrd has been. His .414 wOBA is seventh best in the National League, although I would like to note that Alfonso Soriano's lazy .423 wOBA is fifth. Even more impressive is Marlon Byrd's 2.2 WAR, trailing only Chase Utley for best in the NL thus far. Byrd signed for three years and $15 million this past offseason. He's played 39 games and already has been worth $9 million.

The combination of his bat and glove have made him a legitimate MVP candidate so far in 2010. That being said, he has been incredibly lucky at the plate as of late. According to Fangraphs, the last seven days Byrd has posted a team high .412 BABIP (minimum 10 PA). The Byrdman continues to rake, right?

During the same time span, Byrd has a team low LD% of just 5.6%. Apparently when Marlon Byrd hits a ground ball, it's harder to track down than a greased-up chicken on roller skates.

I realize it's an incredibly small sample, but even in the span of a week: team low LD%, team high BABIP. That's just weird.

May 12: Marlins @ Cubs WPA Recap (Game 35)

As always, graphs and data from our friends at Fangraphs


Cubs MVP: Marlon Byrd; .176 WPA
Marlon Byrd's one out double in the 5th inning put the Cubs up 3-2, a lead they never relinguished. That hit alone accounted for .175 of his WPA, and was the biggest one of the game for the Cubs.
Marlins MVP: Ronny Paulino; .076 WPA
Paulino's two out single in the fourth plated two runs and tied the game at 2. The hit itself was worth .184 WPA, the largest of the game.

Cubs LVP: Geovany Soto; -.098 WPA
Soto went 0-3 with a walk, and ended the third inning by grounding into a double play with two men on. Not a terrible game by any means, but the lowest on the team.
Marlins LVP: Chris Volstad; -.197
Volstad surrendered four earned runs through six innings. Eleven Cubs reached base (four walks), and he struck out five.

Biggest Cubs' At-Bat
Marlon Byrd's aforementioned double (.175 WPA)
Biggest Cubs' Pitch
Carlos Marmol strikes out Hanley Ramirez looking to end the game (.142 WPA)