IBL alumni storm the Atlantic

The Atlantic League, that is. In the likely event that you've never heard of it (I hadn't), the Atlantic League is a ten-year-old independent baseball league in the northeastern U.S. "Independent" means it's not affiliated with any of the MLB's farm systems. The level of play is estimated to be equivalent to AA or AAA minor league ball (where AAA is the highest level of the minor leagues).

Two IBL alumni, both pitchers from the Bet Shemesh Blue Sox, have recently been signed by Atlantic League teams. First, Rafael Bergstrom was signed by the Bridgeport Bluefish, and now Jason Benson has joined the Lancaster Barnstormers. Bergstrom and Benson both played well in the IBL, and were among the league's best pitchers - hopefully I'll have more to say about pitching stats in the future - but I find it curious that they were signed so quickly, long before other players with better numbers.

In any case, I thought I'd take a look at their performance in the Atlantic League, but then I found that Ari Alexenberg has already done it.

If more IBL players move to other established leagues, it will be interesting to see what we can learn from the comparison about the IBL's overall level of play.

Note the comments on this post about Benson's Barnstormers debut. Someone noted that "his ERA is a bit high" - if only he knew about the home run factor at Gezer!

About those home run derbies

Much was made in the press over the IBL's decision to break tie games with a home run derby, rather than baseball's traditional extra innings. (For the rules of the IBL's home run derby, see section 4.10 (b) of the IBL's official rules.) A commenter has asked how many home run derbies were held this season.

The answer, after a quick search of the files, is eight, or about 6.5% of games:

June 26: Modiin (L) @ Raanana (W)
July 2: Petach Tikva (L) @ Bet Shemesh (W)
July 12: Bet Shemesh (W) @ Raanana (L)
July 13: Netanya (L) @ Petach Tikva (W)
July 17: Modiin (W) @ Petach Tikva (L)
July 31: Raanana (W) @ Tel Aviv (L)
August 6: Raanana (L) @ Modiin (W)
August 8: Bet Shemesh (L) @ Modiin (W)

I never attended a game with a derby, so I can't comment on it from a fan's perspective. But from a baseball perspective, it seems daft. I'd actually prefer if they flipped a coin, or just declared the game a tie.

Baseball is an adversarial sport. The central drama focuses on the face-off between the pitcher and the batter, with one trying to outwit the other. No play in baseball is the act of a single player, or a single team. There are no free throws, for example.

In the home run derby, each team plays separately, appointing its own "pitchers" to pitch to its own "batters", whose only objective is to try to hit the ball out of the park. Properly speaking, these aren't even home runs. The pitches aren't really pitches, since they're not thrown in an effort to get the batter out, and the batters aren't really batting, since the only outcome that matters is the long ball. For that matter, no one ever needs to run the bases, let alone run home.

It's a meaningless exercise in raw batting power, and while it may be entertaining, it bears little relationship to playing baseball. You might as well have a baserunning race, or a game of catch. Those are also valuable baseball skills, but no one would suggest they should stand on their own. The same goes for smacking the ball over the fence.

Actually, I wonder how entertaining it is either. The drama of a home run is that you never know when it's coming. You can anticipate it or imagine it, but it's a rare event that only happens when it happens, as a result of the right (or wrong!) pitch to the right batter at the right moment. Where's the drama in the derby? Especially compared with the drama of extra innings, everyone nervously wondering how long it will go on and who will finally break the tie?

Then consider that baseball teams have different skill sets. Some have more power, others more on-base skills, other more pitching or fielding. Why decide the game based on a display of only one skill, which will naturally be concentrated more in some teams than others?

I don't imagine anyone in the IBL is reading this blog, but if you are, please reconsider the home run derby. It's a corruption of the spirit of baseball. No less.

A final comment about statistics: I can't find statistics for home run derbies anywhere on the IBL's website. Neither the box scores nor the game logs even mention which players participated in them, let alone who hit how many home runs in each round. This despite the provision of the rules (4.10 (b)(7)(a)) that "Statistics from the Home Run Derby shall not be included in a player’s regular statistics but shall be included only in the statistics for home runs during a Home Run Derby."

I presume the explanation is that the IBL used off-the-shelf scorekeeping software, which had no provisions for scoring home run derbies. Another reason to drop the practice.

Home run leaders, broken down by field

As requested in the comments, here are the IBL's leading home run hitters, with their home runs and at bats broken down by ballpark. I've included everyone with at least five home runs for the season.





I don't have much to say about this. The dominance of Gezer, and of Gezer-based hitters, in the standings is plain to see. Just four of the fourteen home run leaders (Ramirez, Crotin, Doane, Field) were from teams other than Bet Shemesh and Modiin.

As a rough estimate of the Gezer effect, imagine cutting all the Gezer home run bars in half on the first chart. The same players still lead the list, but they're not nearly as dominant.

Surprise! Park factors are not what you expected!

I'd like to take a first stab at estimating IBL park factors.

For this first attempt, I'm going to average the performance of all six teams at each of the three fields.

I know I already explained why that's somewhat problematic: it overweights the home teams at each park, so that (for example) Gezer, home to the IBL's strongest batters (Bet Shemesh and Modiin) would have its park effects exaggerated in favor of batting, while Yarkon, home to the league's weakest teams (Petach Tikva and Raanana) would look too much like a pitcher's park.

To correct for this problem, I've decided to weight each team's record equally at each of the fields. That is, rather than tote up all the games played at each field and average the number of runs, hits, etc., I computed each team's individual performance at each field, and then averaged the team results weighting each team equally.

So even though Bet Shemesh played 24 games at Gezer and Modiin played 27, while Petach Tikva played only 9 there, I've treated them as equal for the purpose of averaging Gezer's performance levels. The same, of course, goes for Sportek and Yarkon.

This approach doesn't eliminate all forms of bias in the computation. For example, the home teams are still overrepresented in the average level of fielding faced at each park. But nothing we do will realistically eliminate all forms of bias, and I consider this approach to be a reasonable start.

The envelope, please:


Now, for the analysis. We've already seen the home run effects. Gezer produced 32% more home runs per game than the average field, while Yarkon produced 37% fewer. Overall, home runs were hit more than twice as often at Gezer as at Yarkon (relative factor: 2.08), and the difference from Sportek was nearly as large (1.82). Presumably, this is mainly due to the distances to the fences. Most of those Gezer home runs became fly outs at Yarkon.

So Gezer was a big hitters' park, right?

Not so fast.

What about triples?

Triples aren't that common to begin with. Only 19 were hit in the IBL season. Of those, 13 were at Yarkon, 6 at Sportek and 0 at Gezer. Shorter fences, not enough room to hit a triple.

How about base hits? Not much to say about them. Gezer was smack in the middle here, with a range of just 13% in hit rates between the three fields - probably too narrow to be meaningfully distinguished, given the sample size. Gezer was above average for doubles, with Yarkon below average, but again the range was not that great - 19%. Total bases from all hits - including those frequent Gezer homers - was just 7% above average at Gezer, with Yarkon 11% below average, a range of 21%.

Gezer also yielded more strikeouts and fewer walks than average. Overall, after home runs, the most telling column in the chart, and the most relevant to winning or losing games, is the one labelled R. Average runs per game, when weighting all six teams equally, varied within a range of 5% among the three parks. And Gezer was by no means the leader - it was just below average!

What can we learn from this? First, as usual, the data doesn't always support our intuitions about baseball. Second, a lot more goes into a baseball game than home run hitting. Third, if we were to assess IBL batters by adjusting their performances based on park factors, we'd see changes in home runs and triples, but batting and slugging averages wouldn't be affected much.

To confirm that suspicion, I calculated batting and slugging averages on the same basis as the park factors - averaging team results per field on an equal basis. (I don't have enough data tabulated yet to analyze on-base percentages.)

IBL 2007 batting and slugging averages by field, weighting teams equally at each field
Field	AVG	SLG
IBL	.270	.411
Gezer	.271	.435
Sportek	.284	.380
Yarkon	.251	.359

So how much does Gezer field inflate offense? Not as much as I expected, at least.

Welcome to bIBLemetrics!

With the inaugural season of the Israel Baseball League behind us, I've just launched bIBLemetrics, a blog for Israel Baseball League statistical analysis.

I was a big baseball fan as a kid, but lost interest when I finished high school nearly 20 years ago. This year, partly thanks to the IBL, I'm back with a vengeance. And I'm returning to one of my childhood dreams: to be the next Bill James. Instead of going up against the experienced statheads of Baseball Prospectus, though, I can start with the field to myself, right here with the IBL.

If a statistical analyst of the MLB is a sabermetrician, it seems appropriate that the IBL should have iblemetricians. So that's what you can call me.

I've already downloaded the IBL's box scores and game logs (see the Scoreboards section of their website), and I'm working on the software to extract the data from them. Some of the questions I hope to address once I'm set up:

• Park effects: Does Gezer Field inflate offense? If so, by how much? Do park effects change our assessment of who were the league's top players?
• In general, did the most valuable player awards go to the right players?
• What is the advantage to batting second (if there is one)? With two teams sharing each home field, we can compare games with the same venue but different "home" and "away" sides.
• By how much does Beit Shemesh (or any other team) increase a game's attendance?
• Any other questions on your mind that can be approached with baseball statistics?