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Turns out the book didn't do any projections about the upcoming season, but instead dove deep (by 1980s standards) into player and team performance the previous season: L/R, H/R, G/T splits, performance by month, leading off innings, with x runners on base, success percentages driving in runs, and late inning pressure situations.
No mention of Gregg Jeffries in the Mets section.
unfortunately, no.Flipping through it, it's interesting to see saber-metrics in its infancy. It has a lot of the splits we see on sites like B-R and Fangraphs, OBP and SLG are listed right by AVG, there's a snapshot of ballpark effects. Yet it also dives deep into topics seamheads today would write off as luck instead of skill, like success rate driving in runs and late-inning pressure performance.
That's a fair assessment. Flipping through the 1987 Elias, there were a few good moments, like recapping Frank White's beef with the Royals Stadium official scorers followed up by a study of effects of playing surface (even different brands of artificial turf) on errors, doubles, and triples. Conclusion: the high number of errors at Royals Stadium were most likely caused by the official scorers having the broadest definition of "error" among all MLB scorers. They also got a little unlucky. They used the Dodgers section to discuss record in one-run games and how teams that lose a bunch of one-run games in one season tend to bounce back the next. Across MLB history that's true, but they drop this article on the Dodgers, who went 73-89 in 1986 while losing 38 one-run games, and rebounded in 1987 to go... 73-89.
I wasn't much into roto baseball, but as I've mentioned here many times, I had a serious Strat-O-Matic Baseball habit in the 1980s. It was thousands of innings of S-O-M that taught me that OBP was more important than AVG, that situational relief pitching was coming, and that bunting with anyone besides the pitcher was pretty much a waste of an out.
Willy Taveras isn't
on Strat-o-Matic changing how a kid/teen looked at the analytical side of the game. I still dabble a little in "Strat-o" (as we called it in our town ... had 2-3 different leagues going on at any given time back in the '80s).
Well, I was 9 and 10 during the 1987. Maybe I didn't hear his name much that year. He did get a cup of coffee with the Mets that year.
In your defense, if you asked Rickey Henderson himself about it, he would probably tell you, "Rickey once stole 181 bases in a season."ClownCausedChaos2 said:
Are you Rickey Henderson?
