The First Thing I Checked

I narrowed down my baseball-website-subscription wish list. I went through the stages of grieving on this a while ago. When BP and ESPN went mostly pay-to-see for their good content, I was outraged. Well, maybe outraged is a little strong. I was sort of annoyed/pissed off. I wanted to read Rob Neyer and Chris(tina?) Kahrl and Derek Zumsteg without having to pay for the pleasure.

I think I skipped a couple of the stages of grief after that and just paid the subscription for Baseball Prospectus. It was, for the most part, the only game in town for me. That lasted two years, I think. During that time, other websites like Baseball Analysts and Hardball Times cropped up, providing decent (if significantly reduced) content for free. That satisfied me for a while, but I'm itching again.

Under the auspices of a birthday gift, I resubscribed to BP this morning. I figure it's really no more nuts than subscribing to a magazine or the Sporting News or something like that. I was going to wait until my actual birthday (this Saturday, for you last-minute shoppers), but something happened this morning to push up the subscription date. I read an article in the Hardball Times about DIPS (defense-independent pitching), which normalizes pitching performance and accounts for bad or good defense, relying heavily on peripheral statistics. There was also a new stat called LIPS, which accounts for bad/good luck. There was also I noticed a couple of intriguing things. First, Chien-Mien Wang was probably the luckiest pitcher in the majors last year. Posting an ERA below 4, when it could easily have been in the mid-5's. Barry Zito was similarly lucky. There seems to be a recognition that ground-ball pitchers with very low strikeout rates are awfully dependent on just where those balls are hit. Wang may have gotten a bunch of balls to Cano, when different swings could have sent them...wait for it...past a diving Jeter. Wang could be due for a down year in 2007, especially with Jeter and A-Rod another year older, and some uncertainty at first base.

The more significant thing I noticed was the MOST unlucky pitcher in baseball last year, according to home runs allowed vs. expected, was none other than Josh Beckett. We all know that he gave up a bunch of homers- 36 to be exact. His expected HRs should have been closer to around 25. Does this augur a good year, a bounceback year for Beckett? I wanted to know more. I needed PECOTA!

That brings me back to my subscription. I couldn't find any good pitching projections for Beckett on the internet (for free, anyway) so I knew the time had come. I just got my confirmation email- with the closing "Love, Baseball Prospectus"-and am ready to roll. I'm ready to find out what the geniuses at BP are predicting from Josh Beckett for 2007. And the answer is...

PECOTA projections for 2007 are not fully rolled out yet. Damn it.