Happy Valley Hardball with a sabermetrics twist

PSU was the only team to win as Purdue fell to Michigan State, Michigan fell to Minnesota, and Northwestern dropped two to Indiana. Place Team Wins Losses Win % GB 6 Purdue 7 11 .389 — 7T Michigan 7 13 .350 1.0 7T Penn State 7 13 .350 1.0 9 Northwestern 3 15 .167 4.0

Introducing the “Jim Abbott Predictor” In their book, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, co-authors Rob Neyer of ESPN and the legendary Bill James developed a formula that predicts who will win the Cy Young Award. Rob Neyer tracks how current pitchers numbers stack up through the current season at the Cy Young Predictor site on [...]

Here’s the pitching equivalents of my top ten hitting lists. To get on the list, a pitcher must have one inning pitched for each of his team’s games. That makes it difficult for some of the top relievers to make the lists. I’ll put together a separate list that includes those guys at a later [...]

You might have noticed that the PSU guys were noticeably absent from the top ten lists in my previous post. We actually happen to be the only school that did not have a player appear on one of the lists. There is a way to find many of our guys though – turn the lists [...]

Now that we are a third of the way through Big Ten conference play, I thought I’d take a look at some the top players around the league (data is as off 4/14). Here are my top ten lists using some traditional measures (e.g. batting average) and some not so traditional sabermetric measures (e.g. runs [...]