A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the players who were leading baseball in various offensive categories in the '00s. Here is the pitching version of that article. The leaders are much  more predictable than the last one.

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Some of our more eagle-eyed (pun intended) users may have noticed a new feature on the main page today, a link to The Baseball Early Bird. But maybe you were also wondering, what on earth is The Baseball Early Bird? Well, that's the question I'm here to answer.

The Baseball Early Bird is a joint project between Baseball-Reference and Gary Gillette of 247baseball.com (you may also know him as the co-editor of the ESPN Baseball and Pro Football Encyclopedias) that sends out daily e-mails containing recaps of the previous night's games, the day's slate of games, current standings, the starting pitchers and top hitters of the previous day, a list of players who were born, died, and made their MLB debut on the current date, and a variety of other editorial features.

You can access the Early Bird at the project's website, or by subscribing via e-mail, which offers the option of receiving the message optimized for html, text, or mobile devices. So go over and check it out, and be sure to make it your first stop for baseball info when you wake up in the morning.

Dunn homered last night and is up to 38 on the season. Now's he's on pace for 41. He's going to blow it if he's not careful.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, see my Dunn post from yesterday.

What do you make of Mark Reynolds?

I'm not going to discuss his strikeouts because I don't think they're all that meaningful. Over 2008 and 2009, he's 36th in outs and 45th in plate appearances. No big deal.

What does worry me is that he's currently cracking the top 10 for worst OPS+ in a season with 43 HR. Just like how Ryan Howard worried me last year, Reynolds is putting up numbers that are less than they might seem at first. Reynolds is also near the top of the list for fewest RBI in a 43+ HR season, although he figures to fall down a bit. If he adds just 7 RBI this year he won't make the top 15. (Still, though, he's up there, and you can't compare his year to current #8 Barry Bonds, who had 232 walks.)

But, check out all the 3rd basemen since 1901 to have 40 HR and 20 SB in the same season:

  Cnt Player            Year HR  SB Age Tm  Lg  G   PA  AB  R   H  2B 3B RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Positions
+----+-----------------+----+--+---+---+---+--+---+---+---+---+---+--+--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--+-----+-----+-----+-----+---------+
    1 Mark Reynolds     2009 43  24  25 ARI NL 144 616 536  92 143 28  1  99  74   3 203   4   0   2   8  9  .267  .359  .563  .922 *53
    2 Alex Rodriguez    2007 54  24  31 NYY AL 158 708 583 143 183 31  0 156  95  11 120  21   0   9  15  4  .314  .422  .645 1.067 *5/D
    3 Alex Rodriguez    2005 48  21  29 NYY AL 162 715 605 124 194 29  1 130  91   8 139  16   0   3   8  6  .321  .421  .610 1.031 *5/6D
    4 Chipper Jones     1999 45  25  27 ATL NL 157 701 567 116 181 41  1 110 126  18  94   2   0   6  20  3  .319  .441  .633 1.074 *5/6

Apparently the guy has some baserunning skills and with a .359 OBP he's getting on base decently enough.

Would you take this guy on your team? Despite his shortcomings, I still think he's a very talented player, and I'd take him.

I ran the numbers through our park factor calculator today. Basically, the new parks come out as neutral. Citi get a 98/99 (batting/pitching) park factor and New Yankee gets a (98/97) park factor. Hyperventilation aside they are both very slight pitcher's parks. Whenever possible we use 3-year park factor which are an average of year N-1 and year N+1. When only two years are available we use year N-1 and year N and in the case of New Yankee and Citi we just use the current year. I also only use intra-league games since there is a home and home with every team in the league. Interestingly, if we include the inter-league games in our totals, we have only a percentage point change here or there.

I think we need to seriously rethink park factors and I've done a little bit of that, but don't have anything ready to use.

For now, I'm not going to tweak the park factors in the db. You should assume that Yankees and Mets hitters are slightly better than shown and the pitchers slightly worse, since I've been using 100/100 for the two parks.

Here are the 2009 3-year park factors if the season ended last night.

team_ID BPF_tot PPF_tot
ARI     109.000 109.000
COL     109.000 109.000
CHC     108.000 106.000
BOS     106.000 104.000
SFG     104.000 104.000
TEX     104.000 104.000
DET     103.000 104.000
PHI     103.000 101.000
CHW     103.000 103.000
CIN     102.000 103.000
TBR     102.000 102.000
LAA     101.000 100.000
FLA     101.000 101.000
BAL     99.000  101.000
HOU     99.000  99.000
MIN     99.000  98.000
ATL     99.000  99.000
STL     98.000  97.000
TOR     98.000  98.000
OAK     98.000  98.000
NYY     98.000  97.000
KCR     98.000  99.000
WSN     98.000  99.000
NYM     98.000  99.000
MIL     97.000  97.000
SEA     96.000  97.000
LAD     96.000  94.000
PIT     96.000  97.000
CLE     94.000  95.000
SDP     88.000  89.000

The multitude of pitchers that the Padres have trotted  out this season have put them near the top of several interesting lists.

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Perhaps you know that Adam Dunn hit exactly 40 homers every season from 2005 to 2008. If you're counting, that's 4 seasons in a row.

As of this moment, Dunn has 37 HR this season. He projects to, you guessed it, 40 HR again this season.

I wonder what the highest number of homers any player hit 5 seasons in a row. I would think it's been done with 1 or maybe 2 HR each year for 5 years but I can't imagine the record is any higher than that. If Dunn hits exactly 40 again this year, it'll be a piece of trivia remembered for all time.

The Baseball Early Bird - Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Baseball Early Bird is a joint project with Gary Gillette of 247 Baseball that provides a daily e-mail with:

• recaps of last night's games,
• a trivia question,
• a list of players born, died, or debuted on this date,
• current standings,
• pitching performances, and hitting performances from last night's games,
• assorted editorial features, and
• e-mails optimized for html, text, or mobile.

We aim to be out by 8am ET every morning in-season with fewer issues during the off-season. You can opt-out of the e-mail at any time and we will never sell or share your e-mail address with another party. Hope you enjoy the Early Bird.

Over at The Baseball Analysts, Chris Moore has a very interesting piece about which pitchers have the best fastballs in the game today. The premise is classic process-centric thinking: filter out the luck aspect of pitch outcomes, and instead focus on the quality of the pitch irrespective of results. To this end, he uses a complex method to assign an expected value to each fastball thrown based on its PITCHf/x data (velocity, location, movement, etc.), and see who averages the fewest "expected runs allowed" per fastball thrown. And the winner? Well, you'll have to read to find out, but let's just say that he's having one of the 30 best ERA+ seasons of all-time this year.

I just got curious to see how many RBI the top HR-hitters average per HR. Let me show you what I mean.

I'm starting with the B-R page for 2009 batting leaders. The current HR leaders are:

Gee, Pujols on top of a leaders list. Who'dve thunk it?

Anyway, let's look up how many RBI each guy has on his homers so far this year.

The easiest way to do that is go to the event finder for each guy (here is Pujols', for example) and look up his 2009 homers. If you check out that result, you can see that Pujols has 76 RBI on his 47 HR.

Let me summarize the results for each guy:

Pujols: 76/47 = 1.62 RBI/HR
Reynolds 67/43 = 1.56 RBI/HR
Howard 79/41 = 1.93 RBI/HR
Fielder 71/40 = 1.78 RBI/HR
Pena 61/39 = 1.56 RBI/HR
Gonzalez 57/39 = 1.46 RBI/HR
Dunn 63/37 = 1.70 RBI/HR
Teixeira 56/37 = 1.51 RBI/HR
Bay 63/36 = 1.75 RBI/HR
Werth 55/34 = 1.62 RBI/HR
Lee 55/34 = 1.62 RBI/HR

Interesting variation. Howard is pretty far out in the lead among this group, but there are so many things to consider:

• This list includes only the top HR hitters. Nothing says that a guy further down on the HR leaderboard couldn't have a higher ratio than Howard.
• This stat depends heavily on how many guys are on base when the HR hitter is batting, and obviously he has little control over that.
• It's not surprising that Howard's value is so much higher than Werth's. Werth hits further down in the same batting order as Howard, meaning that Jayson has much less benefit of the #1-#3 hitters getting on base, plus he's usually the guy batting with the bases empty after Howard homers.
• Note that this stat does have a significant affect on RBI total. Compare the lowest guy on this list, Gonzalez, to Howard. There's almost half an RBI per HR difference in their rates. That means about 20 fewer RBI for Gonzalez this year (based on his HR production of about 40.)
• I wonder if this stat is random. In other words, I'd be curious to look at the same stat for each of these guys over their careers and see if it changes a lot from year to year. I figure it probably would since it has more to do with the team than anything else, although each guy's position in the batting order (which generally stays fairly constant) probably matters a lot too.
• I want to look at this on a team-by-team basis and I'll do that later this week.