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The Owlcroft Baseball-Analysis Site
Baseball team and player performance examined realistically and accurately.
You can get a site directory by clicking on the “hamburger” icon () in the upper right of this page.
Or you can search this site with Google (standard Google-search rules apply).
(Be aware that “sponsored” links to other sites will appear atop the actual results.)
The sentence in the heading box atop each page here says it all: baseball team and player performance examined realistically and accurately.
If you want to know in definite, meaningful numbers why each team is where it is in the standings, and how various players do or don’t help their team, this is the place to find out. Here we do not dispense opinions, or natter about “chemistry” and “momentum”: we leave that to the writers and sportscasters (who, through some miracle, manage to get paid for such nattering). Here, we apply on a daily basis the proven techniques of modern numerical baseball analysis to raw stats to generate meaningful interpretive measures of performance.
If you are already up to speed on what we do here and how and why, then you can just jump right into the daily results: use the blue “Teams”, the red “Players”, and the orange “Pitchers” zones in the drop-down site-menu available from the “hamburger” menu icon () in the upper right atop every page here. (The pages available in that menu are discussed farther down this page.)
If, on the other hand, you are new to baseball analysis, or know something about it but not how we do it here, there are some pages you should read before jumping into those daily results. There is, as noted just above, a drop-down site-menu available from the “hamburger” menu icon () in the upper right atop every page here; in that menu are several colored “zones”, as described in more detail below. But there is also a full Google-powered Site-Search Engine up there, at the Click here to search this site. link.
For the newcomer here, we urgently recommend as a first step a reading of the following pages, preferably in the order shown here:
(These are the pages in the green Background drop-down Site-Menu zone.)
For You Rookies what this site is all about—what it is telling you about baseball, and how, and why
There is a huge amount of daily-updated data presented on over fifteen hundred pages on this site. Here is a guide to what we have for you. We hope that the “hamburger” drop-down menu atop each page is clear enough to guide you, but the material below fleshes out the necessarily short menu tags.
Team-Oriented Data
There are three team-level data pages plus four sets of 30 individual team pages. Those various pages are:
(These are the pages in the blue Teams drop-down menu zone.)
By-Team Performance by Players & Pitchers there are four 30-page (one per team) sets of team stats; the pages linked below are each a “portal” page from which you select the particular team you want to see.
Team & Player Current vs. Expected Stats, Batting this shows, for each player, both their actual raw stats for this season and what would be expected (for the same play time) based on their career-to-date stats; it gives a quick idea of who is above or below expectation and—quite
important—by how much in actual events (hits, walks, whatever).
All-Teams Table: Win Expectations From Player Career Stats this shows how good each team is “on paper”—that is, how many wins would normally be expected of each based on the career-to-date stats of its players & pitchers pro-rated for actual play time (thus it can change daily).
All-Teams Table: Defense How good each team’s “whole-team-level” defense is, and how it is likely to be affecting wins totals.
There are eight sets of pages for batters. Those include listings, both current-season and career, by name, by position played, by performance, by performance per position played, and more; check out the various descriptions below for the full panoply.
In addition, there is a large set of individual one-man data pages; those are not listed in the menus (or here), but you can get to any man’s page from links in any tabulation page that includes that man (the all-batters page necessarily includes all men, but there are—as you will see below—many other pages also listing men).
(These are the pages in the red Players drop-down menu zone.)
There are eight sets of pages for pitchers. Those include listings, both current-season and career, by name, by pitching role, by performance, by performance per pitching role, and more; check out the various descriptions below for the full panoply.
In addition, there is a large set of individual one-man data pages; those are not listed in the menus (or here), but you can get to any man’s page from links in any tabulation page that includes that man (the all-pitchers page necessarily includes all men, but there are—as you will see below—many other pages also listing men).
(These are the pages in the orange Pitchers drop-down menu zone.)
In addition to the key pages listed above, there are some others (besides, of course, the actual daily-results pages), and we hope that you will look these over as well:
(These are the pages in the purple Miscellaneous drop-down menu zone.)
The Juiced Ball why baseball before and after 1993—and with even more drama in more recent years—is really a very different game
Steroids and Baseball why just about everything you think you know about them is wrong
(that is now actually a separate, full-fledged site of its own)
We have compiled what we hope is a sound guide to some of the most important books available for the reader interested in modern baseball analysis, plus a few of a more general nature—but we tried to keep the list to books that offer some significant insight into the game and its workings. Those books are listed on our Selected Baseball Books page here; but we also have a page about Buying Books On Line, with a lot of interesting material (such as the criteria for labelling the condition of used books). The Selected Baseball Books page not only lists our recommended books, it provides links whereby you may see the offerings, used and (when applicable) new, and their prices, and even allows you to buy them, direct from AbeBooks. (Full disclosure: we are an ABEbooks affiliate, and would get some pittance if you do buy anything through our links).
(These are the pages in the brown Books drop-down menu zone.)
) in the upper right of this page.