Who would you pick as AL Rookie of the Year?

I don’t see why an injury (Lawrie) and cheap management (Jennings) should prevent the two most exciting rookies this year from winning the ROY. Yeah, I get it was a small sample but it was still enough to negate their ROY eligibility for next year. I think they should get just as much consideration as the rest of the (IMO rather unimpressive) field.

people say stuff like that a lot, and it really bugs me. he’s played 3 years of professional baseball. do you not think there’s tape/scouting reports/etc of him given to opposing pitchers the moment he reaches the majors? i certainly assume any mlb organization is doing that. i really think that this "rookie adjustment" thing is total BS. (not that i don’t think hitters/pitchers are constantly making adjustments, it’s just that i see no reason why this would be more true about rookies than other players).

There is a massive difference between the tape generated at the MLB level and that of AAA and below. Most prospects are profiled based on a number of scouting reports and a very limited amount of tape. As opposed to the book on them by the end of a season which will include hundreds of at-bats or thousands of pitches thrown. The assumption that every organization is generating tons of tape on even just the farm system of the opposing teams in the league in order to put together tapes for players that might make it to the majors is the sillier assumption. The Jays are considered to have significantly improved their scouting staff and even AA says in interviews that they might see a guy they like a dozen times at best.

Short answer is that when a rookie steps to the plate, you’ve got small sample sizes, scout impressions, and maybe a limited amout of tape to study. By the end of the year, you’ve got 400+ ABs with every possible metric broken down against pitchers at the MLB level. Which do you think is more likely to generate the better advantage for the pitcher?

As for your second point, it’s not about comparing ‘hot streaks’ between players. It is saying that, unlike a random hot streak for another player, that there are definite factors that can be looked at as generating an initial advantage. When the hitter has thousands of your pitches on tape to study and break down, and you have less than 100 ABs to work with, again, who has the advantage in that scenario?

I mean, selective memory? How about logic instead?

FIP does not regress things the pitcher has control over, only those things that they don’t. xFIP regresses home run rate, which I feel a pitcher absolutely has control over, and thus it makes it a useless descriptive stat imo. Saying “The pitcher did this good, if only all those balls stayed in the park” really tells people nothing at all about the season he had. Saying “a pitcher is likely to do this good in the future if his HR rate normalizes” is an amazingly useful piece of information going forward.

To a much lesser extent do pitchers have control over their BABIP, as it’s considered a defense dependant stat, and thus it’s regressed to form both a better descriptive and predictive story.

If this wasn’t the case, there would be no need for both FIP and xFIP, the reason that they exsist as seperate things is because one is designed to be strictly defense independant and thus be an accurate description of a pitcher’s performance, while the other is ment to show probable regression to the mean for a major variable that pitchers have some control over (but that still does tend to regress to the mean over time).