Royals Review, a Kansas City Royals community

A good friend of mine, Brett Foster, an English Professor at Wheaton College (IL), has published a book of poems titled The Garbage Eater. In that work is a poem titled "Little Flowers of Dan Quisenberry." Brett is a big Royals fan. Buy the book if you can! - TL

Naturally, the title is "Back in Time".

Here's a link for a little FanPost I did over at Royals Review about probably the best reliever in Royals history (insert joke here). I've been meaning to get my stuff together with historical WAR for pitchers for a while -- getting Patriot's park factors into BDB is holding me up, although it's coming around (thanks to TucsonRoyal). For now, I can only do one player at a time. I won't make any promises, and for relievers, in particular, data is lacking, but if people have any specific requests for seasons/careers for pitchers they'd like to see me review, that would be something I'd enjoy doing from time-to-time.

I thought this was something a bit more positive that we could all enjoy. Yes, it is connected with my latest Driveline article on pitcher valuation, but I figure if I add a little extra sugar on top for my Royals Review Peeps (tm), it doesn't count as spam. Anyway, you can learn more about how I value pitchers by reading the article (there's a bit more sugar at the end for Royals fans in the section on tRA). While I haven't incorporated park factors into my database yet, since replacement level is derived from league average, and runs --> wins conversion is custom for each year in my database, it is pretty well adjusted to era. "fe2WAR" is just the dumb name I came up with for averaging FIP-RAR and ERA-WAR, which I then convert to wins. I like Zack, but as you can see, perhaps the Saberhagen comparisons are a bit premature... some pretty incredible seasons in there. Much more to discuss there, I imagine. Note that this is just starting pitchers -- I have a way to incorporate leverage, but it isn't straightforward in terms of mixing leveraged and un-leveraged value in my system, at least not yet. But if we did count it for relievers, I'm pretty sure that at least one or two of Quisenberry's awesome seasons would be in there. But I'll save that for another time. I'm also going to revisit this using BaseRuns-based pitching stats, but that will come later. Enjoy, disagree, discuss!