Sabermetric Readings

A few good articles on sabermetric topics have been published over the last week or so and here are the highlights from each article:

Predicting the Future - How Can We Know How Players Will Adjust to the Next Level? By King Richard at Athletics Nation

The first thing you notice about this is that players [hitters] did not get worse jumping levels in the minor leagues, as I would have expected them to. Instead, on average, players [hitters] either stayed about the same or got a little bit better in all four rate categories as they went up a level, until they reached the Major leagues, at which point there was a major drop off in production

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Firstly, BB% has a strong correlation across levels, meaning that players generally maintain their BB% fairly consistently as they cross levels.

Pitchouts: Why Do Managers Call for Them? by Matt Hunter at Beyond the Box Score

On Baseball Prospectus yesterday, Russell Carleton (with help from Sam Miller) showed that pitchouts are rarely a smart strategy because of the improbability that a manager will correctly guess whether a runner is attempting to steal.

2012 minor league leaders in predictive FIP (Part 2) by Glenn DuPaul at The Hardball Times

I typically work with major league statistics and talent evaluation, so I typically consider hit prevention to have more to do with luck than defense or actual skill. However, Fast's argument is that all major league pitchers have some hit prevention skills, which means in the minors (especially in the lower levels) having the ability to suppress hits is important.