Do you have any idea how fast you were going?

Seems that at StatSpeak, we’re all about speed.  I teased this in my last post on speed, but I recently wrote an article for SABR‘s Statistical Analysis Committee newsletter By The Numbers, in which I develop a whole new system for speed scores based on some advanced statistical methodology.  But, after all that, it turns out that Bill James’s speed scores are pretty much all we need after all.
 You can read the article here (under my ever-so-secret real name, starting on page 8).  Fair warning, that’s a PDF file.
For those interested in speed scores for the whole league last year under my model, I’ve posted that as a Google Doc here.  Players are listed by their Retrosheet ID and at least right now, are sorted from fastest to slowest.  There are a lot of missing values on the chart, owing to the way in which I calculated things.  (I used a log-odds ratio method for all the probabilities.  If someone was perfect (100%), then the log odds ratio was undefined (odds ratio is 1/0).  If someone got caught every time, their odds ratio was zero, for which there is no natural log.  I tried to correct for that with some other trickery, but some guys just don’t have speed scores.  Also, only players with 100+ PA last year are included.
Enjoy.

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