Projecting Moustakas

John Viril likes the chances of Mike Moustakas posting big numbers in 2017:

Over on Fangraphs.com, Randy Holt pointed out that Mike Moustakas suffered from an unusually bad Batting Average Balls in Play (BABIP) in his short 2016 season. Further, Moustakas’ plate discipline continued to improve with a low 11.5% strikeout rate. Meanwhile, Moustakas’ hard-hit percentage zoomed to a career-high 37.4%. Even with the horrendous .214 BABIP, Moustakas managed a .801 OPS and a 110 OPS+ (10% better than a league average hitter).

That unusually low BABIP occurred despite Moustakas continuing to show that he had learned how to hit balls to the opposite field. While Moustakas is a guy that has posted low BABIPs throughout his career, his BABIP improved to .294 in 2015. That number is slightly below the .300 that most analysts consider average.

Moustakas also suffered from a death in the family as well as an injury.

If you look at his career, however, 2016 is much more in line with his career prior to 2015. Moustakas hit for a low BA, with a low OBP, and some power. Batted ball data show he reduced his likelihood of pulling the ball in 2016, something that he did carry over into 2016. In 2016, he started hitting fly balls with more authority, popping up less and leaving the park more.

I suspect, however, that going the other way stops working as well once the element of surprise is gone. Moustakas used to pull the ball a lot, and I suspect defenses played him that way. Once they knew he was using the whole field, the holes closed. He went back to being a low on-base hitter with some power.

Moustakas plays 2017 as a 28-year-old. He’s still at the top of his prime, so a return to his 2015 levels is quite possible. He adjusted in 2015 by going the other way. He adjusted in 2016 by improving his home run swing (in a small sample). Pitchers and defenses adjust, too. We’ll see if Moustakas can stay one step ahead of the competition. I would guess he posts a season better than his career averages, but not equal to his 2015 campaign. Musings Marcels has him at .258/.320/.436.

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2016: Hobby Year Review and A Look Forward

It's the last day of the year, so what better time to have a look back and see what worked, what didn't and where my painting mojo went!

I recently got a lightbox so included here are a few of my minis from this year!

I started the year with a rather crazy plan involving random numbers and a spreadsheet. The idea was to get me painting things I might normally put to the back of the cupboard. This worked for the first part of the year before derailing midway through, about the same time as the initial mojo failings began.

My initial plan for the year was simply to paint more this year than last year - a target of 18. Thanks to my Conan crates, which I counted as half each, I ended up on a total of 23 finished minis, so success!

I picked up a couple of Purgatory painting comp wins for Saint Peter and Keysha which were both great boosts to morale. I didn't get a couple more comp entries finished in time though, so for 2017 I'm looking to turn that around, starting with the JoeK Minis comp, which is running until March.

I'm not massively sure what happened in the second half of the year but the motivation to paint often dried up. In a bid to get around this, I took on board a sentiment that was going around Facebook at the time - Finished Not Perfect. The jist of it is, if you worry about something being perfect, you'll never actually finish it as you'll keep going back and tweaking bits. If you finish a model, you can then say "this bit looks good, that bit could be better" so you start the next mini and work on the area that could be better. Over time you improve with practice, so a mini you might have considered perfect will look of a lower quality once you get 6 months down the line. Plus it helps clear the ever expanding backlog a little quicker ;)

So, despite achieving my target of painting more than last year, this year has felt pretty hit and miss, with definitely more minis in than out or painted.



For 2017 I'm not going to promise to paint more than I buy, as that'd be daft thanks to kickstarter. I do however intend to try some new stuff, along with the old "paint more than last year" thing.

The main challenge for next year is to go bigger. I want to paint a bust, and I want to paint up something in a larger scale than my usual 30mm - a 54 or 75mm piece, I've got probably close to a dozen of each of those things and haven't touched any of them. I'll be getting the new Rathcore painting stands that include stands for larger scales from their Kickstarter when they deliver early in the year, so that might be the incentive to finally build and paint one.

Also on the theme of bigger is that thanks to now having an airbrush, I want to challenge myself and paint up one of the 30mm monsters I have floating around. Might be a dragon, might be a troll - I'll work it out when I get to it, but a monster is on the list.

The final painting challenge I'm laying down for myself for next year is to either finish painting a viable 40K/Age of Sigmar small army/formation or some other small team/gang etc such as a Guild Ball Team or a Batman crew. I've managed to paint up 2 Batman crews in the past 2 years so we'll have to see how things pan out to see if I can manage the same again in 2017!







All that leaves me to do is to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

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Cannizzaro Passes

Chris Cannizzaro, an original Padres player and their first all-star, died at the age of 78:

Cannizzaro had a 13-year career as a catcher in the major leagues from 1960-74, playing for six different teams. He was honored by the Padres in a pregame ceremony over the summer during the run-up to the 2016 All-Star Game hosted at Petco Park.

Cannizzaro, 78, who lived in Rancho Penasquitos, had been suffering from emphysema in recent years.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Cannizzaro was also an original member of the Mets, playing 59 games for New York in their inaugural 1962 season. He didn’t last long enough to get drafted in 1977. Offensively, he didn’t hit for a high average, but drew a good number of walks. He hit .235 for his career with a .319 OBP. (He did draw 35 IBB, which I take it to mean he was hitting in front of the pitcher frequently.) Although he made the All-Star team in 1969, 1970 would prove to be his best season as he posted a 2.3 rWAR.

He made a solid career as good backup catcher.

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Brantley or No Brantley

The Cleveland Indians differ with Jonah Keri on the extent and seriousness of Michael Brantley‘s injury:

Honestly, I would not expect the Indians — through official higher-ups or their social channels — to say anything differently. They’ve put the story out there that Brantley is on track, and there’s no reason to sway from that otherwise unless his shoulder detaches itself from Brantley and rockets itself into the sun. The fact that the Indians even bothered to respond is nice in itself.

It’s still worrying that the reports are out there, though, because the Indians clearly did not know just how extensive this injury was last season when they let him try and play for a handful of games.

The Indians played extremely well without Brantley, coming within a game of winning the World Series. Fans would like a healthy Brantley to help them win that extra game.

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Trollblood Battlegroup Unboxed!

As I said last week I have a new Warmachine/Hordes project and I'm kicking off by unboxing the new Trollblood battlegroup!


I've got the gaming bug back a bit lately, since I finished my Trollblood models, back in the spring, the game has gone through a new edition, and I haven't really been playing at all. This has meant a fair bit of change for trolls in the intervening months, so to bring my army back to a half decent level, I needed some new toys and I started with the battlegroup!

I really like the Privateer Press art style and graphics of late, the box looks great:

 It comes with various books, including a basic training guide, which walks new players through several missions, introducing the rules gradually:

 Interestingly this uses special generic casters/beasts to demonstrate the rules:

 There is an A5 size rulebook, which is very neat and compact:

 And dice, tokens and a paper ruler. The tokens are a grey/brown plastic, which isn't ideal, since most players use black markers to identify effects:

 You can just about see the markings on the spell token below, but I do wonder why they didn't use a lighter colour!

 The set also comes with a paper printed play mat (double sided). The print quality is good and one side is setup with annotations to tie into the rules introduction:

 Finally the stat cards for the models and an 'obstacle' card which is designed to be folded to give some terrain for the starter games..

 And now the models! Coming in two bags, one for the Warcaster (Ragnor) and the other for the beasts..

 Rangor is a good looking model in my book, though since this is a PP starter set, he's made of the Plastic-Resin hybrid, based in PVC, which leaves some ratehr massive mould lines:

 This axe almost has two model lines, the main one around the edge (clearly visible here) and another smaller one 90 degrees around the piece (across the spikes). I'm not sure how this happens really!

 Heads for the warbeasts!

 At first glance the beasts bodies and torsos look the same, which I hadn't realised, but in actual fact the torsos are keyed to take the correct arms/weapons which makes assembly easier.

 Finally the weapons and arms for the beasts, I do love that shield on the bouncer!

Next week I should have these together along with some other new Trolls, I'm looking to get them painted up in time for Smogcon in Feburary, hopefully with a painting entry for their competition too!

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Thinking About Luck

From time to time, I think about the batter-pitcher match-up (or batter-defense matchup) and how best to simulate the outcomes. Some games, like Strat-o-Matic, use fixed stats on batter and pitcher cards. It doesn’t matter how good the batter is if you roll on the pitcher card, and it doesn’t matter how bad the pitcher is if you roll on the batter card. A better way would be to generate Log5 probabilities for events based on the batter and pitcher/defense. So the probabilities of the outcomes adjust for each matchup, and random number determines the outcome.

The batter-pitcher match-up is more nuanced than that, however. I like to think of it as a collision of two probability distributions. For example, a batter reaching base has to do with the ability of the batter, represented by his OBP, and the ability of the pitcher/defense, represented by the pitcher’s OBP against. One might model those probabilities with spheres. They would be painted two colors, one color representing the batter reaching base (positive outcome for the batter, negative outcome for the pitcher), and one color representing the batter not reaching base (negative outcome for the batter, positive outcome for the pitcher). So the collision of the two probability distributions could be simulated by the collision of the two spheres.

There are four possible ways the spheres could collide:

1. Batter reaches base for on both the batter and pitcher spheres.
2. Batter is out on both the batter and pitcher spheres.
3. Batter reaches on the batter sphere, does not reach on the pitcher sphere.
4. Batter is out on the batter sphere, reaches on the pitcher sphere.

Now think of the four cases like this:

1. The batter executes well, the pitcher/defense executes poorly, and the batter reaches base. Think of the pitcher throwing a hanging curve ball and the batter smashing it. In this case, the batter always reaches.
2. The pitcher executes well, but the batter executes poorly. Think of the pitcher throwing a good four-seam fastball, and the batter popping it up. Or the pitcher throws a breaking ball that looks out of the strike zone, but comes back over the plate for a K. In this case, the batter never reaches.
3. Both batter and pitcher execute well. The pitcher throws a good sinker, but the batter was ready for the pitch and golfs it.
4. Both the batter and pitcher execute poorly. The pitcher throws a fast ball down the middle of the plate, but the batter doesn’t get the barrel of the bat on the ball.

In the last two cases, sometimes the batter reaches, and sometimes he doesn’t. These are the situations where the batter hits a line drive right at a fielder, or he pops a ball into no-man’s land for a single.

Take a batter with a .380 OBP, a pitcher with a .310 OBP against, and a league average OBP of .320. Log5 tells us the batter should get on base against this pitcher at a .366 clip. So where does the .366 come from? Look at the probabilities of the four cases above:

1. Both reach: 0.080
2. Neither reach: 0.490
3. Batter and pitcher both execute: 0.300
4. Neither batter nor pitcher executes: 0.130

So .286 of the .366 OBP comes from the two situations where some luck is involved. I suspect most of it comes from the third situation, where the batter executes well. Hitters like Ichiro Suzuki, however, who beat out weakly hit balls may get more from the fourth situation.

What should be clear is that there is a lot of opportunities for luck. In 600 PA, the results of 240 of them might go either way. That represents more than enough chances for good luck to lead to a career year, or bad luck to make one wonder what’s wrong with a player.

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Delivering Insight–What Happens Next?

The CMO and Sales VP were reviewing their latest programs to get their people delivering insight to their customers.  They went through a series of provocative issues and insights–each tuned to a specific set of problems and challenges.  Each offered a unique point of view, helping the customer think differently about the business.  Each was tuned to a specific persona.  The work was quite good.

I asked, “What happens next?”

They looked at me, “What do you mean?  Our sales people deliver these insights early in discussions with customers.”

I respond, “After they’ve delivered the insight, what happens next?”

This is the problem too many organizations have in developing and delivering insight.  They focus on the insight itself and not on what happens next.  The insight becomes the end, not the means.

Insight is just the start of the process of engaging the customer.  Insight is supposed to teach and provoke a reaction from the customer.  Too often, we don’t think about the reaction and we don’t prepare our sales people to deal with it.

Ideally, the customer responds, “Tell me more…..”

Possibly, the customer says, “That’s BS!  I don’t buy that…”

Or they might say, “That’s not important to us…..”

Sometimes it’s, “We have a different view on that….”

Any of those responses is fantastic!  It means we’ve engaged the customer in the start of a conversation.  The challenge is, have we equipped our sales people with the knowledge and skills to continue the conversation?

Training and equiping our people to deliver insight is meaningless—in fact dangerous, unless we equip them to deal with the question, “What happens next?”

They have to deal with the customer response, they have to deal with the customer that may disagree or pushback, they have to be equipped to engage the customer that has a different point of view.

Insight is very powerful in engaging our customers and helping them think differently.  But it’s the starting point.

The key issue is, “What happens next?”

 

 

Related Posts:

• Insight Is Not The End, It’s The Beginning
• “….And This Is What It Means To You”
• Dear Occupant, I’ve Got Insight!
• Insight Without Action Is Just Idle Chatter!
• Insight Is All About Having A Point Of View

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In the Hall

Via BBTF, Ryan Fagan discusses his Hall of Fame ballot on the occasion of his first time voting. He makes a point that I’ve made before:

The second thing was this: It’s the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It’s the reality of the “and Museum” part that surprised me a bit. The Gallery, where they have the plaques of enshrined players, managers and executives, is essentially completely separate from the museum. The truth is, Barry Bonds already is in the Hall of Fame. I took a picture of the ball he hit for his 756th home run, which was in a display case dedicated to Bonds’ achievement. Pete Rose already is discussed in the Hall of Fame. So is Shoeless Joe Jackson. Those guys don’t have plaques in the Gallery, of course, but they’re well-represented in the museum.

I used to make this point when someone brought up Roger Maris. If you visit the Hall of Fame, you learn about Roger Maris. Roger Clemens entered the Hall if 1986 when the game ball from his 20 strikeout game landed in Cooperstown. No one has been wiped from the museum. The arguments are about plaques.

The latest vote totals show Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines getting in, with Vladimir Guerrero and Ivan Rodriguez also pulling plenty of support. The firewall that was keeping Clemens and Barry Bonds out appears to have broken as well, as both are pulling 70% so far.

I believe there are a number of factors for the Bonds/Clemens increase:

• There is an unofficial ranking of the players in the Hall based on the number of years on the ballot. If you make it the first year, you’re the cream of the crop. If you make it on the last ballot, you were borderline. It’s quite possible the writers see a five-year penalty for Bonds and Clemens as being enough, especially since the standard story is that these two were Hall of Famers before that started using PEDs in the late 1990s.
• Some writers are using the excuse of Bud Selig’s election as a reason to vote for Bonds and Clemens. However, they don’t appear to be voting for Sammy Sosa, so again, there appears to be an exception based on the belief that the player would or would not have been a Hall of Famer without PEDs. Manny Ramirez is pulling many more votes that Sosa, despite actually failing drug tests. They may see Manny as a great player who game to PEDs late.
• The newer writers coming online grew up with Bonds and Clemens as their stars. They don’t have the Henry Aaron blind spot.

I don’t think Bonds and Clemens will make it this year, but expect them to break the 75% barrier in the next two years.

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92% Of Top Sales Performers……..

Through 2016, we’ve conducted extensive research on sales performance, trying to understand the differences between top performers and everyone else.  We’ve reached some startling conclusions.

• 99% of top sales performers pee at least once a day. (Consistent with our 2015 results)
• 85% of top sales performers brush their teeth at least once a day. (an update from our 2015 research showing 96% of sales people brush their teeth at least once a week.)
• 87% of top sales performers wear underwear on a daily basis.  Of those 87%, 72% wear clean underwear daily.
• For sales people consistently exceeding quota, 88% are right handed.  (Which upsets me, I’m left handed.)

A colleague, Kenny Madden, has been conducting similar research.  His data shows:  82% of sales people outperform if they correlate their activities to rainfall in Borneo.

Clearly, this insight turns some of our previous thinking of sales performance on it’s head.

Some studies claim that top performance is a result of using social selling tools.  Others would claim top performance is a result of using a particular sales methodology.  Others would claim it’s use of specific sales tools.  Others claim it’s the magic number of “touches” to get an email or phone response, or the number of LinkedIn connections, or the phase of the moon.

The claims on what drives top sales performance are all over the place.  Everyone thinks they have discovered, and have the supporting data to prove that what they do or what they sell is the secret to top sales performance. (or top performance in about everything.)

Turns out, most previous thinking has been wrong.  All you have to do to become a top sales performer is  to pee and brush your teeth daily, wear underwear (for the customers’ benefits, hopefully it is clean), and be right handed.  By the way, in next year’s survey, we will test if peeing and brushing your teeth at the same time drives higher productivity.

All of this gets pretty silly, but even learned journals like HBR promote research with an agenda.  This data gets passed around with increasing authority.  Once, standing at a urinal, a well known thought leader quoted my own statistic about peeing back to me.

Don’t get me wrong.  Understanding what drives performance is important.  Much of the market research is very good and can lead to great insights on performance improvement.  It’s important to think about the data–how it’s presented, what is not being presented, what’s not being said.

For instance, if you look at our stunning research on top sales performers, there are some facts that I hid from you.

• 99% of everyone in the world pees at least once a day.  While I associated that data point with top sales performers, it turns out they are no different than everyone else.
• Only 12% of people are left handed.  88% of people are right handed, so it stands to reason 88% of top sales performers are right handed.

Whenever we see any data about things like top sales performance–or anything else, we have to ask questions and be critical:

1. How does the data differ for top performers differ from similar data for others?  Usually, only the most favorable part of the data is presented.  For instance if 75% of top performers do something, and 70% of all others are doing the same thing–is that really a distinguishing practice?  Usually the 75% is reported, not the 70%, so you assume it is a distinguishing practice.
2. What are the causal effects?  Is it because top performers are doing one specific thing that causes them to be top performers, or is it just one of many things that top performers do?
3. Look at the context of the data and it’s relationship to other things–particularly your own situation.  I once saw some research where a top performer was anyone selling more than $X dollars per year.  But if your performance benchmarks are that 2X is only substandard performance, then clearly the research isn’t very helpful to your situation–while it may be very helpful to another organization.
4. Some of the research shows dramatically different results than other research.  For example, there is a famous recent research report of several 100 participants that suggests 5 million sales jobs will be lost by 2020, bringing total sales employment to around 10-12 million.  Yet BLS data show sales employment in 2020 increasing and exceeding 20M in 2020.  BLS data is the basis for much of our national and global economic forecasting.  Which is right?  It’s impossible to know, but important to look at more than one research report before you draw conclusions.  And when you see dramatically different results, question the validity of all of them (or choose what you want to believe, but be honest about your choice).
5. Be careful about statistical relevance, both in sample sizes and in sample selection.  One of the most egregious is LinkedIn SSI.  It’s social selling index is based solely on an individual’s use of LinkedIn and ignores all other channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Piintrest, and any number of other major social platforms.

The best discussion on how to critically look at research and statistical data is in a book written in the 40’s.  Be sure to read:  How To Lie With Statistics by Daniel Huff and Irving Geis.  It’s a fascinating, fun read!

Moreover, apply common sense.  Top performers never do just one thing well, they do lots of things well.  No single thing they do is the reason for their performance, but contributes to it.

Related Posts:

• The Data On Sales Success Is In!
• The Complete Sales Professional
• High Performing Organizations Outperform Low Performing…
• Creating Crap At The Speed Of Light!
• Poor Performers Probably Don’t Know

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