Tuesday: Fun With Similarity Scores

Many of you are probably already familiar with baseball-reference.com's similarity scores. The concept of similarity scores was initially created by Bill James to compare players eligible for Hall of Fame consideration to players already in the Hall. It has been generalized to all players as a means of, well, finding players who are similar to a given player. Baseball-reference.com has a feature which automatically computes the top 10 most similar players to a given player overall and the top 10 most similar players by the given player's current age.

I have my hallway wallpapered with the complete set of 1984 Topps baseball cards and happened across Ron Washington's card for one of his years with the Twins.

Wash's numbers weren't great, but I was curious to see how the rest of his career turned out. In doing so, I found on baseball-reference.com that Ron Washington's #4 most similar player is Ramon Vazquez. My first reaction was: "so that's why Vazquez got so much playing time." This sparked the idea to see which Rangers were "similar" to current or former Rangers. Here is what I found:

The infield:

**Ian Kinsler's most similar hitter #5 by age 26 is former Ranger second baseman Alfonso Soriano.

**Michael Young's most similar hitter #7 by age 31 is former Ranger second baseman Julio Franco, the last man to win a batting title for the Rangers before Young.

**Hank Blalock registered two former Rangers as most similar hitters: #8 is former third baseman uber-prospect Fernando Tatis (who had a decent season with the Mets in '08), and #9 is the recently departed Milton Bradley.

The outfield:

**Marlon Byrd's most similar hitter #9 through age 30 is former Ranger third baseman Mike Lamb.

**Good ol' Rusty Greer showed up twice: somewhat unsurprisingly, is David Murphy's #2 most simliar hitter. That's not all, however, as Greer is also Josh Hamilton's #10 most similar hitter by age 27. I did not see that second one coming . . .

Pitchers:

**Vicente Padilla's most similar pitcher #5 is former Rangers starter (and current Rangers Spanish radio broadcaster) Jose Guzman.

**Brandon McCarthy's most similar pitcher #7 by age 24 is our Japanese correspondent, Kameron Loe.

**Kevin Millwood's most similar pitcher #3 is former Ranger (for half a season) starter Todd Stottlemyre.

**CJ Wilson's most similar pitcher #8 is former Ranger LOOGY Eric Gunderson.

Hitters signed to Minor League Contracts in the offseason:

**Andruw Jones' most similar player #1 by age 31 is, predictably, Sammy Sosa. #10 is El Caballo, Ruben Sierra.

Pitchers signed to Minor League Contracts in the offseason:

**Eddie Guardado's most similar pitcher #9 is former Rangers closer Jeff Russell. His most similar pitcher #7 by age 37 is Mike Stanton.

**Kris Benson's most similar pitcher #5 is former Rangers gopher-ball specialist Adam Eaton.

**Derrick Turnbow's most similar pitcher #5 is former Rangers reliever Danny Kolb (remember the pitch Kolb called the "Vulcan"?).

**Jason Jenning's most similar pitcher #10 is Adam Eaton, who seems to be fairly "popular" around these parts. His most similar pitcher #2 by age 29 is the recently departed Jamey Wright.

And, just because it hurts . . .

**Almost-Ranger Ben Sheets is similar to two former, though very forgettable, Rangers: his #3 most similar pitcher is Oil Can Boyd, and his most similar pitcher #8 by age 29 is Ismael Valdes. His most similar pitcher #9 is former Rangers pitching coach Dick Bosman.

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The Strategy of Ron Washington

Scott Lucas at Ranger Rundown disagrees with the following comment by Ron Washington in regards to Josh Hamilton's spot in the batting order:

"The No. 4 guys gets off-speed stuff, look back and Milton handled more off-speed stuff than fastballs. Hamilton handled more fastballs than breaking balls because they didn't want to put Hamilton on base and let Milton hurt them."

Now, even Lucas himself notes that multiple studies have shown batting order to be mostly negligible. All the same, using fastball percentage data from FanGraphs.com, Lucas does "look back" to find not only does he disagree with Washington, but Washington is in fact wrong. Last year, Hamilton (usually hitting third) saw 53.4% fastballs, while Bradley (usually hitting fourth) saw 65.9%.

This provides more evidence that Washington relies more on his conventional wisdom and common sense to decide things of this nature rather than relying on statistical fact. I often have similar disagreements with Washington's strategic moves, particularly with his use of the intentional walk and sacrifice bunt. Even Baseball Prospectus 2008 notes that "Washington only made things worse [in 2007] by trying to bring small ball to a park designed for big ball."

Makes me wonder if the occasional small ball that Washington played last year held us down offensively, even though our offense scored 901 runs.