Take a Walk...

My article on the Krueger/Alou controversy has been posted on THT. It takes a look at the group differences in offensive performance between Caribbean and non-Caribbean players.

Also had a nice surprise when I found that Rob Neyer mentioned one of my articles in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2006 where he says:

"In 'The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2006', contributor Dan Fox does something that I've never seen anybody do before: He puts together the wins and losses that we would expect from the run differentials and the underlying events that generally lead to runs scored and allowed.

I won't present the method in any great detail -- Fox's article runs for several pages, and anyway, you should buy the book (which also contains, among other things, a couple of articles by Bill James and a modest essay by your humble columnist) -- but the results are worth mentioning."

As I mentioned in the article I can't take credit for the idea since I lifted it from Phil Birnbaum's presentation at this year's SABR conference in Toronto. Phil looked at the role of luck retrospectively and also included pitchers and hitters having outlier or "career years".