It’s nice to go into 2012 knowing that our team is the reigning Big Ten co-champions AND the Big Ten Tournament Champions.  That’s gotta carry some weight and I’m sure help in terms of confidence.  With our new, improved schedule (i.e. tougher) for 2012, we’ll be reaching for higher goals, I’m sure. 

Before we go any further this year, I want to point out a new web site that Illinois baseball fans will want to check out.  It’s called B1GBaseball.com.  B1G Baseball is run by Chris Webb who maintained the Buckeye Nine and Buckeye State Baseball web sites.  Webb has gone on to bigger and better things and is filling the void left by Big Ten Hardball which fell off the map a few years back. 

Chris Webb is no doubt a Ohio State Buckeye fan but he’s a fantastic baseball analyst.  I’m looking forward to reading more of his postings in the future on B1GBaseball.com. 

Here’s to a even better 2012! 

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new banner at the top of the IBR web page.  This was one of my favorite photos from last season.  Nothing captures emotion better than a key homerun during the last series of the season.  We can thank Casey McMurray for all of this.  This photo was taken after his dinger during the May 21st game against Indiana

(For those who need to know) from left to right: Josh Parr, unidentified fan in the stands, Willie Argo, Corey Kimes (sporting a new fashion trend), Lee Zerrusen, Matt Milroy, Bryan Roberts, hero of the moment Casey McMurray, Adam Davis, Brandon Hohl, Pat Sheehan, Thomas Shelton and Kevin Johnson.

Davis wins the prize for best facial expression.  It looks like he’s about to burst a few blood vessels there.

I’ve updated the banner annually to reflect the changes in the personnel of team for the past few years now.  Now that fall practice is over, it was time to do so. 

The players are, of course, from left to right, Adam Davis, Casey McMurray, Willie Argo, Kevin Johnson and Brandon Hohl. 

If you’re interested, here is the banner from the 2009 season (click to enlarge):

… and here’s the one you’ve been looking at for the past year:

If you missed it from the previous post, I did an interview of the Michigan baseball blogger from MGoBlog.com.  Turnabout is fair play, they say and he returned the favor.

He grilled me about the Illinois baseball team for an interview article on MGoBlog.  He asked me a bevy a questions (a total of eleven in all!) which ranged the gamut in topics.  So take a look and check my answers and keep me honest.

Good Luck this weekend, Illini!!!

Larry Fall blogs about sports at Penn State University and his blog, Happy Valley  Hardball covers the baseball team at PSU.  Happy Valley takes a unique look at the team as it is very stats-oriented and Larry even occasionally expands his coverage to the conference in general. 

In light of Illinois’ opening Big Ten series against Penn State this weekend, Larry was kind enough to answer a few questions about the PSU baseball team. 

Illinois Baseball Report:  Taking a quick look at the standings, the Penn State record of 8-12 (as of Saturday) doesn’t seem too impressive.  But looking closer at their schedule, they’ve played some tough teams.  For example, they’ve played ranked Texas A&M twice.  In the long run, will playing such competitive teams help PSU when the Big Ten season starts?  And given all that, just how good is Penn State?

Happy Valley Hardball:  One would hope so, but we’ve scheduled even tougher competition on our spring break trips in the past and it hasn’t seemed to help.  We got off to a very good start in the Big Ten/Big East challenge (wins over Cincy and Seton Hall and a one run extra inning loss to Notre Dame), which were followed up with a split in a four game weekend tournament in Texas (wins over McNeese State and Dallas Baptist, but two losses to Lamar).   At that point, I’d say things were looking pretty optimistic since, in the past, we’ve been notoriously slow starters.

Unfortunately, we then ran into a buzzsaw in the aforementioned Texas A&M and they whopped us pretty good (17-3, 7-0).  That led to a string of defeats, seven in all, and it wasn’t until this past weekend that we looked like we might come out of it.

If you dissect our 9-12 record, you find that we’ve 0-5 against top 50 RPI schools with our losses coming to #13 Texas A&M (2) and #40 Texas State (3).  So that makes us 9-7 against the rest of the world.  Given that the entire Big Ten only has three wins in forty four games against RPI top 50 schools, maybe we can hold our own in conference.

However, to be honest, I don’t expect us to.  I think our pitching is suspect, particularly the bullpen, and without good pitching, we’re going nowhere.  I see us struggling to play .500 ball in conference.

Just as a follow-up on the scheduling.  I think the Big East/Big Ten challenge has been a fantastic idea.  The Big East traditionally has some pretty decent teams (from a northern school perspective) so they provide a challenge for the Big Ten schools but, at the same time, don’t have the enormous early season weather advantage that the southern schools possess.

IBR:  Perhaps I’m reading too much into it but Penn State has a 0-9 record in opponent’s ballparks but a 8-3 record elsewhere.  Do you think there’s anything to that?

HVH:  Actually, I do.  Part of it is, of course, that we played the top 50 schools, Tex A&M and Texas State, on their campuses, so that’s likely to put us in a road hole to begin with.  The rest of it, though, I think is because of the make up of this team.  We have an ok offense and a bunch of kids who won’t quit, but we are handicapped with our pitching.  So in games where we get the last at-bat, we have a chance.  But with a weak bullpen, the same can be said for our opponents when they get the last shot.

Penn State has actually been involved in seven walk-off games.  We’ve won four and lost three.  Amazingly, when we have the last at bat, we are actually 7-1.  Of course, that also means we are 2-11 when the other guy bats last.

IBR:  Junior catcher Ben Heath seems to be Penn State’s big offensive threat this season.  At this point, he’s leading the team in homeruns and rbis.  Are there other Nittany Lion hitters that Illinois should be careful with?  Pitchers?

HVH:  Ben is having an outstanding season (.358 BA, 7 HR, 26 RBI); I’d actually call it an All Big Ten type of season to date.  He’s currently second in the conference with 7 home runs and, if he can continue to hit with power at Medlar Field, a not exactly power friendly park, he could have a shot at Penn State’s thirty plus year old home run record of 17.  His backup at catcher, Bobby Jacobs (.390 BA, 1 HR, 6 RBI), is someone else to keep an eye on since he’s recently taken over most of the DH role. 

But the big pleasant surprise of the season is sophomore and Illinois native Joey DeBernardis (.372 BA, 1 HR, 17 RBI) from Lake Zurich.  Joey played sparingly as a freshman last year but is having a breakout season this year.  He’s taken over the first baseman’s slot vacated by four year starter (and coach’s son) Cory Wine.  Joey is carrying a very hot bat right now with eight multi-hit games in his last 12.  He did have an eight game hitting streak come to an end last Friday but he has reached base in 19 of 21 games so far this season.  He’s also backed that up with an error-less performance in the field 

Another kid who has come on strong of late is freshman Elliot Searer (.341 BA).  Elliot is normally a middle infielder but coach Robbie Wine has moved him to the outfield to try and get some more offense into the lineup. 

Also, watch out for leadoff hitter Sean Deagan.  If he gets on, he’s going to run.  He’s currently 14-14 in stolen bases.  Unfortunately, he’s only batting .245 with an OBP of only .311, a little low for what you’d like at the top of the order.

As far as pitching goes, I’m having a hard time finding much good to say.  The ace of the staff should be Mike Wanamaker (1-2 W/L, 5.62 ERA), who missed all of last year with an injury and who still looks a little rusty.  The bullpen has really struggled but David Lutz (1-1 W/L,3.97 ERA) had a good week in long relief, putting up 7.1 consecutive scoreless innings. Starter Ryan Ignas (2-1 W/L, 5.34 ERA) had a good outing on Saturday with a seven inning complete game. 

IBR:  Tell us about your blog, Happy Valley Hardball.  It’s pretty unique college baseball blog in that you have a focus on sabermetrics. 

HVH:  The sabermetrics thing is probably something that I ought to remove from my tagline since I’m doing less and less of it all the time – not so much from a lack of interest as from a lack of time. If I could find a better way of automating the data collection and number crunching end of it I might do more. I’ve found myself doing far too much cutting and pasting into Excel spreadsheets when my automated web queries fail. 

One thing that I will do though is use Bill James’s Pythagorean Expectation formula to calculate what we might expect the Big Ten teams winning percentages to be.  For those who aren’t familiar with it, James says that a teams winning percentage can be expected to be equal to their runs scored squared divided by the sum of their runs scored squared and their runs allowed squared.  It’s called the Pythagorean Expectation because of its similarity to the familiar c squared equals a squared plus b squared.

I’ll publish my first expectation results sometime in the next couple of days. My experience with the Pythagorean Expectation highlights some of the problems I have with my sabermetrics stuff.  Ideally, I’d like to plot out the teams winning percentages based on Big Ten stats only.  I think the percentages are distorted by the different caliber of competition that the Big Ten teams have faced during the early non-conference play (Iowa has the toughest SOS at #89 while Purdue has the softest at #280 – that’s a pretty big disparity).  That all goes away if I just use conference results.  However, I have been unable to find a source that can provide me with the runs scored and runs allowed just in conference play (the conference provides conference game stats only for basketball, I don’t know why they don’t do it for baseball).  So to publish it the way that I’d prefer to do it, I’d have to go to every team’s website and pull out their conference numbers from the box scores.  Not going to do that so I have to settle for a non-conference Pythagorean Expectation.

One thing that I’ll also continue to do is experiment with ways of presenting data.  I want to see if I can find some new visualization techniques.  Things like this batting stats chart that I published last year (sometime before the weekend I should get a post up with this season’s data in it).  The chart is interactive and you can play around with it doing various comparisons.

I’ll look around the web other ideas that I can use.

IBR:  Finally, would you care to make a prediction on what teams will make the Big Ten Tournament in 2010? 

HVH:  To be honest, I have yet paid enough attention to the rest of the conference to make much of an educated guess.  I’ve been hard at work on my wrestling blog, Happy Valley Half Nelson, and it’s only now that wrestling season has ended that I can concentrate more on baseball.

***

Thanks to Larry Fall for taking the time to inform us a bit on the Penn State baseball program.  If you want to check out his Penn State baseball blog, head on over to Happy Valley Hardball.

While of course, I would like to see Illinois higher in his preview (he puts him in the second tier after Ohio State, Michigan and Minnesota), it’s pretty consistent with what I’ve seen elsewhere.  And he has some good words to say about some of our players, especially our offense. 

According to formerlyanonymous, Michigan State will be our team to beat.  That’s consistent with recent history.  It’s seems that we’ve been battling with them as rivals the past few years. 

The page will link to all of my web updates and articles plus allow for another venue for discussion (I still encourage commenting here, though!)

Here is the link to IBR’s Facebook fan page.

Those of you who are parents of players most likely know of Brian and Big Ten Hardball.  His site is the only comprehensive Big Ten baseball website out there and Brian has done a great job with it.  Not only that, no one has a full knowledge of the conference as a whole like he does.  For me as a blogger for the Illini baseball team, Brian and Big Ten Hardball has been invaluable.

I’m hoping that while Big Ten Hardball may be closing shop, Brian finds another venue to share his Big Ten baseball knowledge and analysis. 

Thanks, Brian for such a great resource for the past five years!

So bookmark the ones you find interesting or useful.  They may come in handy down the road during the 2010 baseball season.

It’s a big list but I’m sure I’m leaving some out.  Anyway, I hope it’s useful to some of you.

University of Illinois Baseball

The official Illinois baseball page is an obvious one but for those who might dismiss their Facebook or Twitter presence, give it a shot.  It’s a great way to get up-to-date and inside information into the program.

Big Ten

Don’t bother checking the Big Ten blog now.  It usually gets into full swing when the season starts.

Getting your stats fix

The Big Ten (proper) has improved their statistics web page but quite honestly, I go to the Big Ten Network site for my Big Ten Baseball numbers.

The NCAA stats page is quite nice to go to if you want to compare both Illinois team or individual stats on a national level.

Big Ten Baseball Blogs

There is a cadre of hard-working bloggers out there who give a lot of their time reporting and analyzing their favorite teams (and in some cases, conferences).

…and a few others

Please feel free to suggest more.  I’m sure I missed some.