Where do they come from?

By: Jesse Josselyn

Cape League players come from all around the country to play in this premier league. The 2013 crew of 269 players is representative of 39 states, Canada and Puerto Rico. The players travelled a cumulative distance of 348,534 miles from their hometowns to the Cape!

The top three states were California (43 players), Texas (25 players), and Florida (21 players).

The combination of year round warm weather and high populations, give these three states a clear advantage in the rankings. The interactive density map below shows the distribution of players across all states. The second map adjusts the metric to Players per Million residents, to normalize the data for the population of each state, and 3 new states came out on top.

1. Alabama                  (2.70 players/million)

2. Mississippi               (2.68 players/million)

3. Connecticut             (1.67 players/million)

Being as the Cape League is a summer league for college students, there is also a map for the states in which the players attend college. California and Texas topped the charts again, with Florida and North Carolina tying for third. Looking at the map below, you'll see that the southeast is a prominent breeding ground for baseball players.

Some players travelled much further than others in their journey to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. With no players calling Hawaii or Alaska their home, it was the San Francisco Bay area that found itself furthest from Hyannis, the center point used in calculating distance travelled. Nick Lynch (UC Davis) lives in Burlingame, CA and plays for the Brewster Whitecaps. By car, it would take about 46 hours to travel the 3,186 miles from Burlingame to Brewster! He barely edged out a first place finish in the rankings over Danny Deikroeger (Stanford) from Woodside, CA who was a previous teammate in a high school summer league and now plays for the Kettleers. I had a chance to talk to Danny and he admitted that he took a plane cross country, to avoid the drive. When asked when he's expected back at school, he replied, "Whenever we're done, hopefully on August 16th after we win the championship."

Honorable mention would have to go to Trevor Podratz with the Gatemen, who is also from California. However, the reason he gets honorable mention is that he attends the University of Hawaii, his second home and clearly the furthest from the Cape. A teammate to Podratz, Matt Walsh (Franklin Pierce) made the shortest trip of the Cape Leaguers, traveling less than 20 miles from Plymouth to Wareham. In an interview he revealed, "I grew up in Plymouth. I always came to the Wareham Gatemen games." With players from all over the country fighting for spots on these rosters, it's a true privilege to play for the team you grew up following. Not too many players get that opportunity.

HOME STATES

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SCHOOL STATES

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R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22) • googleVis-0.4.3 • Google Terms of Use • Data Policy: See individual charts

Last 12 Years in Cape League History

I spent some time compiling all the season stats for the league over the past 12 years. Below are some of the rankings for pitchers and hitters over a period from 2000 through 2011: (In all the tables below * represents a left handed batter/pitcher, # is for switch hitters)

A lot of current major leaguers populate this list. Some interesting notes are that Luke Scott hit only .192 to go with his 11 HRs. Matt Wieters had about 30 fewer at bats than everyone else on this list due to his late arrival to the Cape.

This list of speedsters also has a good number of major leaguers.

My personal favorite way of evaluating hitters in the Cape League is their ratio of walks to strikeouts. I limited this group to people that got at least 90 Cape League at bats, and a very familiar name tops the list.

I similarly compiled all the data for the pitchers as well.
Here are the rankings for the top strikeout totals:

Again, we have a list full of major league talent. Tim Lincecum really sticks out here as he amassed his 68 strikeouts in a mere 39.33 innings.

The next thing I looked at was Fielding Independent Pitching(FIP). The idea here is to get a measure on ERA scale of how well a pitcher does. Your FIP is only calculated on home runs allowed, non-intentional walks, hit batters, strikeouts, and innings pitched. So ideally it measures your talent by subtracting the elements of your defense and the official scorer. For this category I only had HR allowed data from the 2004 season on, and that's what these numbers are based on. I limited the analysis to pitchers who pitched at least 22 innings (1 inning every other game). I also divided the pitchers into groups of relievers and starters. I classified a reliever as anyone who started in less than 50% of his appearances. Just as an aside, although FIP is on an ERA scale, it doesn't have a lower bound like ERA so a negative FIP is very possible and also very good. I suspect some of these are artificially low due to the minimal number of innings that pitchers throw in the Cape, as compared to college or the pros, so the better pitchers are much less likely to have given up a home run.

Relievers:

Starters:

I included 12 starters here to mention an interesting fact about Tommy Milone. He is a left handed pitcher out of USC and won the pitcher of the year award in the CCBL despite not making the All-Star team during the season. He also made his major league debut (as a starting pitcher) last year for the Nationals and hit a home run on the first pitch he ever saw.

Park Factors

In recent years, I've been curious about the effect of a park on statistics in the Cape League. My first caveat to the analysis, is that there is a minimal sample size for what I was looking at. From the research that I've been doing on major league park factors, typically, you would want about 5 seasons worth of data to try to get reliable numbers, rather than just the results of random variations. I only have Cape League Home/Road split data for the past two seasons at the moment. I used the park factor formula found here: http://gosu02.tripod.com/id103.html

The first thing that I looked at was the run production for each of the ball parks. The basic idea to pay attention to here is whether a ball park is below or above 1. A park factor of 1 would imply that teams score an equal number of runs at that park versus the league average.

As we can see here, YD has the most extreme park factor of all the Cape League ball parks at 1.14. This is not a surprising result as the YD field was the main reason I conducted this analysis in the first place. To give this some context, the park factor for YD is about equivalent to that of the Colorado Rockies. We can see the main reason for YD being so far ahead of the rest of the fields in the graph below:

These are the park factors for just home runs. YD is even more extreme in this regard. Unsurprisingly there are overwhelmingly more home runs at that field than any other, due to the dimensions of the field in the gaps and in center.

I also made graphs for park factors for doubles and triples. The interesting thing to note here is the astonishingly high park factor for triples in Bourne. I do actually believe the ranking of the park factors is correct, but the magnitude of the park factors for triples seems to be off. I suspect that this is a result of the minimal data we are dealing with. Of all the park factors that I looked at, triples are the most rare event considered. With the compilation of more data, I would expect Bourne to continue to be the top park for triples, with the enormous right and left center field gaps as well as the deep right field fence.

These results could potentially factor in to determining all star teams and all league teams in the future. For example, YD hitters should be slightly penalized when considering their stats, especially home runs. Conversely, YD pitchers should be rewarded for pitching in an extreme hitters park. The opposite would hold true for Bourne hitters and pitchers, as this data shows Bourne to be a strong pitchers park.