5/30-6/2 Red Sox @ Baltimore Series Thread

Pretty good pitching match-ups for the Sox in this series. Hope ERod proves healthy in a battle of young guns, and Kelly bounces back to pitch well south of the border.

I think of it as more of a wash on the pitching matchups. The Orioles don't have to face Price. The only game that the Sox have a clear advantage in is game 1, I think. Wright has been solid, except on rainy days.

Honest question, since I have no clue: Could it be that we can read from this that SS and CF get to much positional credit in the WAR-calculations?

Happy Memorial Day to all, hope everyone has a great day and the Sox win (if there is a game).  

There is a debate over those adjustments. To what degree should they vary over time? In the deadball era, 3B was next to SS on the defensive spectrum because bunting for hits was so common. So there are real changes in style of play that mandate era-dependent changes in the adjustments. And yet SS will always be the most difficult position, so there are some constants.

The relative adjustment for 2B and 3B is a matter of debate. Historically, 3B and CF have been the same, but changes in the game could conceivably alter that. LF will always be easier to play than RF, and the fact that LF no longer hit better than RF reflects the talent pool and should not be adjusted for. Changes in the game could conceivably alter the difference between CF/RF (whose difference should be impervious to style of play changes) and 1B. And there should be a debate about the DH adjustment -- should it reflect the fact that most players find it more difficult, like they do pinch-hitting?

None of these questions can be answered definitively. If you measure average offense by position each year, you mostly see blips in the talent pool that should not be reflected. But buried in that data may be changes in the way the game is played.

And the other way to try to measure this is to look at the defensive performance of all players who play a pair of positions, e.g, CF and RF, or 2B and 3B. The huge problem there can be selection bias. It's not a problem in the OF, where guys with good enough range will usually see time in both CF and a corner. I've measured the change in performance by guys as they shift among OF positions twice now, about a decade apart, and there was little change.

But this doesn't work for 2B and 3B. The group of all people who play both 2B and 3B in a season is largely composed of guys who can play SS, or used to. It's a fact that these guys play 2B and 3B equally as well, and some people, like Tom Tango, argue that the adjustment for 2B and 3B should therefore be the same. I think that's wrong; I don't think the idea that Travis Shaw or Kevin Youkilis could play 2B as well as 3B makes any sense, and that this is reflected in the fact that 3B have historically hit better than 2B. It may well be true, however, that the average 2B doesn't play 3B better than 2B (whereas the average 3B does play 3B better than 2B). So there is an asymmetry here. 3B is a position that can be played by some power hitters who could not play 2B, because they don't have the range but do have the quickness to cover the smaller amount of ground. That means that there isn't an innate degree of difficulty difference between the two positions; the more such Shaw / Youkilis guys exist, the bigger the difference is in practice. But now we've come back to the depth of the talent pool again, which we wanted to avoid.

It may be the trickiest thing in sabermetrics. And it underlies WAR!

Game 1 Lineups:

RF Mookie Betts (R)
2B Dustin Pedroia (R)
SS Xander Bogaerts (R)
DH David Ortiz (L)
CF Jackie Bradley (L)
1B Travis Shaw (L)
LF Blake Swihart (S)
C Ryan Hanigan (R)
3B Marco Hernandez (L)

CF Adam Jones (R)
LF Hyun Soo Kim (L)
SS Manny Machado (R)
1B Chris Davis (L)
DH Mark Trumbo (R)
2B Jonathan Schoop (R)
RF Nolan Reimold (R)
3B Ryan Flaherty (L)
C Caleb Joseph (R)

Man, Adam Jones has been awful this year. Interesting that they've been trying him out of the leadoff spot lately.

At this point, Jones is getting on base less than 30% of the time, so yeah, this is unusual. This isn't Bautista who's up over 37%. Here's the OPS+ over the last five years since he peaked in 2012:



He'll probably rebound to some extent as the season progresses, but the trend is not good.

If Papi hits a home run to right, and you see a short guy with a beard viciously fighting people for the ball, say hi to me...

Youth, athlecism, baseball smart: Red Sox baseball!

Mookie Betts, baserunning genius

Mookie Betts is good.

It's actually better than it might have been if he hadn't almost doubled his walk rate to 7.6%.