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WAR and More (...what is it good for)
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Post by manfred on Aug 20, 2018 12:56:17 GMT -5
Last thing (for real):
If most catchers are sucky hitters, then an ok hitting catcher is relatively good, but he is not overall a great player.
If every rightfielder in the AL hit like Mookie, it doesn’t mean Mookie is any worse — it means there are a lot of stud rightfielders.
But in the latter case, Mookie would have a WAR approaching zero, while the catcher would have a solid WAR. Yes, the latter is rarer. But he’s not better.
That’s why I think WAR should be separate by position (at least).
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Post by jimed14 on Aug 20, 2018 13:15:11 GMT -5
Yeah, if every RF were like Mookie, it would be difficult. But it doesn't happen. And that's as ridiculous as a hypothetical that Mookie or Aaron Judge would be worth close to zero WAR if they were on the same team and one stayed on the bench 90% of the time. These are the extreme examples you have to go to in order to 'prove' that WAR should be ignored.
And yeah, if it were not special to hit like Mookie is, then no, he would not be a stud. He'd be average. There is a bell curve on performance though, and you never see 100% of the players all on one extreme side.
Bogaerts at one time would have been a perennial all-star if he hit like he is now in another era. But he's not because of all of the great SS in the league now. He still is a pretty great player and WAR shows that.
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Post by incandenza on Aug 20, 2018 13:20:50 GMT -5
Last thing (for real): If most catchers are sucky hitters, then an ok hitting catcher is relatively good, but he is not overall a great player. If every rightfielder in the AL hit like Mookie, it doesn’t mean Mookie is any worse — it means there are a lot of stud rightfielders. But in the latter case, Mookie would have a WAR approaching zero, while the catcher would have a solid WAR. Yes, the latter is rarer. But he’s not better. That’s why I think WAR should be separate by position (at least). You're just getting some facts about WAR wrong here. For one, a league-average player ("every rightfielder in the AL") is not the same as a replacement player. For the positional adjustment to entirely cancel out Mookie's value, you'd have to have a slew of Mookie-level players in AAA ready to be called up to every AL team. It's like, if every AAA pitcher were as good as Chris Sale, Chris Sale would be worth 0.0 WAR. Well, yeah. But that's a ludicrous scenario that demonstrates nothing. EDIT: Come to think of it, it actually demonstrates the virtue of WAR as a stat! You might look at Sale's sub-2 ERA and think that he was really great. But if every replacement-level player were as good as Sale (or Mookie) then that would indicate that the game had simply changed. Comparing Sale's sub-2 ERA to Pedro Martinez's or Bob Gibson's would be meaningless in that hypothetical world; but WAR would show that Sale wasn't nearly as valuable as those guys had been in the eras that they played.
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Post by rjp313jr on Aug 20, 2018 13:40:08 GMT -5
The problem with WAR is the name. You can’t measure a player in terms of wins added by coming up with a fancy formula. It should just be an index. A lot of strong defenders of it talk about it in terms of wins added then when pressed push back and say it’s not to be taken literally or that it’s better than just using traditional stats to measure a players worth. I don’t think it’s the end all and be all to measure a players worth, but it’s certainly useful. I just use it as an index of a players value but reject the notion that it can successfully measure how many wins a player adds to a teams bottom line.
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Aug 20, 2018 13:40:38 GMT -5
You are talking about wins when Degrom starts, like he's the only variable for a team. Eric broke the numbers down how the offense and bullpen failed him. Again you can't seem to get past results, everything for you seems to be about results. Look at Degrom, look at his WHIP, what batters bat off of him, his walk to strikeout ratio,the amount of runs he allows. By most stats he's a great pitcher and if he played for the Red Sox his team record would be great. War is adjusting everything so you can compare players and I really don't get your issue with Degrom. You are looking at this all wrong, compare Degrom to other top pitchers, does everything else match up besides wins and losses? Like when I had a problem with Moncada being rated as a GG defender, yet he had a crazy low fielding percentage and a crap load of errors I compared him to GG defenders. War was wrong about Moncada in a limited sample size, but adjusted and fixed the error in a bigger sample size. If you have an issue with Degroms war total, look at the numbers that go into to see if there's an error. I'm going to bet there is no error in his war number. Just you can't seem to comprehend how he can be so good without more wins. That is on you! Its not apples and oranges not even close! You just don't get how replacement level is determined and thus you are rather clueless. I've walked you through the basics yet you still argue the same exact thing. Have you even looked at the Red Sox war total? To win a 115 games or whatever they are close to, you would need a team bwar total of around 72 bwar. The Red Sox last I looked were at around 55 bwar while at 88 wins, well on there way to getting very close to what the war system says they will need to reach those wins. If the system is crap that wouldn't happen my friend! I don’t need an algorithm to tell me a) deGrom is great and b) he’d have a better record on another team. A child can see that. How much better? Well, hell, who knows? What does it tell us to guess? Would a penant race get in his head? Would the Green Monster cost him? Blah blah blah. If people want to have hypothetical measures, have at it. But the FACT is — on the field — the Mets have not won any more with deGrom than without. He might be more spectacular than other guys but losing 1-0 and losing 10-0 is the same in the standings. So I accept in theory he’d be better on another team (... what a merry Christmas it would be!), but the idea that he is worth 8 more wins to the Mets seems demonstrably untrue. Not his fault, but seasons are not made of fault or adjusting for the Wilpons. He hasn’t gained the Mets 8 wins, and I don’t think anyone can say what he’d do elsewhere (what was Darvish’s projection?). I think you do need war to tell you a value of a player frankly, if you think losing 1-0 and 10-0 is the same thing you most certainly do! A starter that gives up one run and loses is unlucky, a starter that gives up 10 runs and losses is what's expected. If you think because they both lost they are equal, well no need to go any further with you. Nevermind its 8 wins over replacement level, not just 8 wins. How don't you get that? I can and will say he's been worth 8 wins over replacement level. What does Darvish projections have to do with war, you get they aren't the same thing right? People will use players past war to try and guess his value for an upcoming season, war is the actually value in a given season.
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Aug 20, 2018 13:50:21 GMT -5
The problem with WAR is the name. You can’t measure a player in terms of wins added by coming up with a fancy formula. It should just be an index. A lot of strong defenders of it talk about it in terms of wins added then when pressed push back and say it’s not to be taken literally or that it’s better than just using traditional stats to measure a players worth. I don’t think it’s the end all and be all to measure a players worth, but it’s certainly useful. I just use it as an index of a players value but reject the notion that it can successfully measure how many wins a player adds to a teams bottom line. A guy did a random study picking 4 teams in a bunch of different years and compared there bwar totals and how that was transferred to wins. What he found was that it was within like 6.8%. So while it's not perfect, it does a very good job. The whole issue is that a replacement level team would win 52 games, so one war isn't equal to a win. Thus the confusion.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Aug 20, 2018 13:51:57 GMT -5
Last thing (for real): If most catchers are sucky hitters, then an ok hitting catcher is relatively good, but he is not overall a great player. If every rightfielder in the AL hit like Mookie, it doesn’t mean Mookie is any worse — it means there are a lot of stud rightfielders. But in the latter case, Mookie would have a WAR approaching zero, while the catcher would have a solid WAR. Yes, the latter is rarer. But he’s not better. That’s why I think WAR should be separate by position (at least). And if volcanic eruptions started producing chocolate pudding, we'd really have to rethink geology.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 20, 2018 14:10:02 GMT -5
The problem with WAR is the name. You can’t measure a player in terms of wins added by coming up with a fancy formula. It should just be an index. A lot of strong defenders of it talk about it in terms of wins added then when pressed push back and say it’s not to be taken literally or that it’s better than just using traditional stats to measure a players worth. I don’t think it’s the end all and be all to measure a players worth, but it’s certainly useful. I just use it as an index of a players value but reject the notion that it can successfully measure how many wins a player adds to a teams bottom line. I mean "a distillation of how many runs above a replacement-level player, defined as the type of player generally considered freely available to be added at minimal cost, at his position a player is worth, and then condensed into a more manageable and identifiable statistic by converting that difference in runs into the expected number of wins that difference would be worth" just doesn't roll off the tongue.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 20, 2018 14:27:32 GMT -5
You're criticizing WAR because it doesn't do what you want it to do, measure value a player has to his team. So come up with your own stat. WAR was never designed for that. It's more designed for judging a player's value on a league-wide basis for a particular season. The link you sent says precisely that it measures value to the player’s team. I quoted it above. That’s in the definition. And that value seems to be what matters, really. If a guy has a 5.00 ERA but his team wins every game he pitches, as Bill James says it may be luck, but so what? What replacement, no matter how good, would do better? [Skipping over intervening replies; sorry if this duplicates any.]
It's a terrible definition, but it's terrible because it omits the context that most people take for granted.
What WAR actually measures is this: Take a team entirely composed of average players and that furthermore plays in a neutral park, league, and season. Now create two alternative teams, one by replacing one of the average players with the player in question, and one that replaces him with a fungible AAA player of the sort who gets called up when someone gets hurt, which is to say, a "Dan Butler" "replacement level player."
Have each team play a thousand seasons so that all the luck disappears. The average wins of the team that had the player in question, minus the average wins of the team with the replacement player, is the player's WAR.
It's an incredibly useful number, because it answers this question: If we have a position on our team that was filled by a bunch of Dan Butler types, and we acquire this guy, and he plays just as well as he did last year, how many more games can we expect to win? Furthermore, no matter how good the player you had was, WAR attempts to answer the same question: if we swap out player X for player Y, how many more or less games can we expect to win if he plays like this again?
It's an attempt to measure how good a player was after removing all luck and context. (Removing all context is demonstrably an error, but we can't discuss WAR's imperfections until we get what it's trying to do.)
Now, if you want to measure a player's actual value to his team, including luck and context, there are several ways of doing this.
1) Win Probability Added includes the context of each event. It does not separate luck from skill. It does not include what happens after the event, which is a mixed bag: if you're down a run in the bottom of the ninth and hit a lead-off triple, that's an incredibly valuable event and you should not be penalized if your teammates never drive you in. OTOH, if you single with two outs and your team down by five, that's on average an almost meaningless event, but if it ends up starting a game-winning rally, it was necessary to the win and ought to be credited as more than almost meaningless.
WPA is wins above or below average, and the WPA for a team plus 81 will equal its actual wins. It does not separate pitching from defense (which it doesn't measure at all) and it does not separate hitting from baserunning, so if Mookie scores from first on a single by Benny, Benny rather than Mookie gets the extra WPA of Mookie scoring instead of stopping at third.
Right now it's a pretty good estimate of how clutch a player has been. You just compare it to what WAR says the player was, in terms of offensive or pitching wins above or below average.
I dream of a set of stats using the basic idea of WPA that would separate out skill, clutch, and all sorts of luck, including repeatable luck (e.g., the player who gets a lot of cheap bloop hits year after year).
2) Bill James invented "Win Shares," an elaborate system that sums to a team's actual wins. He later decided that he should have also included a "Loss Shares." It's a hybrid of WAR and WPA. Like WAR, it omits all clutch and luck, but like WPA, it sums to actual wins. James had to invent a whole methodology for taking a team's luck and clutch and dividing it up among the players. It's basically been superseded by WAR.
3) Your method where everyone on a 0-162 team would have the same number, the lowest possible number. Which is demonstrably wrong.
Let's put Mookie on a team of Little Leaguers. A replacement level team goes 48-114 by definition (which may be too generous). You have 9 regular position players, five starters, a closer, a regular plaayer's worth of PA from the bench, and two player's worth of setup guys, which is 18 guys. You would put all the regulars on this team at -2.67 WAR, including Mookie, because nothing he did ended up helping his team win a single game.
Really? Seriously? It's pretty obvious that Mookie contributed +11 wins of talent and the other players therefore contributed -59, so that all the Little Leaguers should be -59/17 = -3.47 wins. And this immediately shows how uninformative it is to measure players this way. Did adding Mookie to the team actually make each Little Leaguer 0.80 runs less good? If you had a replacement level player and you replaced him with a Little Leaguer, would you only lose 2.67 more games (on average)?
4) If you back off from that extreme, you still have the method where player performance is ignored or revalued because of what his teammates did. For instance, your assertion that deGrom should not get any credit for losing a 1-0 game, because Bartolo Colon's Little League son could have started that game and lost 145-0.
Do you see what's wrong with this? The reason the team lost the 1-0 game was the pitiful Mets offense. You don't say, hey, they lost the game, so no one gets any credit, which means that they all share the blame equally. You want a set of numbers that reflect why they lost the game. You have to correctly debit the pitiful Mets' offense for getting shut out, and once you do that, you have to give deGrom the credit for holding the other team to 1 run, or the numbers will not add up.
(Note that with WPA, the Mets' hitters in the 145-0 loss would get almost no debit, because their context would be meaningless once the opposition had batted.)
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Post by manfred on Aug 20, 2018 14:39:35 GMT -5
The problem with WAR is the name. You can’t measure a player in terms of wins added by coming up with a fancy formula. It should just be an index. A lot of strong defenders of it talk about it in terms of wins added then when pressed push back and say it’s not to be taken literally or that it’s better than just using traditional stats to measure a players worth. I don’t think it’s the end all and be all to measure a players worth, but it’s certainly useful. I just use it as an index of a players value but reject the notion that it can successfully measure how many wins a player adds to a teams bottom line. I mean "a distillation of how many runs above a replacement-level player, defined as the type of player generally considered freely available to be added at minimal cost, at his position a player is worth, and then condensed into a more manageable and identifiable statistic by converting that difference in runs into the expected number of wins that difference would be worth" just doesn't roll off the tongue. I prefer this name. After all, most stats are transparent. We all know what a hit is, on-base etc. in the case of WAR, a win is really some unit — it is not really an actual win (surely we don’t really think we know the Mets would be 3-22 in games started by a AAA pitcher or whatever?). If people want to use the homunculus replacement abstraction, ok. I would like to see the stat EW+/- as part of that. That is “Ed Whitson + or -“ — can you hack it somewhere else? Players are not strato-o-matic cards. Trying to abstract out all the factors that go into playing a particular game — or even play — eliminates a huge part of what matters most. If you want to draft Carl Crawford for rotisserie league — great idea. You want to bring him to a big market? Check his EW+/-. Or... is Cole Hamels finished? Naw, he just needs the juice of a pennant race.
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Aug 20, 2018 14:53:12 GMT -5
I mean "a distillation of how many runs above a replacement-level player, defined as the type of player generally considered freely available to be added at minimal cost, at his position a player is worth, and then condensed into a more manageable and identifiable statistic by converting that difference in runs into the expected number of wins that difference would be worth" just doesn't roll off the tongue. I prefer this name. After all, most stats are transparent. We all know what a hit is, on-base etc. in the case of WAR, a win is really some unit — it is not really an actual win (surely we don’t really think we know the Mets would be 3-22 in games started by a AAA pitcher or whatever?). If people want to use the homunculus replacement abstraction, ok. I would like to see the stat EW+/- as part of that. That is “Ed Whitson + or -“ — can you hack it somewhere else? Players are not strato-o-matic cards. Trying to abstract out all the factors that go into playing a particular game — or even play — eliminates a huge part of what matters most. If you want to draft Carl Crawford for rotisserie league — great idea. You want to bring him to a big market? Check his EW+/-. Or... is Cole Hamels finished? Naw, he just needs the juice of a pennant race. Just for a second think if a really crappy pitcher starts 25 games and has a ton of 2, 3, 4 inning games and the effect it would have on the Mets over other games. You are overlooking the value of a great starter that pitches a lot of innings and thinking a replacement level guy only impacts games he pitches in. Which is wrong, he could ruin the bullpen and cause loses down the road. You think or need this to be black and white, but its not.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 20, 2018 15:13:47 GMT -5
You are talking about wins when Degrom starts, like he's the only variable for a team. Eric broke the numbers down how the offense and bullpen failed him. Again you can't seem to get past results, everything for you seems to be about results. Look at Degrom, look at his WHIP, what batters bat off of him, his walk to strikeout ratio,the amount of runs he allows. By most stats he's a great pitcher and if he played for the Red Sox his team record would be great. War is adjusting everything so you can compare players and I really don't get your issue with Degrom. You are looking at this all wrong, compare Degrom to other top pitchers, does everything else match up besides wins and losses? Like when I had a problem with Moncada being rated as a GG defender, yet he had a crazy low fielding percentage and a crap load of errors I compared him to GG defenders. War was wrong about Moncada in a limited sample size, but adjusted and fixed the error in a bigger sample size. If you have an issue with Degroms war total, look at the numbers that go into to see if there's an error. I'm going to bet there is no error in his war number. Just you can't seem to comprehend how he can be so good without more wins. That is on you! Its not apples and oranges not even close! You just don't get how replacement level is determined and thus you are rather clueless. I've walked you through the basics yet you still argue the same exact thing. Have you even looked at the Red Sox war total? To win a 115 games or whatever they are close to, you would need a team bwar total of around 72 bwar. The Red Sox last I looked were at around 55 bwar while at 88 wins, well on there way to getting very close to what the war system says they will need to reach those wins. If the system is crap that wouldn't happen my friend! I don’t need an algorithm to tell me a) deGrom is great and b) he’d have a better record on another team. A child can see that. How much better? Well, hell, who knows? What does it tell us to guess? Would a penant race get in his head? Would the Green Monster cost him? Blah blah blah. If people want to have hypothetical measures, have at it. But the FACT is — on the field — the Mets have not won any more with deGrom than without. He might be more spectacular than other guys but losing 1-0 and losing 10-0 is the same in the standings. So I accept in theory he’d be better on another team (... what a merry Christmas it would be!), but the idea that he is worth 8 more wins to the Mets seems demonstrably untrue. Not his fault, but seasons are not made of fault or adjusting for the Wilpons. He hasn’t gained the Mets 8 wins, and I don’t think anyone can say what he’d do elsewhere (what was Darvish’s projection?). Not to belabor the point, but try re-reading this after my last post. If you want to argue that deGrom has only been worth a few wins rather than 7.6 (or 6.x including his clutch), then you can't put the proper blame on the rest of the team. The reason why he can be worth 7 or 8 wins even though you can only find five games where his performance actually made a difference is that you have to collectively charge his teammates -2 or -3 wins for sucking.
In your way of thinking, only for an 81-81 team is credit and blame for wins divided fairly. The better a team is, the more equally everyone gets the credit and the worse the team is, the more equally everyone gets the blame.
The Red Sox have won so many games, and by such a big margin, that your way of looking at things would reveal that Mookie and JDM weren't all that more valuable than JBJ. You would have to find the games where Mookie alone seemed to be the difference between winning or losing and compare them to the corresponding games for JBJ.
Baseball doesn't work this way. You're trying to apply it to deGrom because it seems like starting pitcher is 50% responsible for whether a team wins or loses (it's actually 30%). And you can therefore always find games where if you replaced a starting pitcher's performance with an average or replacement level player, the game outcome would be different. But this is almost never the case with hitters.
Mookie's had 7 games this year where he arguably deserved the majority of the credit for a Sox victory (WPA > .25, so he got us more than halfway to the win. However, two players can do this in the same game if the pitching was bad). So has Xander, and Benny has 6. JDM has just 5 -- but 3 where he deserved all the credit, which I believe are the only three such games of the year.
Offense is a collaboration, so your way of looking at deGrom would fall apart laughably if applied to any offense.
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Post by manfred on Aug 20, 2018 15:28:14 GMT -5
I prefer this name. After all, most stats are transparent. We all know what a hit is, on-base etc. in the case of WAR, a win is really some unit — it is not really an actual win (surely we don’t really think we know the Mets would be 3-22 in games started by a AAA pitcher or whatever?). If people want to use the homunculus replacement abstraction, ok. I would like to see the stat EW+/- as part of that. That is “Ed Whitson + or -“ — can you hack it somewhere else? Players are not strato-o-matic cards. Trying to abstract out all the factors that go into playing a particular game — or even play — eliminates a huge part of what matters most. If you want to draft Carl Crawford for rotisserie league — great idea. You want to bring him to a big market? Check his EW+/-. Or... is Cole Hamels finished? Naw, he just needs the juice of a pennant race. Just for a second think if a really crappy pitcher starts 25 games and has a ton of 2, 3, 4 inning games and the effect it would have on the Mets over other games. You are overlooking the value of a great starter that pitches a lot of innings and thinking a replacement level guy only impacts games he pitches in. Which is wrong, he could ruin the bullpen and cause loses down the road. You think or need this to be black and white, but its not. Agreed. Huge problem. Does it factor in that pitcher throwing those innings? Is a replacement pitcher pegged at a 2-4 inning guy? I’m a huge inning-eater fan, actually. Personally, I don’t like seeing comparisons between contemporary starters vs. guys who used to pitch double-digit complete games without emphasis on that difference. Indeed,I think we actually under-value older pitchers (for example, if you look at a guy like Jim Palmer, who has a relatively low career WAR (behind Rick Reuschel), but was doing things in the mid-1970s we’ll never see again. To your point: a starter who completes games is potentially wirth more than one replacement, in that he’s starting and eliminating the need for relievers. But it nakes eras hard to cross compare. Clayton Kershaw had a bWAR of 5.8 in 2016 having started only 21 games and thrown 149 innings. Palmer had a bWAR of 5.3 in 1972 when he had 18 complete games(!) and 274.1 innings. Both had sick numbers additionally.
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Post by manfred on Aug 20, 2018 15:34:47 GMT -5
I don’t need an algorithm to tell me a) deGrom is great and b) he’d have a better record on another team. A child can see that. How much better? Well, hell, who knows? What does it tell us to guess? Would a penant race get in his head? Would the Green Monster cost him? Blah blah blah. If people want to have hypothetical measures, have at it. But the FACT is — on the field — the Mets have not won any more with deGrom than without. He might be more spectacular than other guys but losing 1-0 and losing 10-0 is the same in the standings. So I accept in theory he’d be better on another team (... what a merry Christmas it would be!), but the idea that he is worth 8 more wins to the Mets seems demonstrably untrue. Not his fault, but seasons are not made of fault or adjusting for the Wilpons. He hasn’t gained the Mets 8 wins, and I don’t think anyone can say what he’d do elsewhere (what was Darvish’s projection?). Not to belabor the point, but try re-reading this after my last post. If you want to argue that deGrom has only been worth a few wins rather than 7.6 (or 6.x including his clutch), then you can't put the proper blame on the rest of the team. The reason why he can be worth 7 or 8 wins even though you can only find five games where his performance actually made a difference is that you have to collectively charge his teammates -2 or -3 wins for sucking.
In your way of thinking, only for an 81-81 team is credit and blame for wins divided fairly. The better a team is, the more equally everyone gets the credit and the worse the team is, the more equally everyone gets the blame.
The Red Sox have won so many games, and by such a big margin, that your way of looking at things would reveal that Mookie and JDM weren't all that more valuable than JBJ. You would have to find the games where Mookie alone seemed to be the difference between winning or losing and compare them to the corresponding games for JBJ.
Baseball doesn't work this way. You're trying to apply it to deGrom because it seems like starting pitcher is 50% responsible for whether a team wins or loses (it's actually 30%). And you can therefore always find games where if you replaced a starting pitcher's performance with an average or replacement level player, the game outcome would be different. But this is almost never the case with hitters.
Mookie's had 7 games this year where he arguably deserved the majority of the credit for a Sox victory (WPA > .25, so he got us more than halfway to the win. However, two players can do this in the same game if the pitching was bad). So has Xander, and Benny has 6. JDM has just 5 -- but 3 where he deserved all the credit, which I believe are the only three such games of the year.
Offense is a collaboration, so your way of looking at deGrom would fall apart laughably if applied to any offense.
I actually agree with you. But you are making the case that those wins are not win-wins — they are ideal wins or some other unit. He is not ACTUALLY worth 8 wins — he just Should be if we eliminated much of what transpires on the field, including the Mets being keystone cops. You are doing what I am arguing: saying that in practice deGrom can’t actually be shown to be worth 8 wins without boosting his team. But WAR is an individual stat. It doesn’t say 5 (+3 if Conforto didn’t K on July 12 etc). The replacement player would pkay in the sane conditions.
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Post by incandenza on Aug 20, 2018 16:28:14 GMT -5
What about WPA, manfred? Does WPA do it for you? Seems pretty close to what you want WAR to be doing, though I may have somewhat lost track of what it is you wish WAR was.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 20, 2018 17:45:45 GMT -5
I mean "a distillation of how many runs above a replacement-level player, defined as the type of player generally considered freely available to be added at minimal cost, at his position a player is worth, and then condensed into a more manageable and identifiable statistic by converting that difference in runs into the expected number of wins that difference would be worth" just doesn't roll off the tongue. I prefer this name. After all, most stats are transparent. We all know what a hit is, on-base etc. in the case of WAR, a win is really some unit — it is not really an actual win (surely we don’t really think we know the Mets would be 3-22 in games started by a AAA pitcher or whatever?). If people want to use the homunculus replacement abstraction, ok. I would like to see the stat EW+/- as part of that. That is “Ed Whitson + or -“ — can you hack it somewhere else? Players are not strato-o-matic cards. Trying to abstract out all the factors that go into playing a particular game — or even play — eliminates a huge part of what matters most. If you want to draft Carl Crawford for rotisserie league — great idea. You want to bring him to a big market? Check his EW+/-. Or... is Cole Hamels finished? Naw, he just needs the juice of a pennant race. So what you're looking for is kind of the opposite of WAR, a stat which measures a player's relationship to his own team's won-loss record, giving credit for events which contribute to team's winning. The stat you are looking for is: Proportional Exhibitions of Ability to Contravene Externalities Total opposite of WAR.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 20, 2018 22:24:29 GMT -5
Not to belabor the point, but try re-reading this after my last post. If you want to argue that deGrom has only been worth a few wins rather than 7.6 (or 6.x including his clutch), then you can't put the proper blame on the rest of the team. The reason why he can be worth 7 or 8 wins even though you can only find five games where his performance actually made a difference is that you have to collectively charge his teammates -2 or -3 wins for sucking.
In your way of thinking, only for an 81-81 team is credit and blame for wins divided fairly. The better a team is, the more equally everyone gets the credit and the worse the team is, the more equally everyone gets the blame.
The Red Sox have won so many games, and by such a big margin, that your way of looking at things would reveal that Mookie and JDM weren't all that more valuable than JBJ. You would have to find the games where Mookie alone seemed to be the difference between winning or losing and compare them to the corresponding games for JBJ.
Baseball doesn't work this way. You're trying to apply it to deGrom because it seems like starting pitcher is 50% responsible for whether a team wins or loses (it's actually 30%). And you can therefore always find games where if you replaced a starting pitcher's performance with an average or replacement level player, the game outcome would be different. But this is almost never the case with hitters.
Mookie's had 7 games this year where he arguably deserved the majority of the credit for a Sox victory (WPA > .25, so he got us more than halfway to the win. However, two players can do this in the same game if the pitching was bad). So has Xander, and Benny has 6. JDM has just 5 -- but 3 where he deserved all the credit, which I believe are the only three such games of the year.
Offense is a collaboration, so your way of looking at deGrom would fall apart laughably if applied to any offense.
I actually agree with you. But you are making the case that those wins are not win-wins — they are ideal wins or some other unit. He is not ACTUALLY worth 8 wins — he just Should be if we eliminated much of what transpires on the field, including the Mets being keystone cops. You are doing what I am arguing: saying that in practice deGrom can’t actually be shown to be worth 8 wins without boosting his team. But WAR is an individual stat. It doesn’t say 5 (+3 if Conforto didn’t K on July 12 etc). The replacement player would pkay in the sane conditions. No, you don't agree with me. No, I am not arguing that deGrom is not worth 7 actual wins.
The Yankees lose tomorrow 9-0.
manfred: The Yankee pitching staff deserves no blame. The offense scored zero f-ing runs! (Which is so pathetic it's worse than replacement level.) A replacement level pitching staff would have still lost the game! So the Yankee offensive ineptitude renders what the pitching does in a game like this completely moot. Yankee hitters get the loss. Pitchers get a no-decision. What they did ended up not mattering.
manfred's equally clueless evil twin: I agree with your methodology 100%! You have to look at actual wins, not hypothetical abstract wins. But you've got it backwards. It's the Yankee hitters who are blameless! The pitching staff gave up 9 f-ing runs! (Which is so pathetic it's worse than replacement level.) A replacement level offense would have still lost the game! So the Yankee pitching ineptitude renders what the offense does in a game like this completely moot. Yankee pitchers get the loss. Offense gets a no-decision. What they did ended up not mattering.
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Your error here is in thinking that there's just one win to be divided up between the offense and the defense. No. The win or loss that equals 1 is like the profit or loss for the day. It can have a revenue (offense) and a cost (pitching and defense) that can be of widely varying scales.
If you win a game 30-20, your offense that day was worth 3 wins and your defense was worth -2. Or 5 and -4. Something like that. The values are determined separately for the offense and defense and the only rule (in WPA-based measurement) is that the difference between the two must be 1 win or loss.
If you ran a business, you wouldn't look just at profit. You would want to know where the profit was coming from. You would separately keep track of revenue and costs. You would not go to a message board and write a series of long rants about how your top purchasing agent, Jakob deGrommit, wasn't really as good as he was being given credit for by everyone else on the planet, because the prices he paid for a few lots of widgets weren't real, just hypothetical, because your idiotic sales department sold those lots at below your cost, so that you would have lost money no matter what price he had paid.
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Post by incandenza on Aug 21, 2018 1:26:04 GMT -5
Honestly haven't been keeping up with this thread, but saw it at the top of the Forum list and couldn't help but check it out. I see we haven't resolved anything yet. If I could add one additional item to the argument, I think there's one stat that the sabermetric crowd is overlooking and it's the last column of this table: www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml(that's attendance per game if you don't want to bother clicking through) MLB attendance peaked in 2007 and has been in a decline ever since, roughly coinciding with the spread of advanced analytics. You ever heard the phrase "you can either be right or you can be happy"? If this stuff is so great, why is it killing the game (Jason Werth's words, not mine)? Why do you have to get in a blood fight to convince fans one by one that this stuff is an improvement? Some of it was good at the beginning, I'm personally a fan of quantifying defense, but now it's just getting to be overload. I'm an analytical guy. I have a thermodynamics book with a sheet of paper in it that has the math to explain that footballs deflate in cold weather, but WAR makes my head hurt. And this fielding independent stuff just strikes me as nonsense. Going back to football, can you imagine Bellicheck explaining that the other team's game plan is irrelevant and defense doesn't matter? Not scared of numbers but I like baseball games where balls are put in play, hits are better than walks, RBI's still count for something, and the game is played on the field instead of a simulator. Feel free to reply if you'd like, but if you're an advocate of WAR and advanced analytics I think it's only fair/consistent to ask that your rebuttal not include anything that might be construed as context. I can't imagine watching a NESN broadcast and hearing about nothing but pitcher wins and RBIs and small sample size batter v. pitcher matchups, and being like "ugh so many stats my head hurts I refuse to enjoy baseball anymore."
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Post by natesp4 on Aug 21, 2018 5:33:08 GMT -5
Honestly haven't been keeping up with this thread, but saw it at the top of the Forum list and couldn't help but check it out. I see we haven't resolved anything yet. If I could add one additional item to the argument, I think there's one stat that the sabermetric crowd is overlooking and it's the last column of this table: www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml(that's attendance per game if you don't want to bother clicking through) MLB attendance peaked in 2007 and has been in a decline ever since, roughly coinciding with the spread of advanced analytics. You ever heard the phrase "you can either be right or you can be happy"? If this stuff is so great, why is it killing the game (Jason Werth's words, not mine)? Why do you have to get in a blood fight to convince fans one by one that this stuff is an improvement? Some of it was good at the beginning, I'm personally a fan of quantifying defense, but now it's just getting to be overload. I'm an analytical guy. I have a thermodynamics book with a sheet of paper in it that has the math to explain that footballs deflate in cold weather, but WAR makes my head hurt. And this fielding independent stuff just strikes me as nonsense. Going back to football, can you imagine Bellicheck explaining that the other team's game plan is irrelevant and defense doesn't matter? Not scared of numbers but I like baseball games where balls are put in play, hits are better than walks, RBI's still count for something, and the game is played on the field instead of a simulator. Feel free to reply if you'd like, but if you're an advocate of WAR and advanced analytics I think it's only fair/consistent to ask that your rebuttal not include anything that might be construed as context. I'll just point out the old correlation =/= causation and the decline in attendance likely is more affected by the massive economy crash and the fact that people no longer want to or can afford spending hundreds of dollars to go to a baseball game when you can find it for free on the internet. Additionally the decline in interest in baseball has been almost entirely about not engaging the younger generation, who in my opinion would embrace advanced stats much more than the older generation. The issue is more the terrible job the MLB does marketing their players and how inaccessible they make games and highlights.
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Post by voiceofreason on Aug 21, 2018 5:54:21 GMT -5
I also lost track of this thread for a while and just caught up with the last 5 pages of posts. Here are a few of my takes.
1. WOW Manfred are you stubborn and persistent!
2. Stats are tools to be used in conjunction with other stats and tools, like scouts, to help make decisions. Thus most stats have some meaningful value and just how much value is up to the beholder or decision maker. Anything predictive is a gamble not a precise outcome, what could be wrong with using advanced calculations to be as accurate as possible when trying to mitigate risk within that gamble?
3. I don't see how in the world the use of "new stats" can be in any way blamed for the decline in baseball attendance.
Have a nice day everyone.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Aug 21, 2018 8:33:09 GMT -5
Honestly haven't been keeping up with this thread, but saw it at the top of the Forum list and couldn't help but check it out. I see we haven't resolved anything yet. If I could add one additional item to the argument, I think there's one stat that the sabermetric crowd is overlooking and it's the last column of this table: www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml(that's attendance per game if you don't want to bother clicking through) MLB attendance peaked in 2007 and has been in a decline ever since, roughly coinciding with the spread of advanced analytics. You ever heard the phrase "you can either be right or you can be happy"? If this stuff is so great, why is it killing the game (Jason Werth's words, not mine)? Why do you have to get in a blood fight to convince fans one by one that this stuff is an improvement? Some of it was good at the beginning, I'm personally a fan of quantifying defense, but now it's just getting to be overload. I'm an analytical guy. I have a thermodynamics book with a sheet of paper in it that has the math to explain that footballs deflate in cold weather, but WAR makes my head hurt. And this fielding independent stuff just strikes me as nonsense. Going back to football, can you imagine Bellicheck explaining that the other team's game plan is irrelevant and defense doesn't matter? Not scared of numbers but I like baseball games where balls are put in play, hits are better than walks, RBI's still count for something, and the game is played on the field instead of a simulator. Feel free to reply if you'd like, but if you're an advocate of WAR and advanced analytics I think it's only fair/consistent to ask that your rebuttal not include anything that might be construed as context. I'll just point out the old correlation =/= causation and the decline in attendance likely is more affected by the massive economy crash and the fact that people no longer want to or can afford spending hundreds of dollars to go to a baseball game when you can find it for free on the internet. Additionally the decline in interest in baseball has been almost entirely about not engaging the younger generation, who in my opinion would embrace advanced stats much more than the older generation. The issue is more the terrible job the MLB does marketing their players and how inaccessible they make games and highlights. Small point, but I'd also add the lateness of post-season/World Series games hurt getting the younger generation involved. My little boy is starting to love baseball, but it's hard for him to watch a full game. I dream one day we'll be able to watch the Red Sox win the World Series together but for that to happen, I'd have to put him to sleep around the 4th inning and wake him up around or after midnight for him to see it. And the reason for that is all about profit. Why can't there be afternoon World Series games or 7pm starts rather than pushing it to between 8 and 8:30. You lose a lot of East Coast young fans that way.
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Post by manfred on Aug 21, 2018 8:40:00 GMT -5
I don’t know if new stats are to blame... I mean, I watch every Sox game and don’t get bothered (the exit velocity stuff is tedious, but The Dude abides).
I do think the turn to more Ks and more relief pitching is a killer... but I think that is a longer trend (though one ratified by new analysis). I love pitching, so seeing a guy strike out double digits used to be my favorite thing, but it is cheaper now. It also takes a long time.
The game used to ge faster in two ways: the games were over quicker and there was more, well, running. I don’t just mean steals (though those were awesome), but balls in play (especially on the ground).
Anyway, I don’t think the stats are to blame. But they may represent an ethos — that, say, on-base is so important that walks are as good as hits. This may well be true from an analytic standpoint, but not from an aesthetic standpoint (ugh.. or a clock standpoint: can kids even see the 9th inning anymore?). We all want to win, but it is also important to have a beautiful game.
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Post by manfred on Aug 21, 2018 8:47:34 GMT -5
Honestly haven't been keeping up with this thread, but saw it at the top of the Forum list and couldn't help but check it out. I see we haven't resolved anything yet. If I could add one additional item to the argument, I think there's one stat that the sabermetric crowd is overlooking and it's the last column of this table: www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtml(that's attendance per game if you don't want to bother clicking through) MLB attendance peaked in 2007 and has been in a decline ever since, roughly coinciding with the spread of advanced analytics. You ever heard the phrase "you can either be right or you can be happy"? If this stuff is so great, why is it killing the game (Jason Werth's words, not mine)? Why do you have to get in a blood fight to convince fans one by one that this stuff is an improvement? Some of it was good at the beginning, I'm personally a fan of quantifying defense, but now it's just getting to be overload. I'm an analytical guy. I have a thermodynamics book with a sheet of paper in it that has the math to explain that footballs deflate in cold weather, but WAR makes my head hurt. And this fielding independent stuff just strikes me as nonsense. Going back to football, can you imagine Bellicheck explaining that the other team's game plan is irrelevant and defense doesn't matter? Not scared of numbers but I like baseball games where balls are put in play, hits are better than walks, RBI's still count for something, and the game is played on the field instead of a simulator. Feel free to reply if you'd like, but if you're an advocate of WAR and advanced analytics I think it's only fair/consistent to ask that your rebuttal not include anything that might be construed as context. I'll just point out the old correlation =/= causation and the decline in attendance likely is more affected by the massive economy crash and the fact that people no longer want to or can afford spending hundreds of dollars to go to a baseball game when you can find it for free on the internet. Additionally the decline in interest in baseball has been almost entirely about not engaging the younger generation, who in my opinion would embrace advanced stats much more than the older generation. The issue is more the terrible job the MLB does marketing their players and how inaccessible they make games and highlights. I don’t think they’d care about the stats. The game is too long and too slow. There was a lot in the news about the coning golf apocalypse a few years back because it takes too long to play for millennials — I can’t imagine they’d sit through three hours of baseball (generalizing, of course... mea culpa). I don’t know about a literal pitch clock, but pitchers have to pick it up. Batters need to cut down their between-pitch rituals. Pitch to contact. If the problem is that there are too many homers if you pitch to contact, move the walls back a bit. Get the game moving a bit. EDIT: In fairness, the crisis in baseball may also be overblown. I looked at this after I posted: www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/misc.shtmlAnd attendance may have dipped slightly, but the general trend for decades has been up — more total (sure, expansion, bigger stadiums... but it counts!) and per game (look at the small 1970s crowds!) — so maybe scratch what I wrote? Who knows? Maybe people dig the walks and Ks?
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Post by incandenza on Aug 21, 2018 10:42:23 GMT -5
I'll just point out the old correlation =/= causation and the decline in attendance likely is more affected by the massive economy crash and the fact that people no longer want to or can afford spending hundreds of dollars to go to a baseball game when you can find it for free on the internet. Additionally the decline in interest in baseball has been almost entirely about not engaging the younger generation, who in my opinion would embrace advanced stats much more than the older generation. The issue is more the terrible job the MLB does marketing their players and how inaccessible they make games and highlights. Small point, but I'd also add the lateness of post-season/World Series games hurt getting the younger generation involved. My little boy is starting to love baseball, but it's hard for him to watch a full game. I dream one day we'll be able to watch the Red Sox win the World Series together but for that to happen, I'd have to put him to sleep around the 4th inning and wake him up around or after midnight for him to see it. And the reason for that is all about profit. Why can't there be afternoon World Series games or 7pm starts rather than pushing it to between 8 and 8:30. You lose a lot of East Coast young fans that way. You could test this theory: has there been a greater decline in interest in baseball on the East Coast than the West Coast? I'm skeptical, but it would be interesting to see. I'm also skeptical of these theories about how there are so many walks and strikeouts the game's gotten more boring. The walk rate has been basically steady since the 1920s, despite those sabermetric kids and their infernal meddling. The strikeout rate has been steadily rising since the '80s, but there have nonetheless basically been the same number of hits per game since at least the '60s. I don't think baseball helps itself by being composed of a bunch of fuddy duddies who have a temper tantrum if anyone shows emotion by flipping a bat or whatever, for reasons Chris Rock makes clear. (He's talking about black interest in baseball, but the implications run broader than that.)
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Post by manfred on Aug 21, 2018 10:52:54 GMT -5
Small point, but I'd also add the lateness of post-season/World Series games hurt getting the younger generation involved. My little boy is starting to love baseball, but it's hard for him to watch a full game. I dream one day we'll be able to watch the Red Sox win the World Series together but for that to happen, I'd have to put him to sleep around the 4th inning and wake him up around or after midnight for him to see it. And the reason for that is all about profit. Why can't there be afternoon World Series games or 7pm starts rather than pushing it to between 8 and 8:30. You lose a lot of East Coast young fans that way. You could test this theory: has there been a greater decline in interest in baseball on the East Coast than the West Coast? I'm skeptical, but it would be interesting to see. I'm also skeptical of these theories about how there are so many walks and strikeouts the game's gotten more boring. The walk rate has been basically steady since the 1920s, despite those sabermetric kids and their infernal meddling. The strikeout rate has been steadily rising since the '80s, but there have nonetheless basically been the same number of hits per game since at least the '60s. I don't think baseball helps itself by being composed of a bunch of fuddy duddies who have a temper tantrum if anyone shows emotion by flipping a bat or whatever, for reasons Chris Rock makes clear. (He's talking about black interest in baseball, but the implications run broader than that.) Totally agree about bat flips etc. It is entertainment. That is another problem: star development. Baseball doesn’t do a great job marketing its stars. Personally, I also think this is a problem (in one area) with all the relief pitching. I don’t tune in to see Heath Hembree, you know? It’s like if NFL teams put in backups for the third quarter. But on marketing... JFC, I saw Tony Romo in a commercial the other day... a retired never-was! How do guys like Mookie and Trout not have a bit more cultural cache?
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