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WAR and More (...what is it good for)
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Post by incandenza on Aug 1, 2018 22:52:49 GMT -5
You'll drive yourself crazy looking at specific examples. For example, I can't see much discernible difference between Mookie Betts and Mike Trout offensively. However, Betts is at 5.5 oWAR and Trout is 7.3 (per baseball reference). Apparently, 23 at bats and 20 OPS points is worth 1.8 oWAR. Because I learned something today (WPA) I'm going to point out that Betts is 4.0 WPA (leads the league) and Trout is 3.5 WPA. Still learning what that means, but thought it was interesting. Betts plays RF, Trout plays CF. That's a major factor. I am pro-fancy-stats, but this is one of my bigger criticisms of WAR: the assumptions behind the positional adjustments seem too strong to me. For instance, Betts plays RF, which dings him with a significant negative positional adjustment. But why is he playing RF in the first place? Because he was more useful to the Sox playing there. He came up as a 2B, of course, and surely would have stayed there, except that we had a similarly short and awesome guy already manning that position. So it was better for the team to move Betts to RF. But does anyone doubt, given Mookie's athleticism and quickness and general Mookieness, that he would've been a great defensive 2B? I'm pretty sure he'd hold down the fort in CF, too, if we didn't have Superman playing there. But WAR doesn't know any of that. The other criticism I have of WAR is not really WAR's fault, but it's based on defensive stats that are really not much more than vague approximations of actual performance. For instance, despite rightly depicting Eduardo Nunez as a below-replacement-level player, fWAR actually understates his awfulness by rating him in positive territory for defense. Part of that is positional adjustment, but still. I watch the games. That is wrong. Nunez is bad at second base defense. I will trust my eyes over those vague defensive stats any day. Now, I don't really know what to do about that; maybe statcast will eventually allow for more accurate defensive ratings. But they're not there yet. A last point: I think it's completely silly to rate a player's talent based on old-timey stats like RBI or Runs or whatever. But statheads go too far sometimes in saying such stats are totally worthless. They have value - as narrative stats. For instance, the fact that JD Martinez leads the league in RBIs doesn't say as much about his talent as it says about the fact that he hits behind Betts and Benintendi. But it does tell you that he's driven in a lot of runs this year, and that's narratively significant. If you watch a game, don't you care a lot more about a guy getting a big hit with men on base than you care about how much he's increased his wRC+ with a given at bat? Of course you do. So RBI is a quick-and-dirty way to tell you how much a guy has done that. It's not answering the same question that WAR is answering, but it's not useless either - depending on what you want to know. (Other old-timey stats, however, are so convoluted and divorced from the quality of the player's performance that they don't even have narrative value, in my opinion. Pitcher wins and saves come to mind.)
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Post by dirtdog on Aug 1, 2018 22:57:11 GMT -5
When it comes to offense I still like runs createded because in the end runs determine the outcome of the game. Top 4 right now are Trout 119, Ramirez Cle 111, Mookie 101, JDM 96.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 1, 2018 23:46:01 GMT -5
Another specific question — Boston related: why is Andrew Benintendi a negative defensive WAR? Is he really a below average defender? I am not asking to continue the battle — I don’t get how that can be so. You'll drive yourself crazy looking at specific examples. For example, I can't see much discernible difference between Mookie Betts and Mike Trout offensively. However, Betts is at 5.5 oWAR and Trout is 7.3 (per baseball reference). Apparently, 23 at bats and 20 OPS points is worth 1.8 oWAR.Because I learned something today (WPA) I'm going to point out that Betts is 4.0 WPA (leads the league) and Trout is 3.5 WPA. Still learning what that means, but thought it was interesting. Why would you use at-bats? Trout has 73 more plate appearances, 18% more than Betts. Obviously that's a huge difference - more than half of the difference in their oWAR is just the playing time advantage. Another factor is that OBP is about three times more important than SLG, which is why OPS isn't a great stat. So their difference in offensive production is more pronounced than the OPS difference. becuase Betts has a 20 point advantage in the less-important stat, but Trout has a 40-point advantage in OBP which is, frankly, massive. Trout is 10% less likely to make an out than Betts. Add in the park effect where Betts plays at Fenway and Trout at Anaheim.... their difference is actually about what I'd expect to be just from eyeballing it.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Aug 2, 2018 0:15:53 GMT -5
Betts plays RF, Trout plays CF. That's a major factor. oWAR is specifically offense, I thought the same thing you did when I saw the numbers at first so I looked up just the offense. FWIW, baseball reference thinks Betts is slightly more valuable defensively. You'll want to look at plate appearances, not at bats. Trout walks all the time and that depresses his at bats. To highlight the point I made above, per BR Trout has 7.9 in 108 games, or .073 per game. Mookie has 6.6 in 89 games, or .074. By that measure, they're just about even. WAR is cumulative, the more games you play, the more you have, unless you're Chris Davis of course. He's got the negative interest rate think going.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 2, 2018 2:07:20 GMT -5
WAR is being used for at least two entirely different purposes. And there are actually a bunch of different ways of looking at a player's season that we'd love to measure with a single number.
1. How valuable was he to his team, including all clutch and all defensive luck on balls in play? WAR is used for this, and it's all wrong. You can get a much better measurement by taking WPA, converting it into runs, and substituting that for oWAA. I try to run those numbers every year.
2. How valuable would he have been to his team, given neutral defensive luck? Imagine two players with identical Betts / Trout-like seasons, each of whom came up in five ultra high-leverage situations. The first guy gets robbed of five game-winning walk-off hits by insanely great game-ending defensive plays, and the second guy hit five rally-killing DP plays that are booted for game-winning errors. Is the second guy actually more valuable? Existing metrics would say so. If you adjusted the WPA of every event by an accurate defensive performance probability, that would be much better.
3. How valuable would he be to his team, on average, if we replayed the season a thousand or so times? This is a measure of quality more than "value," but it includes a player's fit to his ballpark, which is not necessarily neutral. WAR is used for this, but it still omits defensive luck.
4. How valuable would be be to the average team, again if we replayed the season a whole bunch of times? This remove goodness of fit to park. You could call this a measure of talent, perhaps.
We do park adjustments in all cases, but you get different results if you measure oWAR and then park-adjust it for how good an offensive park it was done in, versus park-adjusting the actual events and then measuring the oWAR of that. Do it the first way, and a guy with no power gets hosed in value if he plays in a tiny ballpark. Do it the second way, and his value doesn't change at all. Both ways are informative: the first answers question 3 and the latter question 4.
There are some essentially philosophical questions here that may be impossible to resolve objectively. If Wade Boggs had been a Yankee his whole career, he might have tried to maximize pulling the ball to RF instead of going opposite field. But how good would he have been in a neutral ballpark that had no feature he could exploit smartly? We really don't know that. You can't take all his cheap Fenway hits and turn them into outs when you try to come up with number #4, because he was hitting the ball to LF knowing they would be hits rather than outs. The same thing applies to a flyball pitcher in a big ballpark who knows he can get away with pitches that he couldn't in a bandbox.
I also have to mention that using Win probability Added to better determine #1 is obviously necessary (even if it's #2 that we really want to determine), but it's not perfect. WPA tells you that Dave Robert's steal of 2B (the one so famous that I don't have to tell you what the circumstances are) increased the odds of the Red Sox winning the WS by about 1% - 1.5%. If you turn it into a CS, however, the result goes from 100% to 0%. If you tie the game in the bottom of the 9th with three successive 2-out singles, WPA has the third as hugely more valuable than the first, but from the point of view of anyone watching the game, they seem much more equally valuable.
What's truly odd is that this obvious need to bring in the raw event values (non-situational), and perhaps the changes in run expectancy too, as a third lens, only seems necessary for successful rallies. If you're down 2 runs in the bottom of the 9th and load the bases with nobody out but fail to score, the successive WPAs do seem to reflect the value of each event. It's only when you score that you seem to need to retroactively assign more credit to the early events in the rally, whose potential run value was later realized. But that actually reflects the deep structure of the game.
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Post by voiceofreason on Aug 2, 2018 5:13:13 GMT -5
This has been a great thread to read for many reasons, first and foremost the intelligence level on this site never ceases to amaze me. Secondly, when there is discord it is still mostly polite. Except for some snarky comments from some who while they have been here for a long time and have their beliefs should realize that newer members may not have been educated to their way of thinking. And nothing is absolute!! Statistics are a tool that when used correctly minimize negative outcomes while maximizing the odds of success.
One comment I can't really agree with is that OBP is worth 3 times as much as slugging, maybe that was meant as hyperbole but it diminishes OPS which in my opinion is a pretty good stat. And although isn't in any way an advanced metric stat it is somewhat progressive for the true old timers who haven't kept up with the study of baseball stats.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 2, 2018 5:52:25 GMT -5
One comment I can't really agree with is that OBP is worth 3 times as much as slugging, www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mark-trumbo-and-the-relative-value-of-obp-and-slg/That is a pretty decent breakdown of the relative values, with links included to previous stuff. And it is important to note that the relative importance changes based on the team (the Red Sox, as a high OBP team, would actually get the most value from exchanging a few points of SLG to gain a few of OBP. Looking at OPS is much less illustrative than a slash line broken out individually, which is why I almost always use the slash line in my writing. A player with a .375 OBP and .425 SLG is both better and a fundamentally different player than one with a .300 OBP and .500 SLG, in a way that ".800 OPS" just doesn't capture.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Aug 2, 2018 8:19:52 GMT -5
...which is (one reason) why players such as Bobby Grich, Dwight Evans, and Lou Whittaker were so valuable. They were all around the .270 mark for AVG, but north of .360 for their lifetime OBP. Until someone gets on base the scoring turnstile is locked shut. Once someone does reach base, a world of possibilities opens up, steals, advancing the runner, taking extra bases, and so on. Watching a game, that's when I see blue sky. It doesn't matter how it's done, just getting to first base is where it all starts and those players did that a lot.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 2, 2018 8:27:16 GMT -5
...which is (one reason) why players such as Bobby Grich, Dwight Evans, and Lou Whittaker were so valuable. They were all around the .270 mark for AVG, but north of .360 for their lifetime OBP. Until someone gets on base the scoring turnstile is locked shut. Once someone does reach base, a world of possibilities opens up, steals, advancing the runner, taking extra bases, and so on. Watching a game, that's when I see blue sky. It doesn't matter how it's done, just getting to first base is where it all starts and those players did that a lot. Rice vs. Evans is actually one of my go-to examples of this. People seem to think it's crazy that Evans has a career WAR that's 20 points higher than Rice, given that Rice was the one considered a superstar at the time and that Rice actually his a higher career SLG. And so people use that as an opportunity to bash WAR calculations instead of re-evaluating their careers. Evans' career OBP was 18 points higher, he has about 11% more plate appearances in his career, he maintained value for longer, and he was a much, much better defensive player.
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Post by voiceofreason on Aug 2, 2018 15:00:25 GMT -5
...which is (one reason) why players such as Bobby Grich, Dwight Evans, and Lou Whittaker were so valuable. They were all around the .270 mark for AVG, but north of .360 for their lifetime OBP. Until someone gets on base the scoring turnstile is locked shut. Once someone does reach base, a world of possibilities opens up, steals, advancing the runner, taking extra bases, and so on. Watching a game, that's when I see blue sky. It doesn't matter how it's done, just getting to first base is where it all starts and those players did that a lot. Rice vs. Evans is actually one of my go-to examples of this. People seem to think it's crazy that Evans has a career WAR that's 20 points higher than Rice, given that Rice was the one considered a superstar at the time and that Rice actually his a higher career SLG. And so people use that as an opportunity to bash WAR calculations instead of re-evaluating their careers. Evans' career OBP was 18 points higher, he has about 11% more plate appearances in his career, he maintained value for longer, and he was a much, much better defensive player. You both are guys I look forward to reading what you say and have a lot of respect for your contributions here and I will definitely go and read/research what you have suggested. On another note could you imagine being the fans of the prospects that we are and seeing Lynn and Rice come up in the same year now. What a year that was, I was 11 and the Sox had me from that point on. Rice not playing in the playoffs that year is something that escapes a lot of fans as to how big a deal it was. What a magical season, Tiant, Wise, Lee, Moret the Fisk hr!! My first real memories of baseball. The incredible slash line for Lynn in Detroit that year unbelievable.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 2, 2018 15:13:05 GMT -5
...which is (one reason) why players such as Bobby Grich, Dwight Evans, and Lou Whittaker were so valuable. They were all around the .270 mark for AVG, but north of .360 for their lifetime OBP. Until someone gets on base the scoring turnstile is locked shut. Once someone does reach base, a world of possibilities opens up, steals, advancing the runner, taking extra bases, and so on. Watching a game, that's when I see blue sky. It doesn't matter how it's done, just getting to first base is where it all starts and those players did that a lot. Rice vs. Evans is actually one of my go-to examples of this. People seem to think it's crazy that Evans has a career WAR that's 20 points higher than Rice, given that Rice was the one considered a superstar at the time and that Rice actually his a higher career SLG. And so people use that as an opportunity to bash WAR calculations instead of re-evaluating their careers. Evans' career OBP was 18 points higher, he has about 11% more plate appearances in his career, he maintained value for longer, and he was a much, much better defensive player. I want to remind folks that when fans voted the All-Time Red Sox team (when MLB had all the fans in each city do that), the OF was Ted, Yaz, and Dewey. Sox fans smarter than BBWAA writers.
(I've tried to find that on Google and failed. It would be in the Globe microfilm records, though.)
Speaking of WAR distortions due to player position choices ... in today's game Yaz would have played CF for a bunch of years. I honestly believe the only reason they put him in LF was to promote him as Ted's successor. TotalZone has him as +9 runs in CF in 155 games through age 29 (and -3 afterwards, including 7 games there when he was 38. The year before he had gone back to LF as a regular, put up a +10 and won a not undeserved Gold Glove).
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Post by iakovos11 on Aug 2, 2018 15:58:24 GMT -5
Rice vs. Evans is actually one of my go-to examples of this. People seem to think it's crazy that Evans has a career WAR that's 20 points higher than Rice, given that Rice was the one considered a superstar at the time and that Rice actually his a higher career SLG. And so people use that as an opportunity to bash WAR calculations instead of re-evaluating their careers. Evans' career OBP was 18 points higher, he has about 11% more plate appearances in his career, he maintained value for longer, and he was a much, much better defensive player. You both are guys I look forward to reading what you say and have a lot of respect for your contributions here and I will definitely go and read/research what you have suggested. On another note could you imagine being the fans of the prospects that we are and seeing Lynn and Rice come up in the same year now. What a year that was, I was 11 and the Sox had me from that point on. Rice not playing in the playoffs that year is something that escapes a lot of fans as to how big a deal it was. What a magical season, Tiant, Wise, Lee, Moret the Fisk hr!! My first real memories of baseball. The incredible slash line for Lynn in Detroit that year unbelievable. I was 6, but have the same feelings/memories. I was a HUGE Jim Rice fan back then - still am. But have to agree, overall, Dewey was a more complete player. Still Rice, Lynn, Evans was just amazing. A few years after '75, my parents got me SuperSox '75 on vinyl. I found it on cd a few years back and got it. Great recap of that year, narrated by Ned Martin (who was awesome!).
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Post by jimed14 on Aug 2, 2018 16:05:28 GMT -5
I kind of got sad when I learned how Dewey was better than Rice because Rice was always my favorite player (duhh, my username). But the funny thing is that I always imitated Dewey's batting stance growing up, no matter how much he changed it. I also loved Dewey and still remember how awesome that arm was. It was even more impressive than JBJ's IMO. I liked Fred Lynn the least since my dad always harped on how he was a little show-boaty because he would never catch a ball with two hands. Funny how things have changed. I was 4 in 1975 and still vaguely remember some things about the WS that year.
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Post by manfred on Aug 2, 2018 16:36:05 GMT -5
Dewey was not “better” than Rice. He had a longer career, yes. But Rice in his prime was a machine. No retrospective statistic will change what I saw with my own eyes.
Don Sutton has nearly 20 more WAR than Sandy Koufax... but he certainly wasn’t better.
None of this diminishes Evans, and I am not against him being in the HOF. At the same time, it is tough for me (a small HOF advocate) to let in guys who were never really “the man” on their own team (especially in a relative power position).
Edit: To my point: Rice’s career was basically 1975-1986. In that span, he averaged 29 HRs 106 RBIs .304/.356/.520. Evans never had a sustained period of that quality.
Evans had two big edges — the first is huge: he was a better defender (by a huge amount). The second is he walked a lot.
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Post by jimed14 on Aug 2, 2018 17:09:22 GMT -5
Evans had two big edges — the first is huge: he was a better defender (by a huge amount). The second is he walked a lot. And that's what made him better. Because walking is a huge part of offense and preventing runs is just as important as creating runs.
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Post by manfred on Aug 2, 2018 17:40:42 GMT -5
Evans had two big edges — the first is huge: he was a better defender (by a huge amount). The second is he walked a lot. And that's what made him better. Because walking is a huge part of offense and preventing runs is just as important as creating runs. Those are both important, but not enough. I don’t think Evans was saving runs at a rate that made the run production. He wasn’t THAT good a defender. As for walks, a few things. First, they have never been as highly privileged as they are now. I have little doubt some of the great hitters of all time would have walked more if they had thought it was preferable to getting hits (that is, trying by swinging). And pitchers generally pitched more to contact. So — broadly — it is often anachronistic to overemphasize walks. In this case, yeah, these guys overlapped. Rice swung away, and walked less. But Evans’s career OBP was .370, Rice .354, while Rice hit .298 to Evans’s .272. And Rice slugged higher. There is no doubt of positive outcomes, walks are worse than singles or extra base hits, which Rice did a good deal more of. (Worse because, for example, they don’t move guys from second etc.). Finally, the game is played on the field. So walks CAN help produce more runs, but if you look at career averages, Rice DID produce many more runs, with a higher 162-game average in runs and rbis. In short, walking does not make him better.
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Post by James Dunne on Aug 2, 2018 18:40:45 GMT -5
As for walks, a few things. First, they have never been as highly privileged as they are now. I have little doubt some of the great hitters of all time would have walked more if they had thought it was preferable to getting hits (that is, trying by swinging). And pitchers generally pitched more to contact. So — broadly — it is often anachronistic to overemphasize walks. This is said a lot, but it's pretty ahistorical. Ted Williams talks extensively about the value of walks and on-base percentage being more important than batting average (though I don't think he ever uses the term "on-base percentage") in both his book and in a lot of his interviews. Christy Mathewson spoke a lot about how walks were a huge negative. The players knew.
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Post by manfred on Aug 2, 2018 19:03:02 GMT -5
As for walks, a few things. First, they have never been as highly privileged as they are now. I have little doubt some of the great hitters of all time would have walked more if they had thought it was preferable to getting hits (that is, trying by swinging). And pitchers generally pitched more to contact. So — broadly — it is often anachronistic to overemphasize walks. This is said a lot, but it's pretty ahistorical. Ted Williams talks extensively about the value of walks and on-base percentage being more important than batting average (though I don't think he ever uses the term "on-base percentage") in both his book and in a lot of his interviews. Christy Mathewson spoke a lot about how walks were a huge negative. The players knew. You know, looking back at numbers... I concede, your point is legit. The average walks per team tens to hold steady somewhere in the 450-550 range for most of the years from Williams forward. Fair. I have not meant to imply walks etc. are not important. But there is a reason announcers say that a pitcher is “not giving in” to a great hitter when he pitches him carefully and walks him.
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Post by telson13 on Aug 2, 2018 20:53:45 GMT -5
Which Dunkin swirl has the highest WAR? I’m out of coffee at home and will have to buy coffee tomorrow morning. Dunkins is 2018 Chris Davis. Get a grinder, an Aeropress, and hit up Trader Joe’s for some very solid relatively inexpensive coffee. Or support a local roaster.
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nomar
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Post by nomar on Aug 2, 2018 20:56:34 GMT -5
Which Dunkin swirl has the highest WAR? I’m out of coffee at home and will have to buy coffee tomorrow morning. Dunkins is 2018 Chris Davis. Get a grinder, an Aeropress, and hit up Trader Joe’s for some very solid relatively inexpensive coffee. Or support a local roaster. I had a free coffee on my Dunkin app and there’s a Dunkin’ in my building. My hands were tied.
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Post by telson13 on Aug 2, 2018 20:58:21 GMT -5
Dunkins is 2018 Chris Davis. Get a grinder, an Aeropress, and hit up Trader Joe’s for some very solid relatively inexpensive coffee. Or support a local roaster. I had a free coffee on my Dunkin app and there’s a Dunkin’ in my building. My hands were tied. Legit LOL. At least get a donut too.
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Post by incandenza on Aug 2, 2018 23:01:08 GMT -5
This is said a lot, but it's pretty ahistorical. Ted Williams talks extensively about the value of walks and on-base percentage being more important than batting average (though I don't think he ever uses the term "on-base percentage") in both his book and in a lot of his interviews. Christy Mathewson spoke a lot about how walks were a huge negative. The players knew. You know, looking back at numbers... I concede, your point is legit. The average walks per team tens to hold steady somewhere in the 450-550 range for most of the years from Williams forward. Fair. I have not meant to imply walks etc. are not important. But there is a reason announcers say that a pitcher is “not giving in” to a great hitter when he pitches him carefully and walks him. They say that because the great hitter might otherwise be even more productive offensively. In other words, a high OBP might underrate the quality of a good hitter, because it's evidence that they're getting pitched around. So that goes against your own argument.
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Post by manfred on Aug 2, 2018 23:31:37 GMT -5
You know, looking back at numbers... I concede, your point is legit. The average walks per team tens to hold steady somewhere in the 450-550 range for most of the years from Williams forward. Fair. I have not meant to imply walks etc. are not important. But there is a reason announcers say that a pitcher is “not giving in” to a great hitter when he pitches him carefully and walks him. They say that because the great hitter might otherwise be even more productive offensively. In other words, a high OBP might underrate the quality of a good hitter, because it's evidence that they're getting pitched around. So that goes against your own argument. I don’t deny this in many cases. Barry Bonds was treated like the plague. But that doesn’t mean every guy who walks a lot is a great hitter being pitched around... nor did I mean to imply that. My point is that if you have two hitters with On-base %s that are comparable, The guy who gets on base more by hits is generally the better player. Put differently: Jim Rice hit for more power and for higher average than Evans in his prime and produced more runs. But Ecans walked more, producing a slightly higher OBP. It is hard for me to see how that, plus longevity, plus defense made him a better player. He was a consistent, very good player. Rice had a relatively short prime, but he was a stud slugger. I return to the Sutton/Koufax comparison.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 3, 2018 2:24:07 GMT -5
Dewey was not “better” than Rice. He had a longer career, yes. But Rice in his prime was a machine. No retrospective statistic will change what I saw with my own eyes. Don Sutton has nearly 20 more WAR than Sandy Koufax... but he certainly wasn’t better. None of this diminishes Evans, and I am not against him being in the HOF. At the same time, it is tough for me (a small HOF advocate) to let in guys who were never really “the man” on their own team (especially in a relative power position). Edit: To my point: Rice’s career was basically 1975-1986. In that span, he averaged 29 HRs 106 RBIs .304/.356/.520. Evans never had a sustained period of that quality. Evans had two big edges — the first is huge: he was a better defender (by a huge amount). The second is he walked a lot. The thing is, what you saw with your own eyes is not what you now remember.
You definitely saw Rice cost his team 42 runs by hitting into double plays, while Dewey, in a longer career, cost them 6.
You definitely saw that, of the 11 most dramatic, game-changing home runs in their combined careers (as measured by Win Probability Added), Dewey had #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, and #11. You ought to remember that, too.
If you watched both careers, it shouldn't surprise you that their ten best seasons by WPA, a purely offensive stat go: Evans ('81 prorated to 135 games or more), Rice, Evans, Rice, Evans, Rice, Evans, Evans, Evans, Evans. There's no number N where Rice's N best seasons were more valuable offensively than Evans' N best seasons, when you include clutch, and once N hits 4 or more the gap gets really big. You definitely saw Rice put up an OPS+ of 86 relative to his own career with 2 outs and RISP, while Evans had 105, and Rice put up 86 late and close and Evans 95.
I'm guessing you remember how relatively mediocre a clutch hitter Rice was, consistently, his whole career, but we gave him slack for that because he blew open a lot of games early. But he also did a lot of damage in games that were already decided.
If you want to ignore clutch hitting, you can of course include defense instead. Again, there's no N where Rice's N best seasons total more bWAR than Evans'. It's close through 5 seasons (and Dewey's '81 needs to be prorated to 142 games to give him the edge), but after that, as N goes up, the gap really widens.
And I'll point out that your eyeballs have no ability at all to calculate the relative value of offense and defense, and add them together. It might seem to you, watching the games, that Evans' superiority with the glove was not great enough to offset Rice's raw edge at the plate, but history has shown that no one had any good idea about that back then, and the game of baseball has profoundly changed once defense was correctly valued.
When you combine both defense and clutch hitting, there's no way that Jim Rice was ever a better ballplayer than Dwight Evans. To come to the oppose conclusion, you have to selectively ignore all the stuff Rice was mediocre at.
At the same time, it is tough for me (a small HOF advocate) to let in guys who were never really “the man” on their own team (especially in a relative power position).
Who's "the man" on the team is largely a media construct. And is it really true that Evans was never "the man"?
I'm thinking back to August 23, 1990, when Dewey was 38. He homers with 2 outs in the bottom of the 8th to knot the game 2-2. In the bottom of the 10th, the O's bring in Greg Olsen to protect a 3-2 lead, and he quickly gets two outs before Brunansky singles. He's now faced 471 batters without yielding a HR, since Evans went yard against him in April of his previous, rookie season. Folks have been talking about the streak.
Dewey takes him ovah the Monstah for the walk-off. And as I recall it at the time, he was very much "the man" for doing stuff like that.
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Post by manfred on Aug 3, 2018 7:54:54 GMT -5
Dewey was not “better” than Rice. He had a longer career, yes. But Rice in his prime was a machine. No retrospective statistic will change what I saw with my own eyes. Don Sutton has nearly 20 more WAR than Sandy Koufax... but he certainly wasn’t better. None of this diminishes Evans, and I am not against him being in the HOF. At the same time, it is tough for me (a small HOF advocate) to let in guys who were never really “the man” on their own team (especially in a relative power position). Edit: To my point: Rice’s career was basically 1975-1986. In that span, he averaged 29 HRs 106 RBIs .304/.356/.520. Evans never had a sustained period of that quality. Evans had two big edges — the first is huge: he was a better defender (by a huge amount). The second is he walked a lot. The thing is, what you saw with your own eyes is not what you now remember.
You definitely saw Rice cost his team 42 runs by hitting into double plays, while Dewey, in a longer career, cost them 6.
You definitely saw that, of the 11 most dramatic, game-changing home runs in their combined careers (as measured by Win Probability Added), Dewey had #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, and #11. You ought to remember that, too.
If you watched both careers, it shouldn't surprise you that their ten best seasons by WPA, a purely offensive stat go: Evans ('81 prorated to 135 games or more), Rice, Evans, Rice, Evans, Rice, Evans, Evans, Evans, Evans. There's no number N where Rice's N best seasons were more valuable offensively than Evans' N best seasons, when you include clutch, and once N hits 4 or more the gap gets really big. You definitely saw Rice put up an OPS+ of 86 relative to his own career with 2 outs and RISP, while Evans had 105, and Rice put up 86 late and close and Evans 95.
I'm guessing you remember how relatively mediocre a clutch hitter Rice was, consistently, his whole career, but we gave him slack for that because he blew open a lot of games early. But he also did a lot of damage in games that were already decided.
If you want to ignore clutch hitting, you can of course include defense instead. Again, there's no N where Rice's N best seasons total more bWAR than Evans'. It's close through 5 seasons (and Dewey's '81 needs to be prorated to 142 games to give him the edge), but after that, as N goes up, the gap really widens.
And I'll point out that your eyeballs have no ability at all to calculate the relative value of offense and defense, and add them together. It might seem to you, watching the games, that Evans' superiority with the glove was not great enough to offset Rice's raw edge at the plate, but history has shown that no one had any good idea about that back then, and the game of baseball has profoundly changed once defense was correctly valued.
When you combine both defense and clutch hitting, there's no way that Jim Rice was ever a better ballplayer than Dwight Evans. To come to the oppose conclusion, you have to selectively ignore all the stuff Rice was mediocre at.
At the same time, it is tough for me (a small HOF advocate) to let in guys who were never really “the man” on their own team (especially in a relative power position).
Who's "the man" on the team is largely a media construct. And is it really true that Evans was never "the man"?
I'm thinking back to August 23, 1990, when Dewey was 38. He homers with 2 outs in the bottom of the 8th to knot the game 2-2. In the bottom of the 10th, the O's bring in Greg Olsen to protect a 3-2 lead, and he quickly gets two outs before Brunansky singles. He's now faced 471 batters without yielding a HR, since Evans went yard against him in April of his previous, rookie season. Folks have been talking about the streak.
Dewey takes him ovah the Monstah for the walk-off. And as I recall it at the time, he was very much "the man" for doing stuff like that.
I eagerly await 2048 to have someone tell me who the best player on this year’s team is.
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