Positional adjustment spillover

I think when you make a statement such as this, you need to test it to see if it actually makes any sense at all as opposed to just looking at some numbers spit out on fangraphs. First off I think that most baseball fans would probably laugh and see this as a perfect example of someone who thinks that the game is played on fangraphs, when in fact it is played on the field.

But let's compare the two players. Ortiz has done roughly twice as well as Bradley offensively this year in 1/3 more plate appearances. That's quite a mountain to climb from defense and baseruning alone. If you look at insideredge fielding you see that the real value of Bradley's defense is that he makes plays that are made most of the time, or half the time all the time. The problem is that there aren't that many of these plays, roughly 95% of them, are plays that are made almost all of the time anyways. So what you are saying is that Bradley's performance on roughly 20-30 defensive plays is enough to make up being half as good on offense in 30% less plate appearances.

That seems preposterous to me and really if you think about it, it should seem preposterous to you. But it won't, because you go where you think the data is taking you, even if it takes you down a road that makes absolutely no sense.

Brock Holt is the best outfielder to ever play the game. Inside Edge says so.

jmei
Thanks for the links, interesting read re pitchers hitting. I guess my problem with the DH "penalty" is that it clearly doesn't work when Big Papi is being devalued so much when his value to the team is clear for all to see. Perhaps it's with the idea that there is negative positional value. Seems to me that Dh should be zero for obvious reasons and that other positions should start with with zero value based on replacement player, hit their par level based on mlb average and then gain premium as players approach true gold glove caliber. We would then see guys like Bradley and Pedroia gain value for their D and get a truer idea of the worth of guys like Nava. It also should be noted that in Ortiz' case he's actually not a bad first baseman but is more valuable as a DH where he doesn't get worn down.

Hope it's OK to add my 2 cents on the defensive metrics here. Happy to have it split out as well. Above posts come from the Personal Untouchables thread.

I generally am a sabr type (more cause I'm no good at scouting than super good with numbers). I generally feel that the defensive metrics give us an idea which players are better than others, maybe relative to the average, but I have an issue/question with the specific numbers of runs applied to the defensive metrics. How do we calculate the baseline for defensive metrics? It seems that some of the replacement level players are really quite good defenders, and often that it's the guys in the majors already (Gomes, Nava, Xander, Pierzynski) who drag down the average defense at a lot of positions, and that they're there cause they can hit. Are we still comparing defense to replacement level, or to the average mlb player?

Related question/issue, I remember reading an article on BJOnline 6 or 7 years ago that discussed defense when these calcultions were in their (public at least) infancy. It began by calculating the runs scored per season and then made the bizarre theoretical leap that this was also the number of runs prevented per season. It then went on to begin to divide these up between pitchers and defenders. I never understood that argument, and was wondering if that rang a bell with anyone.

Lastly, does anyone know of any work that argues there's a tipping point where a run saved isn't worth a lost run-scored? Seems like we're coming upon that environment in Boston particularly, and in baseball more generally.

It's generally assumed replacement level players will have about average defense, so the answer is "both".

You know, according to fWAR Miguel Cabrera is the 29th best player in baseball! What a dumb stat!

As alwys, we should be using projections, not YTD stats, and by the projections Ortiz is about a 3 win player and JBJ is about 2.5.

So, GASP, those nerdy people who don't understand the game is played on the field actually DON'T think Bradley is better. And BTW, those projections have Bradley at about 20 points higher in wRC+ than he's been so far in the majors. So you can even accuse them of being optimistic if you like and say he's a 2 WAR guy.

So according to the clueless nerds, Ortiz is about 1 WAR better. And of course smart people don't think these numbers are accurate to within decimals. So you could reasonably say that Bradley's defense is overstated and he is more like a 1.5 WAR player. Wow, so Ortiz is twice as good? Still probably not good enough for moonstone who apparently thinks JBJ is below replacement and Ortiz is an MVP candidate, but sounds a bit more realistic, no?