Statistics & You

[imb]

It's not a chicken or egg. It's like you are an omnivore and now want to be a vegetarian. You want to say that it's a better lifestyle but all you have are vegetarians to compare with, how do you prove that being a omnivore is less healthy?

 

Dusty?

[CuseCubFan69]

I wouldn't want to completely eliminate the SB. But I'd definitely want to be on the lower end in terms of attempts, the same way I'd be with sacrifices.

 

Now that I could see. But, you still need somebody to steal for you to get the information to make the % move. I agree with dav when he says to steal in the minors but still, that doesn't give you that golden number to go by to be able to make sure you have that exact 70% or above type success.

 

Goony, what happens if everyone in MLB feels this way. How do you get the correct barameter to judge this by?

[CuseCubFan69]

It's not a chicken or egg. It's like you are an omnivore and now want to be a vegetarian. You want to say that it's a better lifestyle but all you have are vegetarians to compare with, how do you prove that being a omnivore is less healthy?

 

Dusty?

 

Hey I didn't come up with the chicken/egg they did so I tried to answer it in a way they might understand.

[Magnetic Curses]

It's not a chicken or egg. It's like you are an omnivore and now want to be a vegetarian. You want to say that it's a better lifestyle but all you have are vegetarians to compare with, how do you prove that being a omnivore is less healthy?

 

Dusty?

 

Hey I didn't come up with the chicken/egg they did so I tried to answer it in a way they might understand.

 

i'm convinved that someone has kidnapped the real CCF.

[CuseCubFan69]

It's not a chicken or egg. It's like you are an omnivore and now want to be a vegetarian. You want to say that it's a better lifestyle but all you have are vegetarians to compare with, how do you prove that being a omnivore is less healthy?

 

Dusty?

 

Hey I didn't come up with the chicken/egg they did so I tried to answer it in a way they might understand.

 

i'm convinved that someone has kidnapped the real CCF.

 

It's me sully. I just don't understand all or nothing scenerios.

[goonys evil twin]

I wouldn't want to completely eliminate the SB. But I'd definitely want to be on the lower end in terms of attempts, the same way I'd be with sacrifices.

 

Now that I could see. But, you still need somebody to steal for you to get the information to make the % move. I agree with dav when he says to steal in the minors but still, that doesn't give you that golden number to go by to be able to make sure you have that exact 70% or above type success.

 

Goony, what happens if everyone in MLB feels this way. How do you get the correct barameter to judge this by?

 

I really don't understand your question.

[David]

I wouldn't want to completely eliminate the SB. But I'd definitely want to be on the lower end in terms of attempts, the same way I'd be with sacrifices.

 

Now that I could see. But, you still need somebody to steal for you to get the information to make the % move. I agree with dav when he says to steal in the minors but still, that doesn't give you that golden number to go by to be able to make sure you have that exact 70% or above type success.

 

Goony, what happens if everyone in MLB feels this way. How do you get the correct barameter to judge this by?

 

I really don't understand your question.

 

He's saying that in some crazy scenario where nobody stole ever (in the MLB or minors), there would be no way to know the success rate of basestealers. Close enough?

[CuseCubFan69]

I wouldn't want to completely eliminate the SB. But I'd definitely want to be on the lower end in terms of attempts, the same way I'd be with sacrifices.

 

Now that I could see. But, you still need somebody to steal for you to get the information to make the % move. I agree with dav when he says to steal in the minors but still, that doesn't give you that golden number to go by to be able to make sure you have that exact 70% or above type success.

 

Goony, what happens if everyone in MLB feels this way. How do you get the correct barameter to judge this by?

 

I really don't understand your question.

 

He's saying that in some crazy scenario where nobody stole ever (in the MLB or minors), there would be no way to know the success rate of basestealers. Close enough?

 

Actually the "crazy" mlb idea is yours and sullys because you don't think stealing is worth it unless you have a 70% or better success rate. I'm saying you will have nothing to go by if you don't attempt to steal at all which is what sully feels is the direction to go. So since you don't steal, what's the rate?

[David]

Actually the "crazy" mlb idea is yours and sullys because you don't think stealing is worth it unless you have a 70% or better success rate. I'm saying you will have nothing to go by if you don't attempt to steal at all which is what sully feels is the direction to go. So since you don't steal, what's the rate?

 

I've already stated multiple times (as have others) that past MLB performance and minor league numbers would give you the information you need to make that determination about whether or not a player is capable of eclipsing the breakeven point. You then have proceeded to try and counter this by saying that in a world where nobody ever steals, there is no data. OK, fine. If we really were advocating NEVER stealing (which we absolutely aren't), why on earth would we need to know the success rate anyways??

[CuseCubFan69]

Actually the "crazy" mlb idea is yours and sullys because you don't think stealing is worth it unless you have a 70% or better success rate. I'm saying you will have nothing to go by if you don't attempt to steal at all which is what sully feels is the direction to go. So since you don't steal, what's the rate?

 

I've already stated multiple times (as have others) that past MLB performance and minor league numbers would give you the information you need to make that determination about whether or not a player is capable of eclipsing the breakeven point. You then have proceeded to try and counter this by saying that in a world where nobody ever steals, there is no data. OK, fine. If we really were advocating NEVER stealing (which we absolutely aren't), why on earth would we need to know the success rate anyways??

 

You wouldn't.

[Derwood]

As I stated in the Murray Chass thread, I'd bet that many, many casual baseball fans couldn't tell you how to calculate batting average or ERA, much less sabermetric numbers. I'm not suggesting we dumb down the game for these people, but introducing new stats to them is going to be difficult.

[hardcorecubfan]

though stats are great indicator they will never replace the pure knowledge anfd intuition of a coach being able to identify the tired hitter, (too drunk)the hitter who seems to merging out of a slump or even knowing that this hitters/fielder's favorite aunt died last night. That is what makes the game interesting, the human factor.

[Amazing_Grace]

This is probably going to be more than you ever wanted to know about RP level, but here goes nothing,

 

Replacement level differs by each stat. Even though VORP and WARP stand for value over replacement player and wins over replacement player, the replacement player is not the same in each statistic.

 

VORP is based off of marginal value lineup rate (MLVr). MLVr is an extension of runs created but uses team runs created and calculates the change in OBP, SLG, SB and CS (and a few other small things) when the player is insterted in the lineup, compared to just an average player. There are three key things to notice here. First, it's how many runs his OBP and SLG etc add to a league average lineup and it's the difference in runs over a league average player. Secondly, MLVr is not runs added over a player at your position and finally MLVr is none other than runs added per game played.

 

Then MLVr is of course weighted for park, league, etc. Then it is converted to PMLVr which is runs per game added over an average hitter at the position played. Then it's converted to VORPr which is runs per game over a replacement level player at the players' position. A replacement level is described as about 70 points of OPS (35 each for SLG and OBP) lower than a league average player at that position. Finally VORPr is multiplied by games (which is actually figured out using PA% not games, duh) to find VORP. Of course they may physically calculate the differences in a different order, addition and subtraction are of course associative.

 

In practice VORP's replacement level player is basically a AAA player - which is justified by the concept of replacement player which should be defined something like: A player who is freely available at the position for a low cost.

 

WARP is quite a ways different. First, it's calculated based off of Equivalent Average, which put in simple terms is based roughly on total bases per plate appearance. Where total bases include SBs. It's a bit different, but for an informal definition that's fine. It's then scaled and adjusted for play into EqA on a scale of .260. This stuff is on their site I believe (it was like 2 years ago). I can go deeper if you want into how and the methodology behind it. EqA's scale is basically the same as BA. .260 is always average. .300 is good, .200 is bad and .400 is a top fifteen offense season.

 

WARP basically has three different components: BRAR, FRAR and PRAR. BRAR is batting runs over a replacement level hitter. BRAR is calculated the same for EVERY position, pitchers included. This actually causes AL pitchers to have higher WARPs than their NL counterpart because most pitcher's EqA's are well below a RP level hitter's level. A replacement level hitter has an EqA of .230 by definition. EqA when it's in its adjusted state is basically value per out. BRAR is calculated by 5*Outs*(EqA^2.5-.230^2.5). It's not too tough.

 

FRAR and PRAR are a lot different. As I said there's no position adjustement for BRAR. Their methodology runs that all hitters are hitters and should be compared to all hitters. The value so to speak of doing it at a harder position is factored in FRAR. The starting runs over a replacement player varies with position. It's based off of the James Defensive Spectrum: C, SS, 2B, CF, 3B, CO, 1B, DH. Notice there's nothing for pitchers. This is probably wrong. I hate WARP for pitchers. It's useless, but as bad as it has been for them, it gets worse. The runs per 162 games are set at 36, 32, 29, 24, 22, 14, 0 if my memory doesn't fail me. It's on their site somewhere. Then for each player they use Rate2 for the actual defensive component. Rate2 is something I am not familiar with the actual calculations other than that I know it's based off box scores and is easily one of the more terrible "new age" baseball defensive stats. Anyways Rate2 is based off 100 being average and is scaled to 100 games. If a player has a 109 Rate2 and plays 162 adjusted games at catcher (this is based on innings, not games played) then he's going to have a FRAR of 51.

 

PRAR is pitching runs over a replacement pitcher, where a replacement pitcher's ERA is roughly 6.10 in a league average park (think Jason Marquis and what we got out of our 4-5 spots last year). However, PRAR has a lot of more adjustments. First the ERA/RA used is based off of NRA, not RA/ERA. To compute this there's an adjustment for the team's defense and the resulting RA is scaled to have the same winning power against average 4.50 R/G or RA which ever you want to call it. You can find this using your favorite pythagorean win formula. So for NRA, league average is 4.50. Then it's (6.10-NRA)*XIP. What's XIP? It's based of IP for the player, but this is another part of the formula I hate. They try to synthetically inject leverage into the WARP calculations for pitchers (but not for hitters hypocrites). This is done by redistributing innings pitched based on things like Ws, Ls and SVs. I don't know if they include holds or not. So yes, having an extra loss can actually improve your EqA. They formulized this somewhere on their site, but when I tried to do what they did it never worked for me, but some of the things they do made me laugh. It's really absurd. Anyways once you have your XIP, PRAR is pretty fair.

 

Finally to compute WARP we have to add all of PRAR, BRAR and FRAR into one RAR stat, let's just call it total runs over replacement player (TRAR idk what, if anything, they call it). Someone earlier in this thread (or another?) mentioned that Rs --> Ws is roughly 10 per. While that's true, WARP takes it a step further. There's a diminishing marginal runs per win effect. So each successive run added is not worth as much as the one previous. WARP for ALL players is wins added starting at a replacement level team. This team is not as good as the 2003 Tigers. Think the immortal Cleveland Spiders. A RP team for WARP is good for about 20 wins. Yeah that's low. Anyways so the WARP column you see is not a good indicator of how many wins the player added, so at the point, what's the point? No pun intended.

 

In practice a replacement level player for WARP is about a AA player. A lot of people think this is way too low. And they're probably right.

 

Wow, that was long. I hope this clears it up and doesn't confuse you even more.

 

Wow, sounds like complicated stuff. Thanks for the explanation. I take it you like VORP better than WARP then. I think the concept is pretty good, as it allows you to look at how much a player is really contributing.

[Amazing_Grace]

I think the whole point everyone has been trying to make about SBs is that a good basestealer is a threat and a bad basestealer is just wasting outs, and that there are a lot of guys in MLB that are supposedly "good" basestealers but aren't really, like Alfonso Soriano and Juan Pierre. Because "baseball people" overvalue the SB managing baseball teams, they allow more attempts than are really justified, and end up hurting the team.

 

I personally think having a guy that could really get on base at a .360-.400 clip and steal bases at a rate of 80-90% would be an ideal leadoff man, but the only player I can think of that would qualify would be Carlos Beltran, and he has enough power you probably don't want him leading off for an NL team (don't mention Soriano, I don't need to be reminded of it..grrr).

[goonys evil twin]

"baseball people" overvalue the SB managing baseball teams, they allow more attempts than are really justified, and end up hurting the team.

 

I agree, but I think it works a little differently. What they fail to do is recognize the damage of the caught stealing. So instead of overvaluing the SB, they undervalue the CS. You never hear about SB%, what you hear is "This guy can steal you 40-50 bases". It's similar to how they talk about pitchers. A 15-16 pitcher means you are "a 15 game winner", while a 10-2 record means you aren't a "15 game winner". Baseball people think in terms of counting stats, and ignore the rates far too often.

[Amazing_Grace]

"baseball people" overvalue the SB managing baseball teams, they allow more attempts than are really justified, and end up hurting the team.

 

I agree, but I think it works a little differently. What they fail to do is recognize the damage of the caught stealing. So instead of overvaluing the SB, they undervalue the CS. You never hear about SB%, what you hear is "This guy can steal you 40-50 bases". It's similar to how they talk about pitchers. A 15-16 pitcher means you are "a 15 game winner", while a 10-2 record means you aren't a "15 game winner". Baseball people think in terms of counting stats, and ignore the rates far too often.

 

Yeah, the counting stats are meaningless though, especially when you take the positives only like hits, SBs, wins, and ignoring the negatives like outs, CS, losses. Saying a pitcher has 15 wins like it's a good thing when they also have 16 losses is like saying Ford has 4 billion in revenues while ignoring the fact that the company's expenses were 4.5 billion and they lost half a billion dollars. Calculating value in baseball and business is not much different. If you want to know how valuable something is, you take what you invested, whether it's dollars or at-bats, and see what you got out of those dollars or at-bats. The more output you get out of your inputs, the more valuable an investment, business, or baseball player you have. It confounds me to no end how ignorant the supposedly learned "baseball people" can be.

[TB_11]

I agree, but I think it works a little differently. What they fail to do is recognize the damage of the caught stealing. So instead of overvaluing the SB, they undervalue the CS.

 

One of the over-riding things that the the sabermetric analysis has shown has been that the "traditionalists" don't fully grasp the negative value of outs, whether that's through attempted steals, sacrifice bunts, or undervaluing OBP.

 

I think it was Tim who suggested we should switch from using OBP to using 1-OBP as a proxy for how often a batter makes an out. It would put the emphasis more on what really matters - avoiding outs. Juan Pierre makes an out 67.0% his PAs, and Youkilis makes an out 62.0% of his PAs.

[fromthestretch]

This is probably going to be more than you ever wanted to know about RP level, but here goes nothing,

 

Replacement level differs by each stat. Even though VORP and WARP stand for value over replacement player and wins over replacement player, the replacement player is not the same in each statistic.

 

VORP is based off of marginal value lineup rate (MLVr). MLVr is an extension of runs created but uses team runs created and calculates the change in OBP, SLG, SB and CS (and a few other small things) when the player is insterted in the lineup, compared to just an average player. There are three key things to notice here. First, it's how many runs his OBP and SLG etc add to a league average lineup and it's the difference in runs over a league average player. Secondly, MLVr is not runs added over a player at your position and finally MLVr is none other than runs added per game played.

 

Then MLVr is of course weighted for park, league, etc. Then it is converted to PMLVr which is runs per game added over an average hitter at the position played. Then it's converted to VORPr which is runs per game over a replacement level player at the players' position. A replacement level is described as about 70 points of OPS (35 each for SLG and OBP) lower than a league average player at that position. Finally VORPr is multiplied by games (which is actually figured out using PA% not games, duh) to find VORP. Of course they may physically calculate the differences in a different order, addition and subtraction are of course associative.

 

In practice VORP's replacement level player is basically a AAA player - which is justified by the concept of replacement player which should be defined something like: A player who is freely available at the position for a low cost.

 

WARP is quite a ways different. First, it's calculated based off of Equivalent Average, which put in simple terms is based roughly on total bases per plate appearance. Where total bases include SBs. It's a bit different, but for an informal definition that's fine. It's then scaled and adjusted for play into EqA on a scale of .260. This stuff is on their site I believe (it was like 2 years ago). I can go deeper if you want into how and the methodology behind it. EqA's scale is basically the same as BA. .260 is always average. .300 is good, .200 is bad and .400 is a top fifteen offense season.

 

WARP basically has three different components: BRAR, FRAR and PRAR. BRAR is batting runs over a replacement level hitter. BRAR is calculated the same for EVERY position, pitchers included. This actually causes AL pitchers to have higher WARPs than their NL counterpart because most pitcher's EqA's are well below a RP level hitter's level. A replacement level hitter has an EqA of .230 by definition. EqA when it's in its adjusted state is basically value per out. BRAR is calculated by 5*Outs*(EqA^2.5-.230^2.5). It's not too tough.

 

FRAR and PRAR are a lot different. As I said there's no position adjustement for BRAR. Their methodology runs that all hitters are hitters and should be compared to all hitters. The value so to speak of doing it at a harder position is factored in FRAR. The starting runs over a replacement player varies with position. It's based off of the James Defensive Spectrum: C, SS, 2B, CF, 3B, CO, 1B, DH. Notice there's nothing for pitchers. This is probably wrong. I hate WARP for pitchers. It's useless, but as bad as it has been for them, it gets worse. The runs per 162 games are set at 36, 32, 29, 24, 22, 14, 0 if my memory doesn't fail me. It's on their site somewhere. Then for each player they use Rate2 for the actual defensive component. Rate2 is something I am not familiar with the actual calculations other than that I know it's based off box scores and is easily one of the more terrible "new age" baseball defensive stats. Anyways Rate2 is based off 100 being average and is scaled to 100 games. If a player has a 109 Rate2 and plays 162 adjusted games at catcher (this is based on innings, not games played) then he's going to have a FRAR of 51.

 

PRAR is pitching runs over a replacement pitcher, where a replacement pitcher's ERA is roughly 6.10 in a league average park (think Jason Marquis and what we got out of our 4-5 spots last year). However, PRAR has a lot of more adjustments. First the ERA/RA used is based off of NRA, not RA/ERA. To compute this there's an adjustment for the team's defense and the resulting RA is scaled to have the same winning power against average 4.50 R/G or RA which ever you want to call it. You can find this using your favorite pythagorean win formula. So for NRA, league average is 4.50. Then it's (6.10-NRA)*XIP. What's XIP? It's based of IP for the player, but this is another part of the formula I hate. They try to synthetically inject leverage into the WARP calculations for pitchers (but not for hitters hypocrites). This is done by redistributing innings pitched based on things like Ws, Ls and SVs. I don't know if they include holds or not. So yes, having an extra loss can actually improve your EqA. They formulized this somewhere on their site, but when I tried to do what they did it never worked for me, but some of the things they do made me laugh. It's really absurd. Anyways once you have your XIP, PRAR is pretty fair.

 

Finally to compute WARP we have to add all of PRAR, BRAR and FRAR into one RAR stat, let's just call it total runs over replacement player (TRAR idk what, if anything, they call it). Someone earlier in this thread (or another?) mentioned that Rs --> Ws is roughly 10 per. While that's true, WARP takes it a step further. There's a diminishing marginal runs per win effect. So each successive run added is not worth as much as the one previous. WARP for ALL players is wins added starting at a replacement level team. This team is not as good as the 2003 Tigers. Think the immortal Cleveland Spiders. A RP team for WARP is good for about 20 wins. Yeah that's low. Anyways so the WARP column you see is not a good indicator of how many wins the player added, so at the point, what's the point? No pun intended.

 

In practice a replacement level player for WARP is about a AA player. A lot of people think this is way too low. And they're probably right.

 

Wow, that was long. I hope this clears it up and doesn't confuse you even more.

 

Now solve for x.

 

Seriously though, piggybacking off the Murray Chass thread, I think some of these stats could be introduced without too many problems. As someone (I think it was Derwood) mentioned, there are probably a lot of baseball fans that can't calculate a basic stat like ERA. However, I bet a lot of those people have a relatively good idea of what is a good ERA and what isn't, even though they can't calculate it. Same goes for OBP, SLG, etc. As I mentioned in another thread, the big thing is introducing them with the proper context. You can explain a stat and what it measures without the listing off the exact formula. You can provide leaderboards, showing how players rate against other players.

 

Honestly, I hate to say this, but this is where Baseball Tonight could actually have some value. Have a five-minute segment each Sunday before the Game of the Week where someone (ideally someone other than John Kruk or Dusty Baker) explains the use of one of these more advanced stats. Explain what it measures, explain the value it brings as opposed to a related traditional stat, and show a few examples of players that rate high, low, and in the middle of the pack using that statistic.

 

Even if no one is educated by this, there would be entertainment value listening to Joe Morgan complain about it during the game broadcast.

[Mephistopheles]

well they could put rob neyer on bbtn, but he'd just scream about ops. keith law is a bp product. he'd be alright.

[fromthestretch]

well they could put rob neyer on bbtn, but he'd just scream about ops. keith law is a bp product. he'd be alright.

 

That's the key. You want to find someone with the knowledge to speak about it and the ability to speak about it clearly without coming off like an arrogant know-it-all.

[CuseCubFan69]

well they could put rob neyer on bbtn, but he'd just scream about ops. keith law is a bp product. he'd be alright.

 

That's the key. You want to find someone with the knowledge to speak about it and the ability to speak about it clearly without coming off like an arrogant know-it-all.

 

Exactly. If he or she can put into terms where the average fan can understand it and get ways how to impliment these stats the better and less threatened people will be.

[Mephistopheles]

gammons would be good since hes well-respected by all fans

[fromthestretch]

gammons would be good since hes well-respected by all fans

 

He'd be good. Kurkjian probably wouldn't be too bad either, although I think Gammons would probably do a better job communicating to an older generation of baseball fans.

[Derwood]

"baseball people" overvalue the SB managing baseball teams, they allow more attempts than are really justified, and end up hurting the team.

 

I agree, but I think it works a little differently. What they fail to do is recognize the damage of the caught stealing. So instead of overvaluing the SB, they undervalue the CS. You never hear about SB%, what you hear is "This guy can steal you 40-50 bases". It's similar to how they talk about pitchers. A 15-16 pitcher means you are "a 15 game winner", while a 10-2 record means you aren't a "15 game winner". Baseball people think in terms of counting stats, and ignore the rates far too often.

 

Yeah, the counting stats are meaningless though, especially when you take the positives only like hits, SBs, wins, and ignoring the negatives like outs, CS, losses. Saying a pitcher has 15 wins like it's a good thing when they also have 16 losses is like saying Ford has 4 billion in revenues while ignoring the fact that the company's expenses were 4.5 billion and they lost half a billion dollars. Calculating value in baseball and business is not much different. If you want to know how valuable something is, you take what you invested, whether it's dollars or at-bats, and see what you got out of those dollars or at-bats. The more output you get out of your inputs, the more valuable an investment, business, or baseball player you have. It confounds me to no end how ignorant the supposedly learned "baseball people" can be.

 

prime example:

 

2006 Juan Pierre lead the league in hits. He also lead the league in outs made. The result, 200+ hits and a batting average well under .300. 700 AB's for a leadoff hitter is inexcusable

[Transmogrified Tiger]

I think it was Tim who suggested we should switch from using OBP to using 1-OBP as a proxy for how often a batter makes an out. It would put the emphasis more on what really matters - avoiding outs. Juan Pierre makes an out 67.0% his PAs, and Youkilis makes an out 62.0% of his PAs.

 

We were going to call it Suck Factor, right? I'm still on board for this.