Bob Ryan on baseball's WAR

I've always kind of thought "range" = "how well a player recovers from being out of position against a given batter."

Bad fielding is pretty easy to measure. Determining who is better between two good defensive players really does rely as much on an eyeball test as measureables.

 

That's a remarkable idea. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of it before now. Make sure to alert the editors of the forthcoming 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia.

 

The problem (well, one of the biggest problems, anyway) is that chances are so variable from player to player for each season. No one wants to here that some mediocre fielder had the most valuable fielding season because a ton of balls were hit his way and he fielded them, or that some super-elite gold glover wasn't that valuable defensively because few of the balls hit in his direction were difficult chances this year.

 

So in 2000, Jeffrey Hammonds was a better hitter than Derek Jeter, Magglio Ordonez, Roberto Alomar, Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones, Andres Galarraga and Phil Nevin?

That stat already exists. It's called total chances, and it's largely worthless because teams and fields aren't all the same. Playing left field in Fenway Park is very different than playing left field in Petco Park.

Errors are what a given scorekeeper on a given day decides are errors. The variance in what gets called an error has been proven again and again.

 

One of my favorite new stats is this Win Value Added that got bandied around a little bit last year during the Trout-Cabrera brou-ha-ha. While WAR is context-neutral, which bugs a lot of people - justifiably - WVA is completely context-based. Essentially, every play in a baseball game adds or subtracts each team's chances of winning that game by a certain percentage. And a player's WVA over the course of a season and it tells you what value he added to his team, for real, rather than hypothetically like WAR.

Way better than WAR, to me, for determining an individual award in a season. Because I think that What Happened matters, i.e. hits at key times and such.

 

The problem with WAR is that it is based on a nebulous and poorly defined concept that varies from year to year. Same issue with VORP, obviously.

Why they can't use the same exact idea and just peg it to a median or mean, or even a certain percentage thereof, I do not understand.

A concept can't get much more nebulous than "replacement" since it is inherently obvious that "replacement" levels are so massively different between the best teams and the worst teams. To imply otherwise for the sake of a statistical model is asinine, and therefore, they should use deciles or other tiers rather than defining a "replacement level" that can never actually be approximate to more than a handful of teams' minor league talent levels in a given year.

 

People, including Ryan, get so worked up about the concept of "replacement." I find it the least objectionable thing about WAR. It requires a base line. That's all. Objecting to it is like objecting to the existence of the number zero. If you made replacement values team-specific, then the players wouldn't be measured on an equal footing against one another. Which defeats the purpose.

 

Posnanski.

"Zaidi and I were talking about this when he told me something that I found utterly staggering. He said that Oakland’s objective model for measuring a player’s value — remember now, we are talking about the Oakland A’s, the Moneyball people, Jonah Hill and so on — found that Miguel Cabrera, NOT Mike Trout, was more valuable in 2012.

Well, that’s not exactly right. He was quick to say that the difference between the two was so slight as to be almost invisible — they were, for an intents and purposes, in a virtual tie. But their system did have Cabrera ahead by the tiniest of margins."

hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/03/04/revisiting-trout-vs-cabrera-mvp-debate-with-a-twist/related/

 

None of which makes the following, oft-used argument in favor of Cabrera any more sound:

"Triple Crown, bitch!"

 

No, it's not at all like objecting to zero. Zero doesn't constantly change, for one thing.

 

It's exactly like objecting to zero. "Replacement level" is a base line. It's the functional equivalent of zero. If you disagree with the concept of a replacement player, the only thing that suffers is the accuracy of the figure. The precision - which is what actually matters - remains the same.

 

Hammonds... I thought you were better than pulling Red Herring like that.

If this stat is so readily available, please show me gloved balls per game, or per inning, by shortstops in 2012. And hopefully it will include every time a fielder kept the ball in the infield even though they were not able to make a play.