MLB Thread: 2013

Off Topic
1

Well, pitchers and catchers have reported to Spring Training and most of the position players have also arrived. It’s that time of year again!

And I think I’ll start this year’s thread off by pointing out exactly how flawed of a statistic WAR really is. To wit:

The Angels had a collective team WAR of 37.9, which was tops in the majors. But they finished third in their division. The pennant-winning team from the AL (Detroit) finished 23rd in the majors with a collective WAR of 13.7 and Baltimore, another postseason team, finished dead last in the majors with a collective WAR of 11.4.

To be fair, in the NL the team WARs were much more in line with where they actually finished. For instance, the team with the highest WAR in the NL was the World Champion San Francisco Giants, with a WAR of 28.9. Still, that is significantly lower than the major league-leading Angels, even though Anaheim was clearly not operating on a level anywhere near the Giants when all was said and done.

However, the Giants also had one of the top pitching staffs in baseball by any statistical measure. Except for WAR of course. Their staff’s collective WAR was a mere 5.5, good for 22nd in the majors and well behind Detroit’s 23.3. And we saw how much better SF’s pitching staff was when squaring up against Detroit in the Series, especially when considering which staff was facing the better lineup on paper in that Series. Furthermore, Colorado had the 4th-best WAR in the NL at 14.5 yet had one of the worst staffs in the entire majors and had the league’s highest ERA (5.22). Nobody who actually watched the Rockies’ staff throughout the year would argue that they were anything but one of the worst collections of pitching talent in the majors. Yet they were ranked much, much higher than the vaunted SF staff in terms of WAR.

So I don’t see how anyone could argue in favor of WARs alleged veracity in light of these conclusions. It’s a flawed statistic at best and has little place in any sort of advanced statistical analysis of the game of baseball. There are certain advanced metrics that have some use, but WAR is simply not one of them.

2

No offense, but I don’t care about all that WAR stat shit. I just want to see some baseball.

Padres I think are going to have another mediocre year. Too many questions marks with starting pitching right now. Some of their key guys that got injured last year might not be back until mid season. I can’t wait to go downtown and go to some games.

This is the time of year when sports suck. Only thing good to watch is college basketball and my alma mater has been disappointing.

3

In. My responcse:

Milwaukee led the NL in HR. Did not make playoffs. San Francisco was LAST, and won the series. Therefore it is a flawed stat.

Summary: NO single stat will tell the whole story.

Excited for the new season. Even if my team did lose some guys, the pitching looks to be only getting better.

4

[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
In. My responcse:

Milwaukee led the NL in HR. Did not make playoffs. San Francisco was LAST, and won the series. Therefore it is a flawed stat.

Summary: NO single stat will tell the whole story.

Excited for the new season. Even if my team did lose some guys, the pitching looks to be only getting better. [/quote]

Last time I checked HRs weren’t considered an advanced statistical measurement of a team’s or a player’s success, whereas WAR. Therefore your analogy is…well, not analogous at all.

Besides, HRs ARE a flawed stat in that they don’t take into account what ballpark they were hit in. A HR in SF has more statistical value than one hit in Milwaukee since Milwaukee is a joke of a ballpark and AT&T Park is extremely hard to hit the ball out of.

The point is that those who point to certain stats as better indicators of success than others (sabermetrics vs. “old school” stats) generally overestimate the value of said advanced measurements. The fact is that while they may be better than “old school” stats in many respects, they are flawed nonetheless (as are all stats to varying degrees) and cannot replace good old-fashioned baseball knowledge gained by actually watching the game and understanding two things: HOW the game is played and the human element, which happens to be the great variable that throws a wrench in all of these analyses.

Bill James himself used to argue that pitching the ninth inning was no different than pitching any other inning in relief. He isn’t making that argument at all anymore though. Why? Because he has since understood that the human element necessarily adds much more pressure and so forth into the 9th that doesn’t exist in previous innings. There is something inherently more difficult throwing the inning that could end the game as opposed to throwing the inning before, where you know that no matter what happens in that inning there is still some sort of chance of overcoming whatever disaster may unfold.

There really isn’t a specific stat that takes into account the most important things in terms of winning. Why? Because the most important thing to a team’s success as far as what happens on the field is HOW the team plays the game. What matters are all the fundamental aspects, the little things that go largely unnoticed until someone fucks it up in a critical situation.

Hitting the cutoff man. Laying down a proper bunt. Taking the extra base when possible. Hitting behind the runner on a hit-and-run. Swinging at good pitches. Throwing strikes early in the count. Throwing quality strikes. Freezing on a line drive. Playing good defense. Holding runners well out of the stretch. Making productive outs and moving runners into scoring position with less than two outs.

THOSE are the things that matter the most. The fact is that there isn’t that many wins that separate good teams from bad teams. Some people will claim that it is luck and talent that largely separates the two. Talent has a lot to do with it, luck not so much. But what really separates teams from one another, especially when squaring off against each other in a postseason series, is how well the two teams execute the fundamentals of the game.

That is why the Giants have won two of the last three World Series despite not looking all that great on paper. They certainly weren’t as good on paper as either of the teams they beat in the Series. The game isn’t played on paper; it’s played on the field and they simply played the game better. They did all the little things better than the other team and they had pitchers who threw a lot of quality strikes. No one on those staffs was consistently pumping fastballs in the high 90s past anyone. Their best starters in those two Series were throwing about 90-92 mph and their hardest-throwing relievers topped out at about 95 mph. They didn’t have any big-time power threats, although they got some unexpected power at times in both postseasons. But they were in position to benefit from that little bit of “luck” because they played the game well and their pitchers just come right after hitters with quality pitchers pitches.

5

DB, where do you see the Jays this year ?

6

[quote]tmay11 wrote:
DB, where do you see the Jays this year ? [/quote]

The Jays? I don’t know. They have a pretty stacked lineup, but I don’t like their pitching that much. Not sure about what kind of defense they have. They’re in a tough division and quite frankly, they don’t have a whole lot of players at all who are used to winning at the major league level. The talent is there but I doubt their ability to put it all together for 162 games. Maybe they’ll prove me wrong, but other than the Yankees, there really aren’t any teams in recent memory that have just added a shitload of talent in one offseason and turned it into a successful postseason run.

I don’t think they’ll be this year’s version of the Marlins, but I don’t think they’ll win the division either.

7

WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?

8

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

I don’t understand how a single player’s WAR can be relevant but a team’s accumulated WAR is meaningless? How exactly does that work? I would assume that even if any individual WARs that are more than two standard deviations from the league-wide mean were removed from each team’s total WAR they would be roughly the same anyways, right? Is it simply a matter of outliers on either end of the spectrum throwing things off?

And where exactly does it say that WAR is not meant to be applied to a whole team?

edit: and when you get right down to it, those outliers at either end of the spectrum, especially the ones at the upper end, are a big factor in separating the great teams from the shitty ones each year. So it would be inappropriate to throw out those outliers anyways.

9

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

Also, I’ve always understood fan graphs.com to be a pretty authoritative website regarding virtually all baseball stats. If this is the case and team WAR is irrelevant, then why do they keep track of it?

My point is that if WAR is only supposed to be applied to players and not whole teams, then why is it that virtually any website or any other source for advanced statistical measurements keep track of a team’s WAR along with individual WARs?

10

One other thing Raj, and I’ve mentioned this before maybe so forgive if it is a redundant point that I am making, but how legitimate can a statistic really be if there isn’t even a standardized measurement of that statistic? Would HRs be considered relevant if FanGraphs said that Player X hit 50 HRs in a season, Baseball Reference said the same player only hit 45 and Baseball Prospectus said the same player hit 53?

Regarding your assertion that individual players’ WARs are an accurate reflection of who the good players actually are:

I just looked up the active leaders in career WAR and noticed a few things. For the most part, the upper end of the list is filled with the upper-echelon players. But I also noticed some mind-bogglingly inappropriate entries toward the top as well. Jim Thome is ranked 5th despite the fact that he hasn’t even played defense for most of the latter half of his career. Scott Rolen, who can’t stay healthy to save his life, is ranked 6th.

As far as players who have the lead the league in individual seasons, there are several within the last 20-30 years who really jumped out at me as being completely off-base. Nick Markakis led the AL in WAR in 2008, Ben Zobrist led it in 2011, Dontrelle Willis led the NL in 2005, Lonnie Smith led it in 1989 and Jose Rijo led the NL in 1993. The guy was 14-9 with a 2.49 ERA in 1993. Good by any standard, but good enough to be the allegedly most valuable player in the NL that year? I don’t think so.

Sure, no statistic is perfect, but I don’t see how a stat that produces some odd outliers like this from time to time can be considered an “advanced metric”.

11

I see the Angels being the single most entertaining team this year. With the fire power that line up has, it’s just ridiculous. They should flat run away with the AL West. Their pitching isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either. So with a serviceable rotation and the ability to score 2 trillion runs, they should be a lock.

My bold prediction this year is that neither the Yankees or the Red Sox make the play-offs this year. It’s going to take the Red Sox a couple of years to undo the Valentine effect and get their younger team to gel. The Yankees are just old. Yeah, they still have a good team, but it’s old. A-rod is out for half the season to start, which is a lot of missing production. If Mariano Rivera isn’t the Mariano of old, that bullpen will be scuffling badly.
I believe the Rays will be in it somehow. I don’t know how, but as long as Madden is their coach, they will win, the man is a genius.

The NL has some good looking teams. In not particular order, The Braves look the best they have in years. I hate to say it but the Chipper albatross with his massive salary always kept the order one bat short. That problem has been eliminated and his singular production has been more than made up. The Nationals look like the best team on paper. The Cardinals stand to make a run. The Giants haven’t changed all that much which is a good thing since they are the reigning champs. They are still low on bats, but they have massive pitching. The Diamondbacks look better than I thought they would. The Phils are also still a strong contender.
I expect the Mets and Cubs to stink like normal.

12

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

I don’t understand how a single player’s WAR can be relevant but a team’s accumulated WAR is meaningless? How exactly does that work? I would assume that even if any individual WARs that are more than two standard deviations from the league-wide mean were removed from each team’s total WAR they would be roughly the same anyways, right? Is it simply a matter of outliers on either end of the spectrum throwing things off?

And where exactly does it say that WAR is not meant to be applied to a whole team?

edit: and when you get right down to it, those outliers at either end of the spectrum, especially the ones at the upper end, are a big factor in separating the great teams from the shitty ones each year. So it would be inappropriate to throw out those outliers anyways.[/quote]

I’ve never really seen WAR used as a team statistic ever before. The closest I’ve seen has been the total WAR of each side in a multi player trade.

I asked someone your question and he pointed out that team WAR (pitching, hitting and fielding) are in line with our perceptions (wins/losses). He also said the problem with parsing WAR as you did is that situational adjustments get lost.

13

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

Also, I’ve always understood fan graphs.com to be a pretty authoritative website regarding virtually all baseball stats. If this is the case and team WAR is irrelevant, then why do they keep track of it?

My point is that if WAR is only supposed to be applied to players and not whole teams, then why is it that virtually any website or any other source for advanced statistical measurements keep track of a team’s WAR along with individual WARs?[/quote]

That keep track of all sorts of stuff. Fangraphs is for generating reports of all kinds, the quality of the analyses is determined by the user.

They also keep track of pitching wins but that doesn’t make them useful

14

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
One other thing Raj, and I’ve mentioned this before maybe so forgive if it is a redundant point that I am making, but how legitimate can a statistic really be if there isn’t even a standardized measurement of that statistic? Would HRs be considered relevant if FanGraphs said that Player X hit 50 HRs in a season, Baseball Reference said the same player only hit 45 and Baseball Prospectus said the same player hit 53? [/quote]

You have asked me this before and I did answer it.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

Regarding your assertion that individual players’ WARs are an accurate reflection of who the good players actually are:

I just looked up the active leaders in career WAR and noticed a few things. For the most part, the upper end of the list is filled with the upper-echelon players. But I also noticed some mind-bogglingly inappropriate entries toward the top as well. Jim Thome is ranked 5th despite the fact that he hasn’t even played defense for most of the latter half of his career. Scott Rolen, who can’t stay healthy to save his life, is ranked 6th. [/quote]

First off, I’m not even sure where you’re getting this data from. When I sort by WAR and filter it to only active players Thome and Rolen don’t even show up because they’re retired.

Secondly, even if it’s true, either wouldn’t surprise me. Thome and Rolen have both played over 2000 games (Thome over 2500) and there are only a handful of players in the league currently that have done that. In fact, there are currently only 5

Playing a lot of games allows you to accumulate a large career WAR. I’m going to have to relate this to basketball, because it’s the only example coming to my mind at the moment: Jason Kidd is 3rd all time in 3 pointers made in NBA history. It’s not that he’s ever been a great 3 point shooter (career shooting % is 35%) it’s because he’s been playing FOREVER.

Furtheremore, Scott Rolen and Jim Thome use to be amazing players, both were at one point top 10 players in the league.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

As far as players who have the lead the league in individual seasons, there are several within the last 20-30 years who really jumped out at me as being completely off-base. Nick Markakis led the AL in WAR in 2008, Ben Zobrist led it in 2011, Dontrelle Willis led the NL in 2005, Lonnie Smith led it in 1989 and Jose Rijo led the NL in 1993. The guy was 14-9 with a 2.49 ERA in 1993. Good by any standard, but good enough to be the allegedly most valuable player in the NL that year? I don’t think so. [/quote]

No Markakis was 3rd in the AL

and 12th overall

He hit over .300, got on base over .400 and nearly slugged .500 while playing above average defense with a plus arm. He had a good year, what’s the problem?

Ben Zobrist was 8th in the AL in 2011

Willis was 2nd in the NL in 2005 behind Chris Carpenter. He had a great season that year too.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
Sure, no statistic is perfect, but I don’t see how a stat that produces some odd outliers like this from time to time can be considered an “advanced metric”.
[/quote]

No, learn how to use fangraphs before you criticize WAR

15

[quote]pat wrote:
I see the Angels being the single most entertaining team this year. With the fire power that line up has, it’s just ridiculous. They should flat run away with the AL West. Their pitching isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either. So with a serviceable rotation and the ability to score 2 trillion runs, they should be a lock. [/quote]

Saying their pitching is not great is an understatement. It’s actually quite bad.

16

[quote]therajraj wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

I don’t understand how a single player’s WAR can be relevant but a team’s accumulated WAR is meaningless? How exactly does that work? I would assume that even if any individual WARs that are more than two standard deviations from the league-wide mean were removed from each team’s total WAR they would be roughly the same anyways, right? Is it simply a matter of outliers on either end of the spectrum throwing things off?

And where exactly does it say that WAR is not meant to be applied to a whole team?

edit: and when you get right down to it, those outliers at either end of the spectrum, especially the ones at the upper end, are a big factor in separating the great teams from the shitty ones each year. So it would be inappropriate to throw out those outliers anyways.[/quote]

I’ve never really seen WAR used as a team statistic ever before. The closest I’ve seen has been the total WAR of each side in a multi player trade.

I asked someone your question and he pointed out that team WAR (pitching, hitting and fielding) are in line with our perceptions (wins/losses). He also said the problem with parsing WAR as you did is that situational adjustments get lost.
[/quote]

Situational adjustments get lost in WAR, period. Even when applied to an individual player it doesn’t take into account at all the specific situation that each statistic is achieved in. A single with the bases loaded in a tied ballgame is more valuable than a HR in the middle of a blowout, for instance.

You still haven’t really addressed why WAR is inappropriate to use in terms of an entire team. I don’t understand why it isn’t. That doesn’t sound a whole lot different to me than saying that a player’s individual batting average is relevant but that that stat isn’t to be applied to an entire team. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain why this is?

Here is FanGraphs list of team WARs.

17

[quote]therajraj wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
One other thing Raj, and I’ve mentioned this before maybe so forgive if it is a redundant point that I am making, but how legitimate can a statistic really be if there isn’t even a standardized measurement of that statistic? Would HRs be considered relevant if FanGraphs said that Player X hit 50 HRs in a season, Baseball Reference said the same player only hit 45 and Baseball Prospectus said the same player hit 53? [/quote]

You have asked me this before and I did answer it.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

Regarding your assertion that individual players’ WARs are an accurate reflection of who the good players actually are:

I just looked up the active leaders in career WAR and noticed a few things. For the most part, the upper end of the list is filled with the upper-echelon players. But I also noticed some mind-bogglingly inappropriate entries toward the top as well. Jim Thome is ranked 5th despite the fact that he hasn’t even played defense for most of the latter half of his career. Scott Rolen, who can’t stay healthy to save his life, is ranked 6th. [/quote]

First off, I’m not even sure where you’re getting this data from. When I sort by WAR and filter it to only active players Thome and Rolen don’t even show up because they’re retired.

Secondly, even if it’s true, either wouldn’t surprise me. Thome and Rolen have both played over 2000 games (Thome over 2500) and there are only a handful of players in the league currently that have done that. In fact, there are currently only 5

Playing a lot of games allows you to accumulate a large career WAR. I’m going to have to relate this to basketball, because it’s the only example coming to my mind at the moment: Jason Kidd is 3rd all time in 3 pointers made in NBA history. It’s not that he’s ever been a great 3 point shooter (career shooting % is 35%) it’s because he’s been playing FOREVER.

Furtheremore, Scott Rolen and Jim Thome use to be amazing players, both were at one point top 10 players in the league.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

As far as players who have the lead the league in individual seasons, there are several within the last 20-30 years who really jumped out at me as being completely off-base. Nick Markakis led the AL in WAR in 2008, Ben Zobrist led it in 2011, Dontrelle Willis led the NL in 2005, Lonnie Smith led it in 1989 and Jose Rijo led the NL in 1993. The guy was 14-9 with a 2.49 ERA in 1993. Good by any standard, but good enough to be the allegedly most valuable player in the NL that year? I don’t think so. [/quote]

No Markakis was 3rd in the AL

and 12th overall

He hit over .300, got on base over .400 and nearly slugged .500 while playing above average defense with a plus arm. He had a good year, what’s the problem?

Ben Zobrist was 8th in the AL in 2011

Willis was 2nd in the NL in 2005 behind Chris Carpenter. He had a great season that year too.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
Sure, no statistic is perfect, but I don’t see how a stat that produces some odd outliers like this from time to time can be considered an “advanced metric”.
[/quote]

No, learn how to use fangraphs before you criticize WAR
[/quote]

Here is where I got my data from. As you can see, the list is very different from what FanGraphs has come up with.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_active.shtml

See, based on where the statistic is measured it can be different. Are you trying to tell me that that is immaterial to the stat’s usefulness?

And I completely understand that the longer a player plays he will accumulate more wins above replacement. I fail to see how that means anything in Rolen’s or Thome’s case, though. Rolen was a really good player for just a few years and he’s rarely played an injury-free season in his entire career. Thome has played forever as well, but for WARs purposes he has played 25% less than most players his age since he did nothing but DH the second half of his career and defensive statistics are taken into account when accumulating WAR.

18

[quote]therajraj wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:
I see the Angels being the single most entertaining team this year. With the fire power that line up has, it’s just ridiculous. They should flat run away with the AL West. Their pitching isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either. So with a serviceable rotation and the ability to score 2 trillion runs, they should be a lock. [/quote]

Saying their pitching is not great is an understatement. It’s actually quite bad.

[/quote]

I don’t think it’s bad, I thinks it’s middle of the road.
The ERA of the current staff averages 4.32 replacing the perceivable better staff at 4.27. All they have to do is post a lower era than the teams playing them and with that line up, that shouldn’t be all that hard. If Hanson’s healthy you actually have a pretty good pitcher there. Of course, when the Braves give up a starter, that’s usually a red flag.

19

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

Also, I’ve always understood fan graphs.com to be a pretty authoritative website regarding virtually all baseball stats. If this is the case and team WAR is irrelevant, then why do they keep track of it?

My point is that if WAR is only supposed to be applied to players and not whole teams, then why is it that virtually any website or any other source for advanced statistical measurements keep track of a team’s WAR along with individual WARs?[/quote]

Holy crap, when do you get to give up this avatar?

20

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
WAR isn’t supposed to be used a cumulative team statistic. It’s for measuring individual players, so the argument presented above is a fallacy.

If you hadn’t noticed, the cumulative WARs of each team do not come anywhere close to the amount of wins they had in a season. It doesn’t mean it’s faulty either.

Look at individual WARs of players on fangraphs… do they greatly conflict with your perceptions of players?
[/quote]

Also, I’ve always understood fan graphs.com to be a pretty authoritative website regarding virtually all baseball stats. If this is the case and team WAR is irrelevant, then why do they keep track of it?

My point is that if WAR is only supposed to be applied to players and not whole teams, then why is it that virtually any website or any other source for advanced statistical measurements keep track of a team’s WAR along with individual WARs?[/quote]

Holy crap, when do you get to give up this avatar?[/quote]

Lol. Not soon enough. End of the month. Then it’s back to something much easier to look at.