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Jose Reyes - 103
Pat Burrell - 127
But then compare their EqA's from 2007:
Jose Reyes - .277
Pat Burrell - .304
Burrell is still better, but it's closer.
Some don't like WARP numbers (because the way defensive value is measured). That said, look again at those two by WARP3 in 2007, which accounts for defense, offense and base running:
Jose Reyes - 10.3
Pat Burrell - 5.4
Maybe these numbers are off. But they are a much better approximation of the value of Burrell and Reyes in 2007 than OPS+ is.
Exactly right. That is a ridiculous article. No attempt is ever made to look at defensive metrics. I don't think you can begin to talk about whether a shortstop is overrated or not without including an evaluation of their defense.
Reyes's 30th place finish was a result of one 10th place vote. It's perfectly cromulent to throw a 10th place bone to the guy who led the league in triples and stolen bases. Lets not make too much of that shall we? Scott Eyre and Jorge Cantu also got a 10th.
Maybe OPS+ does a worse job on a Molina brother or something, but I think Reyes is near the top.
And Ichiro!
Not only all this, which I agree with completely, but the trend, especially in 2007 is for his OPS to become more heavily weighted toward OBP. If that represents a legitimate change in approach and improvement, OPS+ underrates Reyes a little just based on his hitting. Even over his entire career, counting the seasons where he was poor at getting on base, Reyes is slightly under league average in OBP (.331 against .338) and SLG (.426 against .430); he's pretty balanced as a hitter, and if you think Reyes' true ability more resembles 2005-present than his career numbers, OPS+ does ever worse for him than it does for the other player mentioned in the article, Jimmy Rollins. Especially in 2007, where Rollins was significantly below-average in OBP and well above average in SLG.
Not just Reyes, but Rollins too. The obvious thing that OPS+ misses is that he plays every day. OPS+ is a great stat to judge future performance, but for actual performance it's absurd to only use a rate stat. One of the most valuable things about Rollins is that he leads off for 162 games and plays one of the two most crucial defensive position on the diamond for almost every inning of the season.
Rollins played 1441 1/3 innings last year out of a possible 1458! That's just insanely valuable for a player of his offensive ability, especially when the backup who logged the other 17 innings was Abe Nunez.
This, incidentally, speaks to one of the inadequacies of using VORP to judge the MVP. The Phils didn't have a replacement level SS offensively or defensively...they had Abe Nunez. And the fact that hypothetical replacement SS abound in VORP does not mean they were coming to Philly. If Rollins had missed time or sat out a few days, it was Nunez, a below replacement level player who would be coming in.
Edit for clarity.
In 2007, from BPro, MLB SS had an EQA of 255.
Hanley 315
Renteria 297
Rollins 290
Jeter 285
Guilen 283
Reyes 278
Tulo 272
Tejada 271
Young 270
Wilson 269
Greene 263
.
.
.
EQAs of some of the players the writer would rather have instead of Reyes:
Zimmerman 272
Francoeur 268
Agree on that, but Rollins, while a good base runner, isn't as good a base runner as Reyes, and probably the same can be said defensively as well. Rollins also probably has more value tied up in his slugging than OBP, at least compared to Reyes, so he doesn't get as hurt there.
But yeah, OPS+ doesn't do a great job telling the story of Rollins either, but I think it does a better job on him than Reyes.
Not say say either one is better, just that I think OPS+ underrates Reyes more than Rollins.
My gut reaction would be one of Colorado's hitters, like Holliday or Atkins, since most people have gone back to not caring about park factors. Either that, or a SD pitcher.
I'd probably go with Carlos Lee. If his defense is as bad as the metrics say, he's barely above average, if at all, but he's considered a star, and paid like a superstar.
My baserunning metrics have him as roughly +5 runs as a baserunner last season, which is very good - he's had batter seasons, though. I'd say him (and Rollins) are two of the best baserunners in MLB right now.
Jimmy Rollins was a two-time All Star before he stopped basically sucking, and won an MVP when he should have probably been third on his team.
Two years ago, Reyes would have been his main competition for most overrated player in the league. I'd still say he's in the discussion, as people talk about him as the most valuable young player in the league or the one guy you'd want to build a team around and his performance simply doesn't warrant that.
I'm not sure why you would say this. It was very close between Wright, Pujols, Rollins and Holliday for who deserved the award, IMO. As such, it's hard to say that Rollins is pretty high on the overrated list simply because he edged out others who were at most only a small amount better than he was. Here are the top scores in WARP3 from 2007:
David Wright 13.1
Albert Pujols 12.8
Jimmy Rollins 11.7
Matt Holliday 11.5
Chase Utley 10.8
Jake Peavy 10.3
Miguel Cabrera 9.9
Hanley Ramirez 9.8
Carlos Beltran 9.8
Brandon Webb 9.0
Brad Penny 8.8
Adrian Gonzalez 8.5
Were there any other advanced metrics besides WARP that showed Rollins being anywere near that close to the top, though? I haven't seen any. I have something of a difficult time taking seriously a stat that says Adrian Gonzalez was the 9th-best position player in the league (and ahead of Chipper Jones).
Wrong. Utley had a great season, but he missed 30 games. That's a huge chunk of the season. Rollins played in every single game. I don't know who else you think was more valuable to the Phillies in 2007. I'd like to see your evidence for this third phantom phenom.
Win Shares
Wright 34
Pujols 32
Cabrera 30
Holliday 30
Ramirez 29
Utley 28
Rollins 28
Fielder 28
Gonzalez 27
Not sure why complaining about Adrian Gonzalez played 161 games last year at 125 ops+ playing above average defense.
Most metrics I've seen would have made Wright the MVP. However, my point is that it was close in most of them, and even if Rollins was not the most deserving, the difference between him and the best player in the NL was not huge in 2007.
Contrast that to 2006 in the American League, when Justin Morneau was undeservedly (according to WARP3) given the MVP. He truly was not his team's MVP:
Derek Jeter 12.2
Grady Sizemore 11.0
Carlos Guillen 10.4
Johan Santana 11.1
Joe Mauer 10.2
Justin Morneau 8.9
The average NL 1B had about a 117 OPS+. And, yes, he played good defense, but Gonzalez was only 7th among NL first basemen in VORP.
By add baserunning bases to OPS, do you mean add them to OBP, SLG or both? The thing about OPS is that you're adding two fractions with different denominators - one is divided by at-bats, the other by plate appearances. So you're further complicating things if you just add baserunning bases - and first you have to figure out what kind of bases they are.
[Also, base running bases don't have the added benefit of advancing the runners ahead of them; if I hit a single or a double, I move up any runners on base ahead of me. If I take an extra base on the basepaths, that doesn't move anyone up. So you have to weight them differently.]
Really the best thing to do is convert everything to runs and go from there, because everything in baseball is related to run scoring. OPS is a shortcut anyway; once you're making OPS more complex, you're better off starting from scratch with something like linear weights.
But you've moved yourself up, which should count for something. Add the 71 bases Reyes took to his OPS (which side it goes to doesn't matter to me) and you get .879, which seems to me, eyeballing it, a better approximation of Reyes's 2007 offensive value.
The plodders like Burrell get 16 bases taken away (for example).
But here's how I do it. According to Baseball Reference, Jose Reyes was worth 2.7 Batting Runs, so right around a league average hitter. Then I take a look at his runs above/below average in baserunning, which works out to 4.45. (I parse my own baserunning stats from Retrosheet event files - it's something of a work in progress.) So, 7.15 runs for Reyes. (If that figure sounds a little low for Reyes, it probably is a bit - he was better in 2006 and 2005 by my metrics.)
Burrell, on the other hand, was worth 24.3 runs hitting, and -4 runs on the bases, for 20.3 runs overall.
You can then go ahead and factor in defense and a positional adjustment on top of that. I'm pretty sure that once you factor in defense and position, Reyes is the more valuable player.
What the author meant to say is, that when something startles him, he's unable to actually go get the facts and look at the issue with any clarity.
This site has .44 runs for a caught stealing and .19 for a SB in the 2007 NL. If I plug in the numbers for Reyes:
78*.19 - 21*.44 = 14.82 - 9.24 = 5.58.
That's 5.58 runs if Reyes is merely neutral as on the basepaths outside of stolen base attempts, which I also doubt.
Those are "generic" weights. The Run Expectancy values I use take into account the number of outs in the inning and which base a runner is stealing, which could be skewing the numbers against Reyes. Like I said - he did better in 2006 and 2005, and so I would expect those numbers to improve again in 2008.
I didn't realize you were calculating on a play-by-play basis; that sounds like an awful lot of work.
Do you account for non-SB running value, like going 1st to 3rd or scoring more frequently than average from 2B?
I look at advance rates on singles, doubles, ground ball outs, fly ball outs, and other events. (Stolen bases are "lumped in" with advancing on wild pitches/passed balls and other such oddities; that might not be entirely correct but it's what I came up with.) The general spread in talent appears to be ten runs above/below average. Reyes at 4.5 runs is good, and 2007 was a down year for him.
Out of curiosity, what does 8.5-9 runs of hitting difference look like? It seems to me like there's a world of difference between Jose Reyes and Pat Burrell on the bases, but for that to amount to less than a single win's worth of difference over a full season is hard for me to wrap my brain around.
I never realized the opportunity difference was so dramatic. Doesn't that skew the average high, though, if the better runners get more opportunities than the worse ones? It seems like we'd get a sense of what the average opportunity looked like, but not so much what the average runner looks like, no?
Well, that was certainly uncalled for. In any event, the replacement level used in WARP is widely considered to be unrealistically low, resulting in it significantly overrating players with a ton of PAs like Rollins and Gonzalez. (It doesn't actually have Gonzalez ahead of Jones last year, though--Chipper had a WARP3 of 10.8, so it looks like Rich just missed him on his list.)
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