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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, February 25, 2008
Value Over Regis Philbin’s son-in-law?
Even so, I wasn’t shocked that stats people have taken issue with Rollins winning the MVP award. There are numbers crunchers out there—including a firejoemorgan.com author who wrote a guest piece in Sports Illustrated last week—who believe baseball writers rank somewhere between morons and idiots for voting Rollins as MVP over David Wright, who had a higher VORP. The stat people seem to believe VORP—a Baseball Prospectus statistic that stands for Value Over Replacement Player—defines a player, but why haven’t many of them championed last year’s VORP leader (Hanley Ramirez) as MVP instead?
I assume the stats guys favor Wright because he played for a contending team. I guess the rule is this: Highest VORP wins unless the VORP champion is playing for a loser.
If Wright’s offensive stats were slightly better than Rollins’, and I will accept that they were, especially considering the respective ballparks they play in (VORP accounts for ballparks), shouldn’t Rollins get points for playing a superb shortstop compared to Wright’s slightly-above average third base? And shouldn’t Rollins get credit for showing extraordinary initiative and leadership? For helping his team barrel into the playoffs from seven games back with 17 to go, as opposed to Wright’s team, which perpetrated a historic choke?
Repoz
Posted: February 25, 2008 at 04:35 PM | 24 comment(s)
Related News: General, Sabermetrics, NY Mets, Philadelphia
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I'm not one of the more well-read primates when it comes to popular media and knowing the specific authors' tendencies and slants, but Heyman could at least take 5 minutes to understand the meaning of the statistic before decrying it. Obviously I'm "preaching to a choir full of preachers" as someone so aptly put it yesterday, but the "rule" is more like the following: "highest VORP wins unless that player's defense completely negates his lead in value added to the team," which Hanley's unfortunately did. It's nearly incontrovertible that at least one of Wright/Pujols/Chipper got jobbed.
shouldn’t Rollins get points for playing a superb shortstop compared to Wright’s slightly-above average third base?
How does he write these two sentences so closely together and not make the connection?
Totally agree. I was looking for an email address on the site, but conveniently it wasn't listed at the end of the article.
What you might be remembering is the "if you have to pick a player from a playoff team, surely you could pick Holliday or Utley over Rollins" argument.
Yeah he was. I was a Holliday supporter, mostly for the novelty of it all (Coors hitter, LFer with great defensive stats, Rockies all of a sudden becoming a playoff team) and because my guy, Utley went down for a month. IIRC, Wright probably had a majority of the posts support him.
I also don't really have a problem with Rollins winning, even if Wright, Utley and five or so other players were better than him last year. It's not worse than the Morneau vote, at least Rollins, who pretty clearly is the Phillies' team leader, fit a pretty good storyline.
I do have a problem with Heyman pretending that defense and baserunning and other things did not factor into the discussions that use VORP.
What you might be remembering is the "if you have to pick a player from a playoff team, surely you could pick Holliday or Utley over Rollins" argument.
I suppose I'm wrong then. I guess I kind of agree with Heyman, which feels wrong. I don't think a player should be excluded or even penalized because his team choked, especially since Wright did so well in September. But, when players are very close statistically, I would think the award should go to the guy with the successful story instead of the one that ended in dismal failure. That's Holliday, though, not Rollins.
ASSUME: When you ASS-U-ME, you make an ass out of you and an ass out of me.
Who else developed VORP, and where is it published?
VORP was on Usenet.
(EDIT) My TSN comment was overstating things, but there are many people who calculate their own VORP. VORP is not a BPro-only statistic.
Heyman's article reads like a usenet post from the mid/late nineties from somebody that just stumbled onto alt.sports.baseball at 2am and decided to take on all these crazy statheads.
Over time, VORP has emerged as the favored metric.
If only these stathead ostriches would get their heads out of the sand. Bow down to the King!
For what it's worth, both had a 12.5 WARP-3.
I wrote a response to Heyman here. Feel free to critique it.
None of whom can carry Chipper Jones' jock.
I love it when sportswriters question the manhood of the athletes they cover. I also remember the Mets saying a lot last year after Rollins piped up, but that would torpedo the narrative, wouldn't it? For instance:
“Good for him,” Carlos Beltran said of Rollins’ boast. “What’d they win? What’d they win last year?”
That took about two seconds to find on Nexis.
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