Mike, you missed the most important flaw.

When evaluated as a team, each team is pretty much equal. There are a few differences, like errors and assist rates, but every team makes 27 putouts a game. FR for a team vary by only a few a year.

Palmer ignored the hits, the team failures. Were he to modify FR even just to make the denominator (PO-SO+H-HR), he would greatly improve his accuracy, even without all the silly weights. That way, good defensive teams would have better FR totals than bad defensive teams.

Charles, there would be an added problem in making the team totals differ in any substantial way. It creates a "double-count" problem for pitchers (since they are given all the credit for defensive events in Palmer's system), making the team LWts come out strangely... good defensive teams get better, and bad defensive teams get worse. As it is, at least the team totals are consistent.

The problem could also be fixed (somewhat) by removing some of the credit a pitcher gets for certain defensive events.

Craig's point is correct. Palmer didn't include hits in FR because they are already included in his pitching runs totals, and the intent was for the individual events to be additive. That's not so much a flaw in FR as it is a choice on Palmer's part as to how to assign the responsibility for hits - and traditionally, 100% of the responsibility for hits has been assigned to the pitchers.

Speaking of responsibility for hits:

It is my opinion that there are only two ways that one can legitimately make this assignment without resorting to a guess:

1. The pitchers are 100% responsible for all hits;
2. The pitchers are only responsible for hits that leave the ballpark, and the fielders are 100% responsible for all other hits.

-- MWE

"It is my opinion that there are only two ways that one can legitimately make this assignment without resorting to a guess:

1. The pitchers are 100% responsible for all hits; 2. The pitchers are only responsible for hits that leave the ballpark, and the fielders are 100% responsible for all other hits."

The trouble is, neither of those is true. The biggest problem in evaluating fielding, now that play-by-play, direction-and-distance data is available, is to divvy up responsibility for all those events where the ball is put in play, but not out of the park.
Cheers,
Alan Shank

Alan:

Certainly, the availability of "play-by-play, direction-and-distance data" could make it possible to "divvy up the responsibility". But I don't think we need to do that. My belief - which I think is supported by a lot of evidence, including analysis of available play-by-play data, Voros's work, the tendency of pitchers to sustain success more readily when they restrict the number of balls put into play against them, the existence of what James called the "Tommy John" class of pitchers - is that the pitcher's level of control over the results of what happens when a ball is put into play within the ballpark is small enough so that we can effectively ignore it, and treat the fielders as being 100% responsible for the outcome when a ball is put into play within the ballpark.

I think we can gain a lot more by proceeding down that path than by expending a lot of energy trying to figure out something that we will find it extremely difficult to validate.

-- MWE

I really don't believe that the pitcher has so little effect on the outcome of balls put in play that it can be ignored. The difficulty of studying this issue is that is requires multiple-year, batter-vs-pitcher data that is difficult to compile. If we could get about three years' worth of batter-vs-pitcher data, then split it up into pitcher-only (K, BB, HBP, HR) vs. ball-in-play (everything else) and plunk it into the XR formula, maybe we'd get closer to an answer to this. My guess is that:

1. the ball-in-play outcomes are more random than the pitcher-only
2. they are obviously affected, to a considerable extent, by the quality of fielding
3. we would still see pitcher influence, in that the results for a given team would vary by pitcher by more than a random amount

We'd want to compare Boston's ball-in-play data with different pitchers, inlcuding Pedro, etc.

Cheers,
Alan

After re-reading Voros' article, I had another thought. If a pitcher has some control over how hard the ball is hit, this would likely show up more in the numbers of doubles and triples than in all hits. That's why I want to use xRuns, so that the value of the hits is considered as well as the number. We would be looking at xRuns/PA.
Cheers,
Alan