Friday, May 24, 2013
HHS: Autin: Miguel Cabrera to the max
(www.highheatstats.com)
Read More...Baseball Fates, please note (please?): I’m just playing around here! None of these things will actually come to pass; it’s just a way of expressing how hot he’s been so far.
Miguel Cabrera finished Thursday’s game #45 with a .391 BA, .701 slugging, 1.168 OPS, 14 HRs, 55 RBI, 39 Runs, 72 hits, 129 total bases, and an OPS+ well north of 200.
The projection multiplier from 45 to 162 is 3.6, so….
Heads up, Hack? Bourn’s gift to Miggy (plus Thursday’s daily dinger) put him on a ...
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1 2 >And “saving runs by being a super fast outfielder with great instincts” is the same thing as Elias junk stats. Sure thing, Mitch. I said in the other thread than I didn’t care that Cabrera won but now I just wish he hadn’t so we could see Mitch whining instead of this smug ########.
I would bet my pay for the next year that the average "stat geek" likes to watch the game of baseball far more than Mitch "I chatted with some people who weren't there" Albom. What a dick.
"Cabrera led his team to the World Series and Trout faded down the stretch" was the main argument for Cabrera on a non-baseball site I visit. Well, technically, the argument was pro-"Cabrerra."
Mike Trout is a more exciting, dynamic, and just plain fun player. And that sense of fun and entertainment has, ironically, been overlooked by many who've framed him as the darling of the stats shut-ins or whatever in order to argue Cabrera's case.
Mitch Albom can take his tedious straw man horseshit and go crawl up his own ass. Where he'd no doubt continue to watch less baseball than the nerds he impugns in this priggish festival of nonsense he calls a column.
This MVP result was significant because it was the first time that people who should have known better -- such as most of the people who post here -- threw their tacit support to a player they knew to be undeserving because of the silliness of something like the triple crown.
Ha ha, who some writers vote on for some honor they created is significant (not only that, but significant because of the reactions to those votes by people here) but actual postseason games and series are meaningless exhibitions? your obliviousness is hilarious.
He led the league in SLG and OPS and his team won the pennant. It wasn't just the Triple Crown.
Know about it? He was there in the crowd, with Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson!
Yes, it was.
This straw man makes me want to stab myself in the eye. This is the exact thing they parade out in game broadcasts and the like, and the exact thing "stats nerds" are railing against.
One of these is irrelevant to the discussion because of the timing of the vote.
Kind of like "First Triple Crown in 45 years"...so if someone got the TC last year, then Cabrera doesn't deserve to be MVP. Yeah that makes sense.
[5] This is ridiculous. A player's underwear color does not reflect their true talent
Jason Giambi's magic gold thong says hi.
[12] We just can't kill this "looking more closely at stats = how the guy hit on even-numbered Thursdays" thing, can we.
Blame Elias Sports Bureau.
Selective advanced stats=bad.
Avg, 7th inning and on in September and August=good.
FTFY
Concur.
Hello Dunning-Kruger effect. A statement like this is symptomatic of widespread societal innumeracy. Far too many people are unable to grasp what should be fairly basic mathematical concepts and they betray this ignorance with statements that are 180 degrees from what "stat geeks" truly think. Where would you even start to educate someone like Albom?
I know the rules forbidding political talk in non-political forums, but this same innumeracy was behind the "unskewing" of polls that made several prognosticators look foolish a week ago. Math as art rather than science.
Since he's already disproven the maxim that 80% of succcess is showing up, I'd prefer to start on an easier case.
When "stat geeks" are so insistent that Trout was not only better, but "HE'S NOT THE MVP, OH THE HUMANITY!!!" better, I'm not sure Albom's the one in need of being "educated."
Most Valuable Player. I can't decide what it means but it would definitely seem to imply that they are not, necessarily, the best player. This is sort of the "We could have finished last without you", syndrome.
I have no problem with Cabrera and would have had no problem with Trout.
There is absolutely no reason that an analysis of who was the most valuable player should focus on how valuable the player's teammates were.
It is not the Most Valuable Team award.
Nor is it the Most Valuable Player Who Has The Most Valuable Teammates. Nor is it the "most valuable player on a good team." Nor is it the "most valuable player on a team that made the playoffs by the least amount."
Nor is it "most valuable player who happened to finish first in a silly grouping of three categories."
People want to focus on everything except the actual question. That is diseased, irrational thinking, and should be called out as such.
Thinking about it I’m getting a bit miffed now that they benefit off our work and then do nothing to validate our work to the general public. Screw you Theo Epstein!
"Diseased"? I can see irrational (pretty clearly), but "diseased"? Really? "Diseased"?
its the only way.
Even with an anonymous poll, though, they will say what is in their best interest to have people think rather than what they really think.
Sean Quixote. I like it. Has a nice ring to it. :D
Yes, diseased. If I asked you which home on your street had the highest value, would you add up all the furniture, possessions, money, and cars inside each house and base your answer heavily on that?
That is what people do with their bizarre interpretations of the words "most valuable." It is not sane.
This is the important point I think. For all the ######## that the Alboms of the world want to do sabermetrics or whatever you want to call it has made substantial inroads in the business of Major League Baseball. There are varying degrees of influence but every tea, in baseball uses this stuff to build their roster.
I don't think it lines up too well for four main reasons:
1. Rickey had 48 points of BA on Fielder, and it's not hard to imagine a sportswriter saying "the higher BA balances out the RBI difference and the steals balance out the home run difference" and so arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons.
2. An argument that Trout was as good or better than Cabrera as a pure hitter requires some adjustments for park effects that are both somewhat complicated and somewhat uncertain. In 1990 no one would've had to argue that Oakland was a lot tougher place to hit than Detroit, and Rickey had a higher unadjusted OPS than Fielder anyway (not that anyone was looking at OPS).
3. In 1990 Fielder was some unknown guy who'd only hit in Japan and Rickey was an established star, just the opposite of the 2012 situation. I'd bet that if Trout was an established star he'd have won the thing.
4. Rickey didn't have anything like Trout's defensive reputation. He was probably undervalued, but he also wasn't ever as good as Trout is at the moment.
EDIT: Reason #5 is that Oakland won 103 games and Detroit only won 79, proving that Rickey is more of a winner or something.
More seriously, sports columnists already know they're smarter than their team's front office. Polling front offices to find that they use WAR or similar metrics would only prove their point.
I think this might be a good starting point for discussions.
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