Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Anatomy of the Red Sox batting order - WEEI | Rob Bradford
(www.weei.com)
Interesting stuff.
Read More...John Farrell and Torey Lovullo looked down toward the Twins bullpen. They saw some stirring, as Minnesota lefty reliever Brian Duensing had grabbed a ball and tossed it a few times.
Then Duensing sat down. It was then the Red Sox manager and his bench coach knew they had put the right people in the right places.
“It’s a good feeling,” Lovullo said after the Red Sox’ 12-5 win over the Twins Saturday night, “when all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly.”
The puzzle Lovullo ...
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< 1 2 3 >Take for instance the question, "Who is the best 3B in baseball right now?" The ensuing conversation has a lot to do with where it is happening. On the internet you'd expect a bunch of stats to be cited, maybe some tables, projections thrown about.
At the local pub, the same question is really just an opening to "let's talk about third basemen for the next little while". Names are bandied about, virtues and flaws of each discussed...no one's really expecting a final definitive answer.
Exactly, and something like "well, I just love Chase Headley" after a bit of discussion is sort of okay (though your friends will probably make fun of you for a while). I struggle to imagine someone on the internet being okay with "man, I can't stand Adrian Beltre's dumb face at all" as a reason for him being "bad" (whereas, with friends, it would be one of those recurring things everyone knows).
Basically, I think that it's a lot more nuanced than "statheads are arrogant and hate the mainstream", because it's all about where/with whom you're interacting.
Dude, stop being such a c*cksucker.
RBI is a 'value metric'. It captures some of a player's value to his team in the past. Those runs counted, and some of them won games. It is useless for telling whether said player will be just as valuable in the future.
You know, that value.
Except they didn't. The "value" is far more binary than you're comfortable admitting, and that's a temperamental and philsophical pose more than anything else. (See post 33). If a guy gets a single and doesn't score a run, he didn't create any value. Put another way, the guys on base need the indispensible event caused by the guy who gets credit for the RBI for their getting on base to mean anything of "value." (Which isn't of course to say that we shouldn't measure what they did outside of scoring runs, or that there might not be some miniscule residual effects from making the pitcher pitch from the stretch or use pitches.)
RBIs measure events indispensible to scoring runs and runs are the measurement by which games are won.
You must really hate soccer.
There is also the value of moving up someone already on base, if that guy scores. E.G. an inning of K, Single, Single (runner to 3rd), Sac Fly, K. 3 guys helped score that run.
Unless they score in one of the number of ways where no one gets an RBI.
And without them getting on base, there is no RBI to take credit for. And if a batter does not manage to get an RBI, there is often still a chance that the next guy will get it. As far as indispensable events go, getting on base is far more indispensable for creating the run than the RBI was.
Yes, there are problems with RBI as a statistic. But saberists overstate its shortcomings. A list of a season's RBI leaders is a list of good hitters.
Also, removing the part that the player has no control over to my mind is trying to pretend that baseball isn't a team game. On a team, some of the value a player adds is going to be dependent on the achievements of his team-mates.
Did you just sing the praises of productive outs? Getting on base and running the bases well isn't inherently more valuable than driving the runner in. Driving the runner in - advancing the baserunner all the way home - is really, really valuable. Because it scores a run. Which is how the game is won. A sac fly is more valuable than a 3-3 day with two doubles but no runs scored.
I assume you mean in the WAR/FIP/stat war threads. Like may second gen feminists, I find the third gen to be overly full of itself.
What if those 3 doubles drove runs in and/or moved people to 3rd who subsequently scored?
Just to be annoying: so is a list of a season's strikeout and GIDP leaders.
And led to the pitcher throwing more pitches to you, and the guys behind you because he had to be more careful, leading to a quicker exit?
Singing the praises is an overly strong description of what I said. I didn't say anything about how much value each of those parts should be credited with, just that they are each greater than zero, so crediting all of it to the guy who got the RBI makes no sense.
And yes, on average the guy who got the RBI probably deserves more credit than the guy who made a productive out (although I never said he had to make an out, you can move a runner over just fine without giving up an out). But by far the biggest chunk goes to the guy who got on base.
And a flyout to LF with nobody on base is worth even less than that.
If you want to count RBI's on a team level, knock yourself out. Although I don't really see what that adds beyond simple runs scored. As an individual player statistic, it adds virtually nothing, and is misused so frequently, that it is actively harmful.
Only if you extend WAR to the kind discussed in political threads. Also, glass house and stones, regarding being overly full of oneself.
By the way, Manny's 165 RBI came in 1999, a whole year after Sosa's 158 so I don't know I'd say that was a number we hadn't seen in a while.
Overall I think there is plenty of blame (and praise) on both sides of the debate and as stated upthread context matters a bunch.
This reminds of a little pet peeve of mine: when people say things like "Bob Welch's 27 wins were the most since Steve Stone won 25 in 1980"
When you put it that way, there really is no room for discussion.
Well, you are welcome to try and make a case that I am wrong.
Point taken. I was less than precise. 3/3 with 3 doubles that drove in no runs and scored no runs, advancing no runners. In general terms, you want the kind of guys who can go 3/3 with 3 doubles on your team. If that is his true level of production, he's going to score and drive in runs more often than he goes empty for those days. But on that given day, when he goes 3/3 with 3 doubles but scores none, drives none in and contributes no runners advanced (that later scored), he's less valuable than a guy that pinch hit in the 8th and lofted a shallow fly ball to a weak armed CF, scoring a runner from third on the sacrifice. Because real runs are more valuable than potential, theoretical runs. And the real run on the board is more important than working the pitcher's pitch count, etc. Runs win baseball games, not potential runs.
Contrarianism is the straw that stirs the drink in political conversations. Also, 90% of the posters in those threads are wrong 95% of the time. Fish in barrels, really.
In this regard, I've lived outdoors for years.
To do that, I would have to disprove to you that the misuse of RBI is so frequent as to be actively harmful, even before I did anything else. No thank you, that's a labour of love and I don't love you or RBI that much.
If you follow this thinking than you simply end up with "count da ringz." Because if getting on base only has value if you score an actual run, then the actual run only has value if you win the game (a 5-0 loss is the same as a 5-4 loss in the standings), and the win only has actual value if you make the playoffs, and production in the playoffs only has value if scores actual runs in actual wins in series that your team wins; and thus, the only value produced was by members of the championship team and all other players in the league were equally valuable at zero. Therefore, count da ringz.
If I have gold in my house it is valuable whether or not I sell it, because I could sell it. A man on base is valuable because he could be driven in.
Yes. The rest is wrong, only insofar as the playoffs are not strategically (historically) the purpose of the season. (The pennant is/was.)
But yes, the run only has value if it scores,and a 5-0 win counts just as much as a 5-4 win (or loss.) There are no tie-breakers based on run-expectancy charts.
Ok, your leader-board for "value" for NL players in 1967 would be a bunch of Cardinals, followed by hundreds of players tied at zero?
If you spend $5 on a sandwich but drop it down the sewer before you eat it, did that $5 have no value?
Er, weren't you just chastising people for allegedly thinking they're smarter than everyone else?
This would seem to turn into a quibble on the meaning of "valuable," at this point. Everyone acknowledges in postgame interviews that the player who went 0 0 0 1 (while his superstar teammate went 3 0 3 0) "kept scrapping and did the little things today." But they're still little things.
That's a little harsh, but you've just stated the fundamental reason Most Valuable Player awards have tended to go to players on division or pennant winning teams. A lot of what happens in baseball games does, in fact, turn out to have very little real "value." Some games are, in fact, more important than others, and going 4-4 in a desultory Tuesday night loss in September when your team's 30 GB and the other team's 20 GB doesn't really add any value at all. (Maybe it does in a philosophical sense -- dedication to craft, persistence in the fact of adversity, and all the rest, but not in a baseball sense.)
The blithe assumption that contribution to theoretical runs "created" is the true measure of value is simply not accurate. It's an assumption.
Not really. Because I don't have a leader-board for value for NL players in 1967. I mean, who the hell does that sort of ####?! The Cards won the pennant in 1967. (I guess they did, from your example. I'd have to look it up. Did they?) That is all. The Braves won the World Series in 1995. I don't have a list of "most valuable players from 1995." I have a memory of Dave Justice going deep in Game 6 and Marquis Grissom tracking down the 27th out. The concept of a historical leader board is foreign to me.
Nope. Sunk costs are sunk.
Somewhat. More precisely I was snarkily lecturing people on why other people hate them. Casual fans don't hate stat nerds because you're smarter than they are. They hate you because you're arrogant twits. Whether or not I am an arrogant twit myself has no relation to the question.
Nobody thinks of themselves as part of the 90%, but chances are that you are.
Only if you use a different definition of "value" than the fairly explicit definition outlined in the voting guidelines for the MVP award, i.e. "strength of offense and defense".
This is a terrible thread, and I already regret posting in it, even before I hit the submit button.
What threads are properly valuable? Do they have a high ThrWAR or something? Good lord. If you don't like the thread, go to another one.
well do you believe it or not?
If you can assign value for within one game, why can't you do it for the whole season?
The same thing goes for a leadoff single. What happens after that doesn't affect the value of that particular single. What happens afterward affects its meaning in a narrative sense, and affects what happens to the team as a whole, but that particular single is over and done - its properties can't change. A leadoff single doesn't produce a run, it only gives you a better chance to score a run or multiple runs. If the team doesn't drive the runner home, it doesn't mean that the single had no value - just like if you drop the sandwich down the sewer it doesn't mean that the $5 didn't have value.
Very few. This one, though, has negative value, in that the universe is actually a worse place simply because it exists.
Probably the best thing said in this thread. I'll do that now.
We do. We call them "wins" and they're the only real currency of the game.
But the single changes the value of subsequent events, like another single. So RBI offer some measure of the value of some of those events. Possibly not the best measure, and possibly not of equal value to Runs. But, then, how do we divide the value of a BIP out between the pitcher and the fielders? At the moment there could be several players each getting an Assist on the play, plus the Putout, while the pitcher gets nothing. Now, we actually think there is some value to Assists and Putouts, because we use them in fielding systems. One probably could do something similar with RBI in the context of a team hitting system, but sabermetrics has gone in a different direction, and given us WPA/LI, which doesn't need the RBI. So now RBI gets dismissed, and the information it does provide is found elsewhere.
No, no. Rings are the only real currency of the game. You won't to arbitrarily define wins as the endpoint, only because that's what suits you.
For individual position players and for individual events within a game? in #60 and #71 you had no problem with assigning value that way, why not add it up for the whole season?
Yes, but without a time machine the subsequent events don't change the value of the single.
I'm aesthetically aligned to the traditionalist notion of long seasons and pennant chases, yes. But that's okay. You're not wrong, per se.
You don't have to do calculus in your head to chase down a fly ball.
Well there's your error, chief. Subsequent events absolutely change the value of previous events. It's called history, and until such point as we do not live in a linear, progressive timeline your desire to interpret Newtonian events via quantum theory is just daft.
So then we're back to you thinking that only plays by the first place team in wins for the first place team had any value.
So the $5 bill never had value because you only ended up with a hypothetical sandwich, not a real one?
No, I wouldn't dispute that.
I'm suggesting that for every given run, its value needs to be assigned among those players who contributed towards it. So the batter who drives in the run accumulates some of that value, which was traditionally tallied by RBI. If we dismiss RBI outright, we're discarding some a player's value to his team. It might not be a 50-50 split between the baserunner and the man who drove him in, but I don't think it's 99-1 either.
Exactly. If a guy hits a leadoff single but doesn't score, the single has no real value (*) and "creates" nothing. It's, of course, not his "fault" that he didn't score an actual run, but that's neither here nor there.
Now, that doesn't mean we don't want to keep track of how many hits a player gets, whether or not they lead to runs -- which is why God(s) created "hits" and "batting average."
So then we're back to you thinking that only plays by the first place team in wins for the first place team had any value.
Or it means that the term can be defined so narrowly that it really doesn't work conceptually. Which brings us back to real runs and real wins as the appropriate storehouses and carriers of baseball meaning.
(*) In the sense that the term is used sabermetrically. It may, naturally, have aesthetic or entertainment value.
It had unrealized value, eventually lost. Just like the stranded leadoff single.
Not just that, but if he hits a leadoff single and does score, the single has no real value under your system, because it never produces a real run. Leadoff singles only produce hypothetical runs. They don't change the scoreboard. If the runner scores, it's never the leadoff single doing it: it is separate and distinct events.
unrealized value is value - in this case $5
This is of course basically what WPA does at the wins level, rather than runs level. Doing a linear weights equivalent for runs is trivial, and will distribute the value according to the actual level of contribution, instead of giving it all to the RBI man. There is no need for RBI.
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