Now, Baseball Prospectus is an organization, and organizations, by definition, tend to degrade a bit over time and exposure. I’m halfway done with the Baltimore Orioles chapter in the new book already—roughly seven percent through the book—and I can’t help but notice it doesn’t have the same spark it used to. The book is better-edited (by Cecilia Tan and Bleacher Report’s King Kaufman) than it used to be, but it’s also a little tamer and safer. The book used to be fairly merciless (and undeniably hilarious) in its criticism of archaic front offices and players hanging around because of “veteran presence” rather than actual baseball skill, but it’s nicer now, more conventional, more team-friendly.
It’s also less Socratic. The intro chapters on each team used to be freewheeling musings on what a baseball organization was, what a team’s philosophy was, what it means to be a member of that organization. Now the team intros have been dramatically shortened, and chopped up into easy-to-digest but less meaty portions that aren’t all that different than a slightly smarter version of an old Street and Smith’s preview magazine.
The book is still essential—I’m still reading every word of it—but somehow less dangerous. Less outsider. Less … fan. It’s as if BP is self-aware and knows every front office in baseball has a copy now. You can’t help but lose a little of your edge once you’re no longer fighting against anything, once you’re accepted.
But that evolution is a small price to pay for what BP did, what BP is still doing. There are people in the world of sports, be it media or corporate, whose nods to fans are cursory, obligatory, dismissive, who act like fans are just heedless consumers ready to be led around. Fans prove the opposite every day. Baseball Prospectus isn’t the only example of it, but they’re one of the best. Now if you excuse me, I need to get back to my book. What is Nick Markakis’ deal, man?
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1. Maury Brown Posted: February 27, 2013 at 04:25 PM (#4377212)Dissenting just to dissent is as boring as conforming just to conform.
Nothing in particular.
For what it's worth, I chuckled.
This is crazy talk. Snark and humor never get old. I wish I were better at them. Heck they are the reason I followed BBTF so much and eagerly early on, and click on certain threads.
But this latest incarnation is worse. I'd rather stale than tame. The individual player sections seem completely devoid of snark. Not neccesarily a bad thing, and I wouldnt mind that much if it was replaced by insight. Unfortunately not the case.
But my real issue is the team articles are just awful. I could write each one in a half hour without doing any research. This years book is basically just a "they lost this player and this player and signed this player and traded for this player, they still need a SS who can hit and a 5th starter, and they have a decent change at making the playoffs, the end". No analysis, no insight, none of the slightly unique slanted takes on a team's past or future that I came to really appreciate.
I think the article might have nailed it. Are too many writers eyeing front office jobs to leave themselves open to being wrong? Concerned with upseting people they know? You'd think the annonymous nature of each teams intro section would help. It also could just be a dilution of talent through attrition or poaching or whatever. Maybe we were just spoiled.
Been getting every annual since I won one in a predict-the-season contest by Lee Sinins. Jesus christo that was a long time ago. Really hoping this is a one year aberration.
Are you... I just... you know... seriously??
Perhaps there are fewer archaic front offices and worthless veterans?
As to the book, I would rarely read a team essay anyway, but yes, they were usually actual essays that had an interesting angle to them.
I basically leaf through the player comments, as I've always done.
What's the count of BPro guys currently working in front offices? There's Woolner in Cleveland, Click in Tampa Bay, Goldstein and Fast in Houston (despite neither having any professional playing experience, Fast is pencilled in as the #3 starter and Goldstein will get a crack at short).
I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.
Just ordered my book today, last year was the first year that I didn't get a book, since 1998(?) At $15 it's a great buy, even if the quality drops down to Street & Smith magazine level.
That is what I loved about Bill James and Baseball Prospectus, is that they would go in all different type of directions when they delved into a subject. They weren't formulatic, you didn't have a default style to any particular section or team. I would hate it, if the team essays were "Here is what they have on offense:" "Here is their pitching:" "Here is their front office/intangibles etc:" for each team.
EDIT: gah, darn, coke I guess.
While they probably do, front offices surely passed BPro long ago and there's nothing in there that they don't know already. Possibly a small bit of analysis they hadn't thought of yet. Certainly no team is going to pay the least bit of serious attention to the essay written about them -- they might read it for laughs. (Hmmm ... that sounds more insulting than I mean it. I simply mean the team obviously knows more about itself than BPro does so there's nothing for them to gain.)
I gave up the annual about a decade ago so I'm not one to ask really but it mainly sounds like they're trying to be more "professional" which, yes, can be very dry but also, when done right, accurate and doesn't make claims they can't support.
I guess I'm just one of the few statheads that never liked BPro all that much. I appreciated that they provided advanced stats freely and relatively easy to search when nobody else was and of course some of their articles were good -- it was certainly valuable. But it was terribly inconsistent and I never felt the writers had any more insight than the folks around here did ... and those writers seemed illing to ignore the numbers when they wanted to.
It was often funny how many of their articles would cite OPS+ constantly and ignore their own EQA and VORP. They'd have articles focusing on how dumb some front office was for passing over or trading away some hitter because he was a good hitter when their own WARP said the guy was so bad on defense that he wasn't particularly valuable. That lack of buy-in by their own writers hurt them I thought -- you don't want uniformity of opinion among your writers but they should at least be agreeing on the basic methodology and then work from there. You can't have an article proclaiming the superiority of your new measure then have your writers not use it 95% of the time.
At this stage, advanced stats are all over the place and the FOs are generating their own. It's quaint that RDP still cites EQA (not that there's anything wrong with that). I can't recall the last time I saw a good piece of BPro analysis linked here -- is that a paywall thing?
And that's fine, there's no need to be on the cutting edge of baseball quant analysis. They've always been writing for fans no matter how much they might have been fueled by thinking their audience was baseball front offices. They just aren't likely to inspire too many budding sabermetricians at this point.
I think this hurt the BP stats, but it was better for their writing. I think it's always better to use stats that everyone knows and knows the scale of. Fangraphs writers use their wOBA and their ERA- and I have no idea (hyperbole for wOBA, literally true for ERA-) what those numbers represent while ERA+ and OPS+ are on a scale that anyone can understand.
I like EQA, but I don't ever look at it any more. OPS+ does a good enough job for me for now, that the extra precision isn't necessary that often.
Agree, but I do think that ERA- should replace ERA+. It's a better stat(one of the few times I'll say that about a fangraph stat, it seems) it might take me half a season to get used to it, but the learning curve would be worth it, for the better scale.
Possibly - the guys at BPro who do the kind of quant work you'd consider cutting-edge and interesting (Russell Carleton, Max Marchi, etc) tend to be behind the paywall, but often hard-core quant research pieces here aren't linked/are lost, so it could just be that, as well. As a comparable gauge, Tango links to BPro a fair bit (on his blog right now, three of the top seven articles about baseball are BPro pieces), and he's not the type to be taken in by a glossed-over piece intended for less sabermetrically-inclined fans.
In the late 90s a clueless FO had much to learn from BP. Now with fewer clueless FOs that is not the case.
As for people here being as smart or insightful as the BP writers, sure, but people here don't focus their efforts towards analyzing a particular team or trade the way BP writers do. (Not that I read BP anymore. I liked to read the founders, but they stopped contributing for the most part years ago, and once Sheehan left I was done reading. But I still subscribe to have access to the player comment archives, which I quote here from time to time.)
Well, people here are citing OPS+ frequently, and certainly EqA is a step up from that. I particular cite it when significant SB value is involved.
Lowest ERA-'s for any starter? The Big Train, and a skinny kid named Pedro.
at 67, but I like the fact that the gap isn't as big between Pedro and others, as I thought that the gap gave a false sense of dominance. The 67(2.93)-70(3.12) difference between him and Roger seems much more closer to reality than the 154 vs 143.
and those writers seemed illing to ignore the numbers when they wanted to.
I absolutely hated the player comments that totally ignored the BPro stats printed directly above them.
Yeah, entertaining is good. You can quote me on that. I still buy the book, the price is right, but I don't really read it anymore. I'll use it to look up a player I don't know about and that's pretty much it.
Bingo. Its role in my life as well, for about the past 5-10 years. You're watching a game and you want to learn something about a team's 6th reliever or backup middle infielder or something, and it serves as a nice reference manual. I think they've long ago said anything of interest they're ever going to say. It's hard to stay relevant for as long as they have been around.
I also think that there's a general trend towards taking things way too seriously. I know I get some tut-tut disapprovals from some of the more serious, wonky types when I suggest that sportswriting, even using sabermetrics, is entertainment first. But then again, I tend to think of the media job as the goal itself rather than a stepping-stone to a team job. As I see it, the cereal *is* the prize.
As for BP, they are no longer subversive, but then again no one is. The last time seriously groundbreaking research was being done was 2 years ago at the Hardball Times and 1-2 years ago at BP (after they poached Mike Fast and Colin Wyers away from THT, ########). Right now the majority of teams likely have better saber departments (comprised largely of former BP and THT writers of course, as well some other writers for BtB, StatSpeak, etc.), but that's only because they poached all of the good internet analysts!
BP also seems much more scouting centric now, and there also seems to be an improved focus on quality of writing. So basically we're seeing BP and ESPN continue to merge closer together (which isn't a bad thing). But I'm guessing we're not gonna be seeing a lot of groundbreaking research for awhile (unless someone takes off the ground running and doesn't have much interest in working for a team).
since i am not interested in lining the pockets of that type of nancypants i will continue to get my baseball info from the folks here and elsewhere.
Mike Groopman with the Royals
Jeremy Greenhouse with the Cubs
Chaim Bloom and Dan Turkenkopf with the Rays
Jason Pare with the Indians
I may be forgetting one or two somewhere.
Because these stats are plenty good enough.
How is saying that those stats are "good enough" and refusing to learn and use newer, better, more useful stats much different from sports writers and announcers who stick with BA/HR/RBI and ERA/Wins because those are "good enough" to those people? So you're using the stats of 5-10 years ago instead of the stats of 20-30 years ago. Is that much better, if you just get stuck there and refuse to adapt when better stats become available?
Full Disclosure: I work part-time for BP, although I don't write and my personal thoughts may not reflect those of actual authors, like Maury :-)
The problem with your argument is that going from AVE/HR/RBI ---> EqA or is a much bigger leap than going from EqA ---> wRC+.
EqA gets you damned close. Increasing your precision from there is like upgrading from a $25,000 car to a $26,500 one.
Your lack of need for a $58,000 car disturbs the market.
Yes.
We don't have EqA anymore, we have TAv. It's not just a rebadge anymore, TAv has a different methodology than EqA did. (And if you can tell me ANY gains from going to wRC+, I'd be shocked.)
Bb-ref blows away fangraphs in speed, ease of sorting etc. If someone wants to use fangraph stats, it's a challenge to get the information. You are right it's somewhat inertia, it's also somewhat because of the attitude of the people over at fangraphs have turned people off of it. WPA is ####### useless, and when you see article after article bringing it up in an MVP discussion, you really can't trust anything else those people have to say about the subject. Factor in their moronic methodology for pitchers war and you have two of their headlining stats that are clearly crap, that it makes you not trust the rest so much.
But ultimately if their stats was easily navigatable and fast, we would probably work around it, even with all the other flaws, but utimately it's just not worth the effort for that little bit of gain in accuracy.
It's mostly this for me. I try to put a priority on the search for absolute truth in baseball, but at a certain point my priority on what is easy takes over. Baseball-Reference is a great site to navigate, especially with my crappy internet connection. (Come to think of it so is BTF). Whenever I go to fangraphs to get some pitch f/x data, or any of the other wonderful things they have, I invariably get mildly annoyed before I get what I'm looking for.
And that points to another problem, I get trying to improve everything as much as you can, but when a stat changes(and eqa in it's day changed formulas year to year) then it's hard to rely on that stat. I understand that sometimes an error in logic can happen in developing a stat and that you have to change it's methodology, if it happens once every few years, that is one thing, the constant changing, means you can't use it as a reference for articles that someone is writing that they expect the reader to come back at a future date. If I'm going to use a stat, I have to feel fairly confident it's 1. going to be around in the future 2. that it's unlikely to change radically.
Gary Huckabay had an enormous influence on the tone (despite being one of the first founders to move on) and he was very much hit or miss. Dave Pease is still there and I wish he'd write more. An old usenet fave. (Of course it wouldn't be hard to find a snarky piece by Dave, but his signal to noise ratio was high and he has a sense of humor that come through nicely)
Your opinion on this is so ####### stupid its incredible. FIP WAR provides a good benchmark if you want to isolate repeatable skills, it offers one component of value and it's incredibly useful for what it tries to do. Looking at FIP WAR and RA WAR is a great combination to understanding a pitchers true value. WPA is basically like a better version of RBI's. WPA/LI is better obviously, but WPA is perfectly good at telling you what it's trying to do.
Even if those stats were worthless, wRC+ and ERA- are clearly superior to their alternatives. So this spiel about FanGraphs navigability is petty ########. It takes, what, 2 seconds longer to load up a FanGraphs player page than a B-R one. Plus FanGraphs has velocity and movement data, and other useful stuff especially for pitchers. Get your head out of your ass!
Edit: obviously you can do whatever you want, but it's not FanGraphs fault that you don't like using their stuff.
I don't think this can be overstated. For conversational purposes if the general audience doesn't understand the stat then you have to spend your time educating about the stat. For reasons outlined above BBRef is the go to site for most of us so their stats are going to be easier to discuss. If I'm explaining to Ray why he's wrong about Ichiro! it's easier to use OPS+ than something less commonly used. At least we're speaking the same language.
I think Dan's point in 39 is valid but as Ray accurately points out the differences between the newer metrics in terms of usefulness is small enough that the general point doesn't change if you go from OPS+ to wRC+ or TAv or whatever else you might prefer
If I want a page with every player in the league, I can get one very easily on BR. Fangraphs breaks it up into 25-player-at-a-time chunks.
I think lack of exposure hurts wOBA greatly. Its actually scaled to OBP, so it should be a fairly intuitive stat to use. If a wOBA would be a good OBP then its good. The linear weights system feels right, a hit will be on average worth x amount of runs, and setting the whole thing to a rate stat makes sense. There's really know reason that wRC+ should be used that much more than wOBA except that one is much better known and set to the very familiar scale we've gotten used to. I think anybody who read Tango in the Book explain wOBA would find it their preferred stat.
As to ERA-, I'm not sure what your concern about the scale is. Its just like ERA+ only in reverse, and computed correctly as opposed to ERA+.
I think there are different uses for different stats. If I'm actually doing calculations, I'm not going to be using OPS+ or wRC+ or wOBA. I'm going to use linear weights divided by PA. The scaling part of wOBA is only to make it conversational. If I'm just posting a comparison here, I'm going to use OPS+ because there might be people here who have no idea what a .360 wOBA means.
wOBA and wRC+ are basically measuring the same thing though ( except that some versions of wOBA don't have a park adjustment, including FG's implementation I believe), with wRC+ being on an incredibly intuitive scale: 100 is average, 110 is 10% above average, etc. It makes far more sense than OPS+, while also being based on Linear Weights, so it actually applies proper values to each batting event, rather than OPS+ which derives from OPS and is thus "in the ballpark" but not really reflecting an accurate scale of a hitter's production. Why use wOBA, based on a scale of OBP from a specific point in time, when you can use something with the same underlying methodology but a far more intuitive and useful scale?
TAv and the versions of wOBA with park adjustments built in are similar stats, and definitely also preferable to OPS+, and if someone prefers the scale of one of those it's hard to fault personal preference. But personally I don't see how scaling to BA or OBP is nearly as useful as a scale with 100 as average and linear scaling such that a player with a 130 is 30% above average.
It may just be personal to me then, because I consider wOBA a back of the napkin type calculation along with FIP.
Perhaps my point was misstated. I wasn't arguing that people should use wOBA above wRC+. I was really just clarifying what wOBA was. OP said he had literally no idea what a good wOBA meant. I personally prefer the aesthetics of wOBA above the aesthetics of the + stats, but I see no real reason why wRC+ is inferior. That's why my quote said, "...set to the very familiar scale we've all gotten used to." I acknowledge thats a feature and if people prefer it because of that feature then they should use it.
The navigating of the website isn't a petty issue, it's a real problem, and it's the number one reason why Baseball-reference stomped MLB.com, espn, cbs and every other baseball stat site ever. This isn't just me, this is a vast majority of baseball fans on the web. Heck I'm not the first person to even say it on this thread, nor was I the last.
As to the other issues, sorry but wpa is horseshit. If it was used and presented properly it would have been one thing, but the fangraph idiots fell in love with it, got a few writers to fall in love with it, and it's past the point of overstaying it's welcome (at the sabr convention in St Louis, there were people in the stats discussion arguing that WPA is the only stat you need, it was pretty pathetic) Anytime I see an article where WPA is presented in the top 10 stats for an argument for a player, you know you have crossed to the stat version of baseball writers moronicness. It's great when the writers have a clue, but it's sad when that clue is corrupted by something so insidious as WPA.
As far as fip war...ehh. It should never be used as a backwards evaluating tool. It should never be used to evaluate the value of a players season. It should never be used in MVP or Cy Young discussions. It makes the assumption that all the assumptions to get to the point that we are at statistically speaking, is 100% accurate, therefore it's 100% accurate. It is one of those stats that makes the basement jokes valid. Fip has a purpose, fip war does not.
Era- is easy. As mentioned above, it is era+ only reversed and properly scaled. Meaning that 100 is still considered average, the difference is, just like era, the lower the number, the better. It's then scaled better and gets rid of the pesky problems with negative numbers that existed with era+.
There is no argument that era- is better than era+ in every sense of the matter.
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