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Tuesday, May 16, 2023

How this one-time MVP found new life in Chicago

Six weeks into the season, the deal has paid off and then some. Bellinger is hitting .288/.360/.530, good for an OPS+ of 141 that makes him 41% above league average as a hitter. His April was so good that it was his best month in four years. Throw in the defense that’s been as advertised, and he rates as one of baseball’s dozen most valuable position players, at least so far as FanGraphs is concerned.

So he’s “back,” right? Well, no—not in the way you think. This version of Bellinger is a quality player, but one that in many ways hardly resembles the ascendant superstar who won the NL Rookie of the Year Award in 2017 and the NL MVP Award in 2019. As he nears his 28th birthday this summer, we’re seeing yet another of the seemingly endless iterations of Bellinger. Will this one last?

RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) Posted: May 16, 2023 at 09:15 AM | 3 comment(s) Login to Bookmark
Tags: cody bellinger, cubs

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1. Walt Davis Posted: May 16, 2023 at 05:04 PM (#6128494)

Six weeks into the season, the deal has paid off and then some. Bellinger is hitting .288/.360/.530, good for an OPS+ of 141 that makes him 41% above league average as a hitter.

Or about 20% but whatever!! What's a factor of two beteen friends? (And of course it doesn't "make" him anything, it "means" he is ...)

Anyway, off to a very fine start but ran into the wall yesterday.

2. Eric J can SABER all he wants to Posted: May 16, 2023 at 05:47 PM (#6128500)

Bellinger is hitting .288/.360/.530, good for an OPS+ of 141 that makes him 41% above league average as a hitter.

Or about 20% but whatever!! What's a factor of two beteen friends?

My tentative understanding is that OPS+ is scaled the way it is because this way an OPS+ of, say, 141, corresponds to a hitter whose estimated run production is roughly 41% above league average.

3. Ron J Posted: May 17, 2023 at 06:36 PM (#6128776)

You can test readily enough at the team level. Compare A team's OPS+ to their runs per offensive innings and adjust using the 3 year batting park factor. All of that info is readily available. Bear in mind that the standard error for OPS+ is not small. In the low 20s at the team level the last time I checked. And that it pretty substantially underrates the relative value of OBP.

And the scale wasn't chosen for anything beyond the desire to put league average at 100. The people who came up with OPS+ never tested how well it works as you move away from 100. Among other things, convenient online databases didn't exist before the Lahman database and OPS+ predates those. It was always intended as nothing more than a quick and dirty way to park adjust OPS.

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Tuesday, May 16, 2023

How this one-time MVP found new life in Chicago

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