DrungoHazewood

I say it's utterly and completely impossible for anyone to accurately judge the defensive performances of all 1000ish major league players and even bucket them into letter grade categories, much less anything more granular. On TV the camera isn't paying attention to any particular fielder before the pitch, so you can't tell positioning. You can't tell jumps. And no human can watch a substantial part of every teams games in person and pay attention to individual defensive efforts. Without the metrics your hardly more informed than old Gold Glove voters being asked to free-associate the best fielders at the end of the season. First base... Palmeiro! Uh, sir, he DH'd all year... Well then, assistant coach, fill out this form, I have to go... do... stuff...

Hays has mostly played LF/RF. The position adjustment for LF/RF is -7.5 runs per full year. The positional metrics, either DRS or OAA have him as average or a touch below average overall. So (defense + position) results in him being slightly below average compared to an average MLB fielder across all positions. There are some adjustments in these metrics over time as the methodology improves, but that has little or no bearing on this.

I'm not 100% sure here, but I think what's going on is that Vespi's two scorless innings came in extras starting with a man on second. If I'm reading things right, Baseball Reference adjusts their run context and expected run values to account for this. They also include some leverage adjustments, and Vespi's leverage index is almost 4.00, which is about as high as leverage index gets. So the 0.9 seems to come from a tiny sample of scoreless innings in a perfect storm of context and leverage. It's likely that for the rest of the year he won't accumulate 0.9 WAR.

I think that when you start to tentatively climb back towards respectability you need to be more judicious in trading everyone with current value for players who might be good in 2-3 years. Especially players like Mullins who would still be under team control and probably of some value in 2-3 years.

Aren't you the one who thinks it's almost criminal to just keep winning 50 or 60 games a year, year after year? If they trade Mullins tomorrow the chances are they just punted two or three 2022 wins when they replace him with someone like McKenna.

Mullins isn't even arb eligible until after this season, and isn't a free agent until 2026. The so-obvious-you-don't-need-to-state-it disclaimer is, yes, if they get an awesome offer you listen. But there's no rush to either trade or extend him. He's on pace for about a 3-win season. If you'd told me 18 months ago that was happening I'd be overjoyed.

A huge problem is that both dWAR and oWAR include position adjustment so they aren't additive. oWAR + dWAR doesn't equal WAR, but many or even most people don't get that and use the metrics incorrectly. The second problem is that they encourage people to think about WAR incorrectly, to assume that WAR applies to components rather than total production. I understand why Sean Foreman did what he did, but it has caused far more confusion than clarity.

- Statcast OAA measures where a ball is hit and its hang time, how far the defender was from that at the start, whether he made the play, and how often an average MLB player would make the play on that type of hit when he was that far from the ball. That certainly doesn't suck, it's exactly what you want. - The other metrics are somewhat more crude, but they are at least systematic and account for a number of biases. - Your eyes only see part of a subset of plays in the game you are currently watching, and cannot account for how other players would do or any number of biases. What you're doing is watching a series of runners in the 100m dash one at at time, you've decided that your stopwatch isn't accurate enough so you're going to fall back on watching some of the runners and subjectively deciding who wins by who looks the fastest.

All eyes.

Neither the Fangraphs nor bb-ref versions of WAR incorporate WPA.

Playing third doesn't make you any better or worse. The position adjustment for third is +2.5 runs per full season. If you can't hit and you can't field you'll still have a poor WAR. In 2013 Flaherty was a +1.2 win player in about half-time play because he wasn't completely awful at bat, was a positive defender and a +2 run baserunner.

There's some SSS weirdness going on here. By bb-ref the Orioles are 6.8 wins above replacement among non-pitchers and 5.8 for the pitchers. Total of 12.6. A .294 winning percentage is about 15 wins, so that would imply that the O's should be a 27 or 28 win team. But they're actually a 21 win team. And their runs scored and runs allowed imply they should be a 21 win team. I don't really know the reason for the delta, but my guess is a combination of random variation, the new park effects, and the generally reduced offensive environment are contributing factors. Just don't ask me to break down the cause-and-effect.

WAR is wins above replacement. There is no replacement level individually for offense or defense, without the context of the other (plus baserunning and avoiding DPs). Here's an example: You have a shortstop who is three runs above average (+3) on defense. Do you play him at shortstop over another guy who is -3 on defense? You can't answer that question without the rest of his contributions. If the first player is Mark Belanger as a hitter and a runner, and the second is Cal Ripken, you play Cal. If the first player has a .625 OPS and is an average runner and the second hits like a pitcher, you play the first guy. "Replacement Level" is the level where there is usually freely available talent. Guys just hanging out in AAA unable to regularly get a callup on a decent team. You can't make that decision without the totality of the player's contributions. Nobody makes playing time decisions just based on defense*. The only way dWAR has any meaning is if you assume average hitting/baserunning/DPs. Or alternately, if you're comparing two players with dWAR you have to assume they have the same hitting/baserunning/DPs. But instead of going through those mental gymnastics you should just look at the whole player, or just use defensive runs above/below average. * Okay, they do for pitchers. No one cares about how pitchers hit or run or really even field, not even in a non-DH league. But they're the special case.

Sure, just like you don't need home run totals to tell if a guy is a home run hitter, you can watch him for 20 or 30 games and try to remember if he hit some homers. You don't need wRC+ or OPS to tell if a guy is a good hitter, just say "sure, Austin Hayes, Mike Trout and Yordan Alvarez are all good hitters, they all regularly bat in the top half of a major league lineup". But you need metrics if you want to go beyond broad-brush subjective comparisons.

Thank you for providing the necessary FAQ so that when someone misuses dWAR we'll have a handy explanation to point them to. Additionally: remember, there is no such thing as defensive wins above replacement, or offensive wins above replacement. Only Wins Above Replacement for the whole player and all of their contributions. dWAR is really just defensive runs above average plus positional adjustment, which always needs to be put in context of the player's hitting, baserunning and proclivity to avoid double plays. If you want to isolate a player's defensive value, just use their defensive runs above/below average preferably from a variety of sources. Statcast OAA is almost certainly the best of the metrics.

The BBWAA didn't really have much problem when they rejected him 15 consecutive years. In 1982 he was 22nd in the voting, behind Don Larsen, Elston Howard, Lew Burdette, Harvey Kuenn, and Maury Wills. In '84 he got 18% of the vote when his peer Luis Aparicio got 84%. His last year, 1992, when you usually get a big bump he got 42%.

The BBWAA guidance on HOF voting includes: It seems to me that the second part says you shouldn't be inducted for one specific performance like pitching a perfect game, which I take as including hitting a single, important home run. But I suppose doing that and getting tagged with "best double play pivot ever" has him covered.

All is right with the world. Ford is still playing for the Long Island Ducks at 45. He's played for them almost every season since 2009.

Not exactly. In the UK big soccer matches are often not televised. I don't know all the details, but I saw many Spurs fans posting their bitterness over not being able to watch the season-ending match against Norwich without a VPN. Someone in North London couldn't watch the game legally while I could in Maryland, while the guy in London could watch the O's while I can't.

They're not concerned about any of that since the average MLB fan is 88 years old and hasn't gotten the hang of touch-tone dialing or setting the clock on their VCR yet, so they don't even know streaming is a thing. Much less streaming blackouts.

You're assuming some kind of logic out of an organization that blacks out the Orioles from MLB.com in Asheville, NC. Or like six teams in all of Iowa, a state with no MLB team. That combination of spite, greed and incompetence is capable of almost anything.

This is probably a little tongue-in-cheek, but yea, by a mile. The guys listed as non-starters on bb-ref have something like a 50 or 60 OPS+? 2021 NL pitchers had a -19 OPS+, a slash line of .110/.149/.140. An average NL pitcher hit considerably worse than Chris Owings.

Here are all the players listed as primarily pitchers who also caught: [code] Rk Player G From To Age G PA AB R H 1B 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+ TB GIDP HBP SH SF IBB PosV Team 33 Ed Crane 391 1884 1893 22-31 391 1497 1409 199 335 257 45 15 18 84 29 86 191 .238 .283 .329 .612 85 464 2 1O2/3 BOSBROBUFCINCKKNYGNYIPROWHS 34 Fred Mitchell 202 1901 1913 23-35 202 619 572 55 120 97 16 7 0 52 8 0 22 92 .210 .245 .262 .508 52 150 5 11 123H/54687 BOSBROBSNNYYPHAPHI 35 George Britt 279 1920 1944 24-48 279 774 698 78 187 154 26 6 1 69 13 48 .268 .320 .327 .647 80 228 6 22 0 12354/7698 ABCBBSCAGCBECCBCOBDMHGHILJRCNDSEN 36 Mike Ryba 250 1935 1946 32-43 250 292 247 18 58 52 6 0 0 24 0 0 22 31 .235 .297 .259 .557 55 64 5 0 20 0 12/H BOSSTL 37 Heliodoro Diaz 120 1926 1935 21-30 120 312 276 22 58 47 9 0 2 25 1 25 .210 .276 .264 .540 44 73 0 11 1/2379 CSWNYC 38 Bill Harman 15 1941 1941 22-22 15 14 14 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 .071 .071 .071 .143 -59 1 0 0 0 0 /H12 PHI [/code] None since WWII. It's been a long time since anyone did it with much regularity. Fred Mitchell played in the early 1900s and was kind of a two-way utility player. In 1903 he started 28 games, going 11-16 with a 4.48. In 1910 he caught 62 games for the Highlanders, after spending 1906-08 or 09 in the minors apparently contuining as a two-way utility player. The other way round, catchers who pitched some... dozens and dozens up through today.

I watch a lot more soccer than baseball these days and I have Hulu (which comes with ESPN+ and Disney), Paramount+, Netfilx, sometimes Apple TV (when Ted Lasso has a new season out), Amazon Prime, probably forgetting one or two others. I can watch almost every Premier League game, lots and lots of Bundesliga and La Liga and Belgian Jupiler Pro League, tons of MLS matches (including DC United for free on their site without any subscription), Scottish Premier League, and English Championship matches. I can go to BR.de or sometimes YouTube and watch a fair number of German 3. Liga matches for free. Hulu and ESPN+ have insane amounts of college sports of all different conferences on, I could have watched the MEAC title game or the Vanderbilt spring football game with no problem. I can see almost every Virginia Tech football game, and half their basketball games. I think watching every NFL game would be relatively trivial if I cared to. Recently I've watched some Virginia Tech softball regionals. What can I not do with all that? Legally watch the Baltimore Orioles except when one of the Apple TV games coincides with the times I've paid up so I can watch Ted Lasso. If I really want to watch the Orioles I can fire up my media PC, navigate with the browser over to MASN and then use my late uncle's DirecTV login. But I'd never do that, as it would theoretically deprive the Angelos family of tens of dollars of revenue they're not going to get from me anyway.

That's not really it. For example, here are all the 35-year-old non-pitchers in the majors in 2022: Rk Player OPS+ Season Age Team Lg G PA AB R H 1B 2B 3B HR RBI 1 Michael Brantley 129 2022 35 HOU AL 39 169 147 16 41 29 8 1 3 16 2 Jose Abreu 113 2022 35 CHW AL 42 180 157 22 37 21 11 0 5 19 3 Darin Ruf 99 2022 35 SFG NL 42 172 142 25 33 25 5 0 3 17 4 Andrew McCutchen 94 2022 35 MIL NL 32 141 128 16 33 24 6 0 3 17 5 Brandon Crawford 88 2022 35 SFG NL 40 166 148 21 33 23 5 1 4 19 6 Charlie Blackmon 86 2022 35 COL NL 38 167 149 21 33 19 7 1 6 18 7 Alcides Escobar 54 2022 35 WSN NL 31 111 104 9 22 18 3 1 0 7 8 Jason Castro 34 2022 35 HOU AL 18 49 40 3 5 3 2 0 0 1 9 Martin Maldonado 29 2022 35 HOU AL 33 114 100 13 12 7 2 0 3 10 10 Manny Pina 8 2022 35 ATL NL 5 17 14 1 2 2 0 0 0 2 There are only 10. Sure, the bottom three are catchers, but the median OPS+ of the other seven is something like 95. There are five 38-year-olds including Chirinos and Kurt Suzuki. But the other three are OPSing 102, 87 and 60. But then you have to remember that the 38-year-old age group also includes players like Jeremy Hermida, Melky Cabrera, Prince Fielder, BJ Upton, Troy Tulowitzki, etc who would be dragging the group down further than the catchers if only they hadn't quit playing baseball years ago.