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Are some stats totally meaningless?


NewMarketSean

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So a guy with 7 wins in (most of) a full season with, say, a 3.70 ERA (25% better then league-average) and a 1.21 WHIP with 6.3 strikeouts per nine innings isn't any good?

That's the problem. Wins can tell you something, because to get a bunch of wins you have to be somewhat consistent at pitching well. However, because wins are so dependent on the offense (and in the modern era on relievers) they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Just like runs batted in is so dependent on having runners on-base.

So what? Any great power hitter is gonna have a ton of RBI. If a guy doesn't have a ton of RBI, he's not a great power hitter. You just need to show sense about how you use stats, and that's true no matter what the stat is. For a SP, W's for a given season are like a month's worth of OPS for a hitter. You can use any stat properly, and you can use any stat unwisely.

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So what? Any great power hitter is gonna have a ton of RBI. If a guy doesn't have a ton of RBI, he's not a great power hitter. You just need to show sense about how you use stats, and that's true no matter what the stat is. For a SP, W's for a given season are like a month's worth of OPS for a hitter. You can use any stat properly, and you can use any stat unwisely.

Well, put three good on-base guys in front of Luis Hernandez, and then three Luis Hernandez's in front of a great power hitter, and see who has more RBI.

The latter guy will still have more, but it won't be as far as I'll bet you think :P

You are right, though, about context, which is the whole point. No stat is meaningless if it is used in the proper context.

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I 100% disagree. Wins are a team stat ONLY. A guy that gives up 5 runs a game on a team that scores 8 runs a game is not better than a guy that gives up 1 run a game on a team that scores 0 runs a game.

It is totally ridiculous to give wins and losses to players. Better pitchers are more likely to have more wins but the wins and losses mean nothing to how good the pitcher actually is.

You win and lose as a team so you take the wins and losses as a team. You don't give them to one player.

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So what? Any great power hitter is gonna have a ton of RBI. If a guy doesn't have a ton of RBI, he's not a great power hitter. You just need to show sense about how you use stats, and that's true no matter what the stat is. For a SP, W's for a given season are like a month's worth of OPS for a hitter. You can use any stat properly, and you can use any stat unwisely.
No, you can't speak in absolutes. Some great pitchers don't put up great win totals. Some great power hitters don't put up great RBI totals.

Some bad pitchers put up great win totals. Some crappy hitters put up great HR/RBI totals.

Especially over one year. Over the course of many years your "absolutes" ring a bit truer, but still aren't absolute.

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To an old school baseball in its pure form proponent like myself, AVG is the single most important stat of all as far as an individual player. It is what they give a Batting Title for and it is the magic 400 target that is the toughest goal that is possible to achieve in sports. How any true baseball fan can say it isn't important is beyond belief?:confused::eek::(

Using batting average as a measure of offensive ability is akin to answering the question "how tall are you?" with "my legs are 33 inches tall".

No stat is meaningless or useless, but many don't answer the question they were supposed to answer.

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When you're trying to compare players' date=' more information is helpful, and it's nice to be able to look at AVG/OBP/SLG/HR/SB/ERA/K/BB/etc, but it can be awfully hard to sort players while looking at that volume of information. I think it's pretty handy to have stats that attempt to take all of these factors into account, such as EqA+ or WARP3. I would never want to stop using those other statistics, but it's good to have a quick way to look at one statistic and get an idea where a player stands relative to his peers.

Tell that to Bert Blyleven.

I could not disagree more strongly with that philosophy. The value in traditional statistics is that they are easily calculated. Accuracy of evaluation is sacrificed for ease of computation. These days, we have these wonderful machines called computers, and we no longer have to make that sacrifice. We can pore over massive amounts of data and determine the actual value of different events in terms of run-scoring potential. We can enter a complicated formula once, and allow a spreadsheet to calculate results thousands of times over, rather than plugging away with a calculator or slide rule. We don't have to use OPS, and just assume that OBP is equally as valuable as SLG. We can use the data to get a closer idea of their relative value. And if that means our equation has an ugly 0.485 * X^1.3 in it, so what?

And why should AVG be any more valuable just because you know how to calculate it? Unless you distrust MLB and feel the need to calculate everyone's stats on your own to verify them, I don't see the value of having the formula memorized. It is certainly useful to know what sorts of factors go in to the equation, but I don't feel the need to know it exactly.[/quote']

I think you're missing his point re: WARP. He's saying that because no one actually knows how to calculate WARP besides BP (as far as I know), he doesn't put much weight in it. I don't either. It might be the most useful stat ever, but how are we supposed to know if we can't at least see what the stat is? The whole thing's very silly to me, and I feel like a fool trying to use WARP and VORP to defend a player when I don't even know what WARP and VORP really is.

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Yep, that's what I meant.

I've always found BP sort of odd. I liked their Between the Numbers book (even though some of it was far from statistically rigorous) and their annuals, but they're sort of too smart for the casual fan but not hardcore enough for the hardcore statheads. They've got some good stuff, but my impression is that they don't do a lot of the heavy lifting you see from guys like Tom Tango or some of the people who write for THT. I suppose that makes them a bit like Rob Neyer and Bill James - accessible enough to the masses while being smart enough for the hardcore fans - although I don't think their authors are nearly as good as those two.

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I think fielding percentage and errors are close to useless stats. I'm not real impressed with saves either. Re: traditional fielding stats, any stats that relies on the discretion of a scorekeeper cannot be unbiased and cannot be flawed. Re: saves, well why not have another stat for someone who successfully finishes the 8th inning? and the 7th inning too? While the end of the game has some significance, it still doesn't say enough about the productivity of the player.

Batting average is still useful and at least correlates somewhat to overall hitting performance. (There aren't that many Rob Deer/Adam Dunn types that can be productive with a batting average under .250.)

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I think you're missing his point re: WARP. He's saying that because no one actually knows how to calculate WARP besides BP (as far as I know), he doesn't put much weight in it. I don't either. It might be the most useful stat ever, but how are we supposed to know if we can't at least see what the stat is? The whole thing's very silly to me, and I feel like a fool trying to use WARP and VORP to defend a player when I don't even know what WARP and VORP really is.

They may not publish tutorials on how to calculate VORP and WARP, but it's pretty transparent. Most modern overall offensive metrics (I mean counting stats like RC, linear weights, VORP) are very close once you figure out what replacement level is assumed to be. VORP is, more-or-less, runs created above a replacement level set at somewhere around an offensive winning percentage of .150 or .200. WARP is more-or-less VORP scaled to wins, with Clay Davenport's fielding ratings thrown in. WARP2 is that adjusted for league difficulty. WARP3 is WARP2 adjusted for schedule length.

It's not rocket science.

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It represents a large portion of a player's offensive ability but not all of it.

Taking walks... having a good eye... is a skill whether you like it or not. If it this wasn't the case, then everyone wouldn't walk at all. Average neglects this.

Average also doesn't factor in how many bases a player is able to touch with each hit too. Is a player who hits 50 singles better than a player who hits 15 singles and 20 doubles?

Average may not be useless but it should never be used as the main tool to gauge how good a player is IMO.

I quoted your post because I think it is a generally held position on avg. Drungo stated it well on page three with the analogy to height, but avg is very important if for no other reason than this: a walk is fundamentally inherent on the failure of the pitcher, not the hitter. It is the product first of the failure of the pitcher, and secondly on the hitter - but it starts with the pitcher. That's oversimplified, but just to stretch it the tiniest bit more: the walk is the result of a pitcher's A.) inability to throw a strike, or B.) unwillingness to throw a strike. Perfection is impossible and so A. is common, but what AVG does is cause unwillingness in the pitcher to throw strikes. At that point it is incumbent on the hitter to determine whether or not to swing, and if he is able to put the ball in play so that it does not result in an out. Many hitters swing foolishly. Many pitchers fail.

After I first started reading about stats and realized how many people considered AVG useless, especially on message boards, I also realized that many fans look at avg as a product of luck rather than skill. A hitter's ability to consistently put the ball in play at a high avg indicates that that player purposefully puts the ball where his opponents are unable to get him out. Many players are not able to do this. Furthermore, some players are so good at putting the ball in play at the detriment of their desire to take walks, and thus adversely affects their OBP, by attempting to put balls into play that they cannot otherwise do successfully. Also, OBP is the product of AVG, BB and HBP.

Finally, the current perspective on stats will fundamentally change when Bill James or anyone else successfully designs a metric to measure "clutch". The reason I personally do not use stats as the end all be all right now, is because they do not consider context. Most stats are the product of large sample sizes and therefore the size itself trivializes context (which is the situation with W-L records for pitchers). Stats right now are not specific enough to tell us what we most want to know - how good a player is. There are a lot of circumstances that arise during the season in which players do not perform at peak level, and it's by choice or by lack of concentration. No one stat is going to tell you all you want to know, but be careful not to disregard them.

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They may not publish tutorials on how to calculate VORP and WARP, but it's pretty transparent. Most modern overall offensive metrics (I mean counting stats like RC, linear weights, VORP) are very close once you figure out what replacement level is assumed to be. VORP is, more-or-less, runs created above a replacement level set at somewhere around an offensive winning percentage of .150 or .200. WARP is more-or-less VORP scaled to wins, with Clay Davenport's fielding ratings thrown in. WARP2 is that adjusted for league difficulty. WARP3 is WARP2 adjusted for schedule length.

It's not rocket science.

Sure, it's pretty easy to see that WARP1 is just something like BRAR + FRAR all divided by some factor (~9.0 or 9.1). But since we have no idea how BRAR or FRAR are calculated, or how they handle their timeline adjustment, why would anyone look to that over something like lwts or runs created or uzr or rzr?

Not to mention that using replacement level fielding and replacement level hitting as the definition of replacement level sets the bar way too low (Luis Hernandez is a win above replacement??). Their definition of replacement is something like a 17 year old Domincan signee playing their first year in the Gulf Coast League.

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Sure, it's pretty easy to see that WARP1 is just something like BRAR + FRAR all divided by some factor (~9.0 or 9.1). But since we have no idea how BRAR or FRAR are calculated, or how they handle their timeline adjustment, why would anyone look to that over something like lwts or runs created or uzr or rzr?

BRAR is calculated similarly to linear weights or runs created. Otherwise the results wouldn't be so close. I see BP's offensive metrics as more-or-less the same as RC or linear weights for most applications.

UZR and RZR are only available for recent seasons. They're useless in analyzing Eddie Collins or Sam Thompson. Or Brooks Robinson. If you want to compare anything but very recent players defensively you're stuck with FRAR or Fielding Win Shares, unless you're going to use something much more obscure and less available.

Not to mention that using replacement level fielding and replacement level hitting as the definition of replacement level sets the bar way too low (Luis Hernandez is a win above replacement??). Their definition of replacement is something like a 17 year old Domincan signee playing their first year in the Gulf Coast League.

As long as you know what the assumed replacement level is you can factor that into your analysis.

I use WARP and VORP sometimes because it's pretty well known, it's set to an understandable scale, and it's easily available online.

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