Two Myths I'm Ready to Debunk

[rolliefingers]

Carlos Pena signed for $800K. The Orioles put some bait on the hook there, but decided not to reel him into the boat. Tampa Bay's entire roster cost them $24.1 million. Of that figure, $13.9M is tied up into Crawford, Fossum, Iwamura, Young and Seo. The other $10 million or so goes to twenty guys. Some of those players would be adequate replacements for Bako, Gibbons, Payton and others. The extra $69 million we spent on payroll has gotten us one extra game in the standings ahead of Tampa Bay.

The Florida Marlins spent $30 million, of which nearly 2/3 is tied up in Willis, Cabrera, Olivo, and our old pal, Julio. Once again, this leaves about $10 million invested in over twenty players.

The Washington Nationals payroll of $37.4 million, $26 million of which goes to Johnson, Guzman, Cordero, Lopez, Schneider, Kearns, and Ayala. The story once again is the same with $10-$11 million tied up in twenty other players. Dmitri Young was signed for $500,000.

Somehow these three teams, and others, manage to primarily fill their rosters with guys making under a million dollars a year. Myth?

To be fair, not all of those guys are "freely available"

Here are two guys we could use right now: Jack Hannahan and Jack Cust. Both were acquired for a song.

[DrungoHazewood]

Myth 1: there is a class of freely available "replacement level" players out there, who can easily replace the bottom few guys on a team's roster with almost no detriment to the team's performance.

Myth 2: you can look at a player's minor league stats and translate them into how they will do/would have done if they were playing in the majors.

Look at what has happened over the last few weeks and tell me again how these two myths are true.

If you replace "a team" and "a player's" with "the Orioles" and "an Oriole player's" I'd agree with you more.

If you really believe that both of these things are complete myths for the rest of major league baseball, or even for the Orioles in another year, I think I've failed horribly over the last five or six years of writing for the Hangout.

[DrungoHazewood]

Oh no.

Take cover. The calvary is coming...... They will gang up on you and stampede you into submission.

That Eli guy said basically the same thing......and we know what happened to him.

Yea, he had the truth pointed out to him.

[TonySoprano]

To be fair, not all of those guys are "freely available"

Here are two guys we could use right now: Jack Hannahan and Jack Cust. Both were acquired for a song.

Not all of those guys, I agree, but the fact is there are adequate pieces to the puzzle that can be acquired and other teams manage to find them. I again cite the examples of Pena, and Young both of whom were available last offseason.

[RShack]

Myth 2: you can look at a player's minor league stats and translate them into how they will do/would have done if they were playing in the majors.

No one has said this is 100% accurate all the time and you are making it sound like people have said that.

It depends on which flavor of MiL numbers we're looking at:

• If a guy has good MiL numbers, there is a great tendency to assume he will be decent at the ML level. The proper thing to say is that he may-or-may-not be decent at the ML level, but that good MiL numbers make it plausible that he *might* be.
• If a guy has poor MiL numbers, the great tendency is to assume that he has exactly zero chance of being decent at the ML level. I think that's probably true in the normal case, but nobody wants to talk about whether there have been significant exceptions, and I don't know if there have been or not.

Either way, the tendency is for people to talk *as if* the MiL numbers are valid predictors of ML performance in each individual case. This is the one very-basic and very-major error in how stats are routinely used around here: confusing the normative case for a large group of players with an individual case. If there was such a thing as "the Stats Police", this is the one crime for which many of our otherwise-very-knowledgeable stats people would be busted about 50 times per month.

The fact that nobody quite says that it is guaranteed is true, I grant you that. But that's more of a legalistic point than a meaningful point. Whether somebody explicitly says "it's guaranteed" is irrelevant to the general assumptions made here about such things. In my experience, MiL numbers for an individual tend to be used as if they are valid predictors of ML performance, and people who challenge that assumption are often treated as ignorant heretics and get gang-tackled. Then, when somebody like Eli causes a huge fracas, he is then pointed to as if he is representative of everyone who doesn't treat MiL stats like Biblical revelations.

[Sports Guy]

It depends on which flavor of MiL numbers we're looking at:

• If a guy has good MiL numbers, there is a great tendency to assume he will be decent at the ML level. The proper thing to say is that he may-or-may-not be decent at the ML level, but that good MiL numbers make it plausible that he *might* be.
• If a guy has poor MiL numbers, the great tendency is to assume that he has exactly zero chance of being decent at the ML level. I think that's probably true in the normal case, but nobody wants to talk about whether there have been significant exceptions, and I don't know if there have been or not.

Either way, the tendency is for people to talk *as if* the MiL numbers are valid predictors of ML performance in each individual case. This is the one very-basic and very-major error in how stats are routinely used around here: confusing the normative case for a large group of players with an individual case. If there was such a thing as "the Stats Police", this is the one crime for which many of our otherwise-very-knowledgeable stats people would be busted about 50 times per month.

The fact that nobody quite says that it is guaranteed is true, I grant you that. But that's more of a legalistic point than a meaningful point. Whether somebody explicitly says "it's guaranteed" is irrelevant to the general assumptions made here about such things. In my experience, MiL numbers for an individual tend to be used as if they are valid predictors of ML performance, and people who challenge that assumption are often treated as ignorant heretics and get gang-tackled. Then, when somebody like Eli causes a huge fracas, he is then pointed to as if he is representative of everyone who doesn't treat MiL stats like Biblical revelations.

Just like in the blow it up argument...No one is going to change how they phrase things to suit your ridiculous purposes.

No one has EVER SAID it is 100% guaranteed...That is really all that needs to be said.

Look, it is very simple....If you suck in the minors against inferior competition, you are likely to suck in the majors against the best in the world.

If you play very well in the minors, you likely have a clue as to what you are doing and that is more likely to carry over to the majors.

This doesn't need to be said every time....You SHOULD have enough common sense to be able to figure these things out.

So, until someone says it is 100% guaranteed that they will have success based on the MiL stats, you have no leg to stand on...No one is going to rephrase things for you.

[DrungoHazewood]

It depends on which flavor of MiL numbers we're looking at:

• If a guy has good MiL numbers, there is a great tendency to assume he will be decent at the ML level. The proper thing to say is that he may-or-may-not be decent at the ML level, but that good MiL numbers make it plausible that he *might* be.
• If a guy has poor MiL numbers, the great tendency is to assume that he has exactly zero chance of being decent at the ML level. I think that's probably true in the normal case, but nobody wants to talk about whether there have been significant exceptions, and I don't know if there have been or not.

Either way, the tendency is for people to talk *as if* the MiL numbers are valid predictors of ML performance in each individual case. This is the one very-basic and very-major error in how stats are routinely used around here: confusing the normative case for a large group of players with an individual case. If there was such a thing as "the Stats Police", this is the one crime for which many of our otherwise-very-knowledgeable stats people would be busted about 50 times per month.

The fact that nobody quite says that it is guaranteed is true, I grant you that. But that's more of a legalistic point than a meaningful point. Whether somebody explicitly says "it's guaranteed" is irrelevant to the general assumptions made here about such things. In my experience, MiL numbers for an individual tend to be used as if they are valid predictors of ML performance, and people who challenge that assumption are often treated as ignorant heretics and get gang-tackled. Then, when somebody like Eli causes a huge fracas, he is then pointed to as if he is representative of everyone who doesn't treat MiL stats like Biblical revelations.

Minor league numbers, when put in the proper context, predict major league performance as well as past major league numbers. They're the best publicly-available data we have, and they're extremely useful in gauging how players will do in the future.

Only the misinformed will ever give you guarantees about anything in the future.

Individual minor league records, in context, are a valid predictor of how someone will do in the majors. There's a statistical distribution of possible outcomes from that minor league record, but that doesn't make it any less valuable a tool.

[DrungoHazewood]

Look, it is very simple....If you suck in the minors against inferior competition, you are likely to suck in the majors against the best in the world.

If you play very well in the minors, you likely have a clue as to what you are doing and that is more likely to carry over to the majors.

That boils it down to its essence pretty well.

[PoorMike]

I'm not really that passionate about either side of this, but I've seen plenty of people here say that "Player X's MiL #'s tell me he'll be better than the 2007 Jay Payton" or something similar. That sounds like someone is pretty convinced of the #'s, if not 100% convinced.

..but yeah, if you suk in the MiLs with inferior comp, you'll probably struggle up here. If you do well, you are a candidate for success, though it's not guaranteed.

[rolliefingers]

Just like in the blow it up argument...No one is going to change how they phrase things to suit your ridiculous purposes.

No one has EVER SAID it is 100% guaranteed...That is really all that needs to be said.

Look, it is very simple....If you suck in the minors against inferior competition, you are likely to suck in the majors against the best in the world.

If you play very well in the minors, you likely have a clue as to what you are doing and that is more likely to carry over to the majors.

This doesn't need to be said every time....You SHOULD have enough common sense to be able to figure these things out.

So, until someone says it is 100% guaranteed that they will have success based on the MiL stats, you have no leg to stand on...No one is going to rephrase things for you.

Exactly. Shack, I think you're a little too enamored with semantic arguments. And by a little, I mean a lot.

[hoosiers]

Myth 1: there is a class of freely available "replacement level" players out there, who can easily replace the bottom few guys on a team's roster with almost no detriment to the team's performance.

Myth 2: you can look at a player's minor league stats and translate them into how they will do/would have done if they were playing in the majors.

Look at what has happened over the last few weeks and tell me again how these two myths are true.

Nice post, Frobby. I've been saying as much for most of this year.

There are replacement level guys out there. As Dave suggests, finding these guys from among the wannabes is significantly harder than some here have suggested. The primary lesson, however, isn't to look harder to find these guys, the lesson is to avoid investing so much the Jay Paytons and Melvin Moras of the world. In Payton's case, his upside was limited and an average season from him does not justify the salary. In Mora's case, the player's age suggested likely deteriorating production and the contract hints at being a fan favorite and being paid for past production that exceeded his earlier contract.

Translating minor league stats into major league production is very difficult and I'm often surprised at the care-free and confident manner that some of the statheads here claim how well certain minor leaguers could do in the majors.

[rolliefingers]

Translating minor league stats into major league production is very difficult and I'm often surprised at the care-free and confident manner that some of the statheads here claim how well certain minor leaguers could do in the majors.

No, it isn't. If you account for league, park, age, injuries, etc., MiL numbers are really the ONLY way to predict ML performance.

If you're using a few players who don't translate their numbers from MiL to ML as proof that there is no relationship between the two, well that's just poor logic.

[DrungoHazewood]

Translating minor league stats into major league production is very difficult and I'm often surprised at the care-free and confident manner that some of the statheads here claim how well certain minor leaguers could do in the majors.

Nobody said it's easy. If it was easy the Orioles could maybe get a handle on it.

But luckily there are people who'll do most of the heavy lifting for us.

[olehippi]

Minor league numbers, when put in the proper context, predict major league performance as well as past major league numbers. They're the best publicly-available data we have, and they're extremely useful in gauging how players will do in the future.

Only the misinformed will ever give you guarantees about anything in the future.

Individual minor league records, in context, are a valid predictor of how someone will do in the majors. There's a statistical distribution of possible outcomes from that minor league record, but that doesn't make it any less valuable a tool.

Something that was mentioned during last night's game might be a factor in the MiL to ML conversion. It was stated (by Dempsey, I think) that players coming out of the Internationl League, as opposed to the PCL, will be better prepared for the ML because IL parks are more in line with ML parks, and that stats put up by IL players are a better indicator of how they will perform in the ML.

I honestly don't know if this is correct or not.

[hoosiers]

If you're using a few players who don't translate their numbers from MiL to ML as proof that there is no relationship between the two, well that's just poor logic.

Well, that's just it, isn't it? If you expect the whole class to fall into the averages of historical players, that's an assumption even a monkey could make.

I'm tired of comments recently like "the Os have five pitchers at AAA who could outpitch Paul Shuey" because the translations say it is so.

The rubber hits the road when the GM has to sign one or two particular replacement level guys for the major league club and a few to stash in AAA. And which ones get the nod in what order and how long you stick with each one.

Like Frobby, I'm tired of hearing how much of a fluke it is from the statheads that Doyne, Hoey, Knott, House and others SHOULD be doing much better and how Bynum has been a fluke relative to his past numbers.