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QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:48 AM) You're awesome I remember reading an article in the BP book from about 8 years ago that cited that and talked about run expectancy from 1B and I recognized right away that the number was likely to fluctuate. It does actually make sense to invest in base stealers right now because the marginal value of a single run has increased. If you can steal 150 bases as a team at a 70% clip, you are talking about adding between 25-30 runs, which could add 2-4 win to your total. That is a hell of an article. Bradley Woodrum has done some good work lately. Looking at it by team is really cool.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:37 AM) The rule of thumb with this is 75%, but I would guess that this percentage has gone down in recent years. It's harder for a runner on 1B to score than it was 10 years ago and I would guess that that percentage has gone down at a greater clip than scoring a run with a runner on 2B (because while it's harder to get just 1 hit, it's even harder to actually string together 2 hits). I'm guessing De Aza was basically a break even, if not slightly productive, base stealer this year. Here you go: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-changin...ing-calculus-2/ This cites the 2012 league-wide figure at 66%. This article also agrees with your explanation of the number dropping as run environment decreases.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:30 AM) Was I talking to you? J4L doesn't watch the games. I took that as the cliche "SABR nerds would rather play the game on paper than watch games." I was probably being over-sensitive. I'm sorry.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:24 AM) 71.4% is high efficiency? Now you are just reaching for stuff. No, no I'm not. That's a widely known standard for the breaking point between providing net positive value with baserunning and net negative. That's one of those pop stats that was even featured in Moneyball.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:15 AM) By showing me that they are flawed, and perpetually being fixed, yet can't have missed this one particular standard. Well, everything's flawed. Physics is currently VERY flawed with all we're discovering about quantum behavior, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get out of the way when big, heavy things are moving toward you. As humans, it behooves us to act upon the best information we have at the time, while always searching for better information. Look, I'm not saying you're definitely wrong in your suspicions, I'm just saying that until you can find some evidence for your suspicions, it's a lot less likely you're right than what the current evidence is showing us. To say that his 5ish extra baserunning errors were enough to outweigh an entire season of high stolen base efficiency and taking extra bases on singles, changing it from a vaguely positive season to among the worst in history is a BOLD claim, and if you want people to take that claim seriously, you should provide some substantial evidence to support it.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 10:08 AM) I just dont think that is really the argument. Of course you would pinch run him right there. I think the argument is pretty much "Is De Aza a good baserunner?" I say no. I watched him all season make one bonehead mistake after another, and not learn from it. There may be a statistic that says he is a positive on the basepaths, but it is really hard to agree with that after watching him this past season. But I think that's the point -- there's still value there. Those of us arguing in favor aren't saying that ADA is an elite baserunner, we're just pointing out that his positives mathematically outweigh his negatives. He can both be a mentally poor baserunner and still provide substantial baserunning value. This is important because the context of the argument is that ADA's poor baserunning is something that must be replaced with high priority, and the results just don't line up with that notion.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 09:39 AM) As opposed to you flat out telling me that these statistics are so accurate, that people have to meet annually to fix them, but that there can't be any bias or error in the statistics related to something that they aren't quantifying correct? Please. I don't understand what you're arguing here. You made an attack on the credibility of the numbers I was referring to, and I attempted to demonstrate credibility for them.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 09:59 AM) We value base running mistakes differently. "Sigh" I was sighing at your bulls*** "SOME OF US STILL LIKE TO WATCH GAMES" line.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Oct 15, 2013 -> 08:04 AM) Jesus Christ. Some of us still like watching the games. I'm with SS2K. After watching ADA run the bases all year, I can't call him a positive on the base paths. He made too many decisions that I couldn't believe a major leaguer was making. I wouldn't just dump him because he can hit and he's the best thing we have, but I'm not sure I want his influence on a rebuilding team either. sigh

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 07:50 PM) Your version of "read up on stuff" isn't helping. It keeps bouncing back and forth between different points and then swearing that I am misunderstanding them when I call them out. It essentially turns into this thing where you can't have any eye test at all, despite the obvious fault here of crediting De Aza as a positive influence through his base running last year. The common denominator is faulty if it is rewarding De Aza for his performance last year. This is the most backwards thing I've ever heard. You start with a conclusion, then try to find something that supports it. When you find nothing, instead of considering changing your conclusion, you just say everyone else is wrong. All I've been doing is pointing out that these numbers DO take all the things into consideration that you have assumed they don't. The fact that you keep asserting different missing things that actually ARE factored in tells me you still haven't tried to actually understand it. Because if you did, you'd know about them.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 07:10 PM) As for the linear weights argument, it's pretty much just math, guys. It's used because it's math, and math works. And for De Aza, he's NOT a good runner of the bases, as that phrase or skill is commonly understood to mean. But he's still fast! And those two things are not mutually exclusive. A runner can be of average speed or even slow but still be a good base runner. A runner can have blazing speed but still be a terrible base runner. But when you add up the speed ability and the technique/baseball IQ, you can still have someone that creates value as a runner but still not be a particular good "runner of the bases" as we commonly understand the phrase. Yes, this

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 05:39 PM) With all due respect, so what. If it isn't deemed valuable by baseball teams, what value does it really have? Tell me that teams are using it, then I will agree with your statements about "widely accepted" etc. People with no connection to the game don't really matter as much as the teams making the actual decisions. If teams aren't using these specific stats, it tells me they think other measures have more value. But they do! lol That's what I'm trying to say. Most of the innovators of linear weights-based statistics in the early 2000's are or have been employed by Major League teams. Tom Tango. Paul Depodesta. Russel Carleton. Voros McCracken. Dayn Perry. Dan Szymborski. Alex Anthopolous. All of these guys were working and/or consulting for teams when they were BUILDING their advanced metrics departments. When you interview the former guys they all say something along the lines of, "yeah everyone has their own constants, but it's all based around the same types of math." Why don't you just read up on some of it and make an informed decision? I don't understand the reluctance to learn about stuff. I mean I respect your opinions, it just doesn't mean much for you to dismiss something without giving it a chance. Linear weights like changed the way I looked at player valuation. It's so exciting how much sense it makes and how cool it is to be able to find a common denominator for comparing guys.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 04:14 PM) I don't honestly care what baseball fans think. I care if the organizations think it is worthy, and then you actually have hit your standard of "widely accepted" and "state of the art". If not, their opinions aren't any more widely accepted than the "eye test " group out there in baseball today. If the Sox felt those numbers were an accurate representation of De Aza's true value, there wouldn't be rumblings of them looking to upgrade his spot. Right, because there couldn't possibly be any other reason that would want to trade him other than they think he's totally garbage. And the newspaper media has NEVER made something up for an article, because they are never ever fed inaccurate or partially accurate information from sources inside baseball. Everything they say is totally true and always happens. I'm not talking about fans. Fans are you and me. When you say, "any stat that says ADA is good at baserunning is flawed, period," THAT'S fans talking. These are professionals who make a living by analyzing baseball, and dozens of them get picked off to be consultants and analysts for baseball teams. These are people that pioneered and invented the stats that have birthed the latest publicly available versions.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 03:53 PM) Show me where this is "widely accepted" and "state of the art". How many franchises use this number for anything of substance, such as game planning and utilization of their base running strategies. Who knows? Franchises don't tell anyone what they use. But linear weights metrics are the basis of the research done by tons of analysts that have been hired by teams over the years, from FG guys like Matt Swartz (Orioles) to BP scouts like Kevin Goldstein (Astros). There are no less than three conferences per year led by organizations like the Society for American Baseball Research and Baseball America where these statistics are unveiled, discussed, and scrutinized. Dave Cameron and several FanGraphs staff are at the forefront of much of this. Their particular set of constants and formulae are among the most popular in existence, and are particularly useful in relation to Baseball References formulae because FG prioritizes accuracy over completeness whereas BR does the opposite, giving us a wide palette of different angles from which to reference in a field that is difficult to predict. I'm not challenging your opinion, I'm challenging you to take a look at this stuff before you form your opinion. It's fine if you ultimately don't agree with it, but at least try to make sense of it before you decide it's BS.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 03:42 PM) If the stat states that De Aza was a good baserunner, it makes no sense in reality. Period. According to what? Make an argument for it. It isn't good enough for you to just say "because I think so." Show me why the widely accepted state-of-the-art measurement is wrong. By the way, I'm not being rhetorical. People are always questioning these things with reasoned arguments, and it drives them to constantly improve the stats.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 03:20 PM) I'm against ones that make no sense in reality. Yet you clearly have no idea how it works, because you keep accusing it of not taking factors into consideration that it DOES take into consideration. How can you be against something you don't know about? How do you know it makes no sense in reality?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 02:58 PM) All outs are not created equally. Any stat that pretends they are is flawed. Pretending that base running mistakes are somehow equal to an infield pop up is just silly. Saying it can't be quantified so therefore it can't be factored isn't good enough either. There is obviously an effect, otherwise it wouldn't be talked about as much as it does when compared to other outs. Common sense tells you that. Why are you assuming that people think all outs have the same value? That's why these stats are based on linear weights. Run values are produced based on the weighted differences in base/out states. For example, if De Aza is caught stealing with 2 outs and a runner on third, it's far more harmful than if he's caught stealing (or picked off) with the bases otherwise empty and no outs. All that stuff is baked in, league adjusted and updated every season based on changes in the run environment. The only thing that isn't here is the "emotional impact' on the rest of the team. It seems like the only people that are against these stats are those who haven't taken the time to understand them.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 02:28 PM) You can't measure it, so throw it out and pretend it doesn't exist? I can't agree with that either. What's the alternative? If we can measure 80% of something and assume that the rest is unpredictable, we have a much more useful picture than "10 mistakes is a lot! No it's not a lot! Yeah but they were big mistakes! No they were medium mistakes! They cost us the whole season because everyone got depressed!" You're essentially choosing to measure nothing at all as an alternative. EDIT: I'm saying nothing at all about pretending things don't exist.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 02:07 PM) Taking human emotion out of the game is just silly. All outs are not created equally. That is a faulty assumption I don't agree with. No one is is claiming that emotion doesn't matter, but (1) you can't measure it, so it's silly to assign some huge, arbitrary value to it based only on intuition. In this case, it's better to leave it out of analysis entirely and accept something as being an incomplete picture rather than throw in a valuation completely out of nowhere for the sake of completeness at the cost of making the entire thing wrong, and (2) I think you are overstating the difference between a big out on the bases and a big out of any kind. Further, I think you are underestimating the ability for professional players to stay focused despite disappointment. Part of the reason they are in the Majors is their ability to perform at a consistently high despite physical and emotional fatigue.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 12:38 PM) I think it's pretty clear that the hangup is about the mental errors with ADA. He's value lies a lot in his speed, which people are hesitant to give him credit for since it's an inherent skill which people view him as having little or nothing to do with. The mental errors are conscious decisions he makes, and so people are going to hold those against him very harshly. But as some have said, you can live with the stupid mistakes because he brings value elsewhere. Whether that value comes from him being an outstanding athlete or the smartest, most intuitive player ever, it doesn't matter. Would you like him to be smarter? Yes, of course. But regardless of how frustrating he may be, you can't base your decision on that Right -- this is the point. It seems like ADA messed up a bunch, and he did, but when you add everything up, he was still among the top few players on our team. He's nothing like a star, but he's one of the last places we need an upgrade just because there are like 6 other worse players that we start.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 12:31 PM) Go back and read the rest of the posts. I don't see anything where you are telling me why the two statistics below provide inaccurate results: http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/ubr/ http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/wsb/ Are you referring to where you talked about the demoralizing effect of a killed rally? I thought wite pointed out that all kinds of outs kill rallies all the time, and that other types of outs occur drastically more frequently. What if Garcia pops one up because he swung at a bad pitch, that's still a mental error, right? And besides, how can you possibly make a claim as to quantifying an effect like that? It's one thing to suggest that it could be a factor, but entirely another to just decide that its effect is immense enough to make ADA the worst runner in White Sox history despite other evidence to the contrary.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 12:27 PM) But this is another thing I don't understand. Why are baserunning and offensive metrics never "off", but defensive metrics always can be wrong? What makes offensive numbers foolproof, weighted perfectly, but defense you need a sample size of 3 years. Because of the nature of the way defensive plays are recorded, which is on a grid and based on where the player begins and where the player ends up. There are just a lot of contextual exceptions (bad hop, screened by runner, covering second for a steal, etc.) that muddy the data up. That said, the knock on UZR-like stats isnt necessarily that they aren't accurate, it's that UZR scores tend not to be predictive short of three seasons of data. Part of this probably has to do with the factors above, but part of it probably also has to do with the fact that players' defensive performances fluctuate more than we are inclined to expect.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 11:52 AM) I think it was pretty obvious Alejandro De Aza was a stupid baserunner in 2013. Speed was the only thing that made him acceptable by advanced metric standards. If he had average speed, everyone would say he is a bad baserunner. Again this is semantics. BTW, Stone was on Kaplan's show a few weeks ago and stated the White Sox would be looking for someone who understood the game of baseball better than De Aza to play CF next year. Maybe that means De Aza will play LF and/or DH, maybe it means he gone. I do agree about not giving him away, but he was pretty dissappointing running the bases and out in the OF in 2013. I agree with everything you said, but the point is that our ideas of valuation are off-base. ADA made 10ish dumb baserunning mistakes, which is a handful more than he would be expected to make on average. This hurt his value, but his overall contribution remained positive. I understand that those mistakes may have FELT like disasters that outweigh the positives of what he did, but our emotional reaction doesn't affect the actual value. That's why we want to use statistics to quantify this value, so that our biases can't affect it and make us make a mistake. So if you (the collective you, not specifically you) think that a statistic is off, then be all means argue that the statistic is off. But make that argument based on your understanding of the stat and why it won't add up. It's sole purpose is to be there to inform you better than your human brain, which is notoriously flawed for this type of exercise, so that fact that it may have felt like ADA's errors were more costly than his contributions is nothing like evidence against the numbers.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 11:44 AM) Which goes back to my point about the baserunning stat that shows De Aza as being a good base runner as being garbage. If you're going to call an objective measurement of something garbage, you should tell us why it's garbage and how your intuition and selective human memory are more accurate.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Oct 14, 2013 -> 10:23 AM) I was actually referring to picking it up off the ground. He fumbled and kicked more balls this season than I have ever seen anyone do. Guys would get extra bases because if it bounced off a wall, De Aza very rarely would come up with it clean. What I don't understand is he wasn't like this previously, at least to the extent he was bad this year, and despite what Balta will say, it has nothing to do with spring training. I also think stupid baserunning mistakes which take you out of innings demoralize a team. Paulie can't be a better baserunner. If De Aza wouldn't be so dumb on the basepaths, he could improve his worth a decent amount. Gotcha, yeah I thought you were referring to routes. I think there's a weird construct in our minds where we accept that guys can have bad years or bad stretches hitting, but not that they can have similar stretches defensively or on the bases. One year doesn't necessarily reflect a guy's true talent. We know De Aza can be better, so I'd bet that next year he will. But again, he still contributed positively overall, even if he could and should have produced MORE positively. Really there are two things going on here: (1) De Aza deserves some negativity because he made more mistakes running than he should have. Ok, this is true. (2) Despite the mistakes, De Aza was among the best baserunning contributors on our team. Being upset at him for his mistakes doesn't mean he needs to go. There's an emotional thing going on here, and there's there's the subject of next year's roster construction. But they aren't mutually exclusive, we can all agree.