FAQ and Forum on Advanced Stats

[Eminor3rd]

I will admit being a lazy drunk watching the game, but fielding has always been quantifiable. As has hitting, as has pitching. Lazy as I am, I will merely say that what sabermetrics is trying to do is to try and find better ways to quantify it.

 

This is a MAJOR step, though. Actual measurements of critical proxies like velocity, angle, speed, positioning, routes, etc. This data, compared to DRS/UZR, could be like comparing a calculator to an abacus.

[CaliSoxFanViaSWside]

This is a MAJOR step, though. Actual measurements of critical proxies like velocity, angle, speed, positioning, routes, etc. This data, compared to DRS/UZR, could be like comparing a calculator to an abacus.

 

Thank you I think he must've answered me without reading any of the articles I listed.

Edited May 3, 2015 by CaliSoxFanViaSWside

[Eminor3rd]

Brady Anderson: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/brady-anderson-on-analytics/

[southsider2k5]

You say advanced stats... I say steroids.

[Eminor3rd]

You say advanced stats... I say steroids.

 

Haha, I think the way he put it was "working the count."

[Eminor3rd]

For those that wonder about what goes into WAR, here's a graphical representation: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/instagraphs...sition-players/

[chitownsportsfan]

A good read and sobering news for Sox fans, when you see "10% playoff odds" on Fangraphs and the like, don't blame the messenger, that's about the odds right now:

 

http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-meaning-o...ord-in-mid-may/

[chitownsportsfan]

Many fans feel the positional adjustments for WAR are too extreme, here's some new data suggesting that yes, that is true:

 

http://www.hardballtimes.com/re-examining-...nsive-spectrum/

 

 

[LDF]

 

if a player is on the major league roster and playing, does he really need to be on the 40 man roster??

 

i know it is to protect him from other teams. but i am wondering??

[Balta1701]

if a player is on the major league roster and playing, does he really need to be on the 40 man roster??

 

i know it is to protect him from other teams. but i am wondering??

Yes, a player cannot be added to the team's 25 man roster without being on the 40 man roster. A player cannot be called up in September when rosters expand unless they are on the 40 man roster. If they are called up for a single game, they must be on the 40 man roster.

[LDF]

Yes, a player cannot be added to the team's 25 man roster without being on the 40 man roster. A player cannot be called up in September when rosters expand unless they are on the 40 man roster. If they are called up for a single game, they must be on the 40 man roster.

many thanks for that. i appreciate it

[Eminor3rd]

Awesome article about the relative values of OBP vs. SLG depending upon roster construction: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mark-trumbo...of-obp-and-slg/

[caulfield12]

http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/mlb/story/_...poto-again-odds

 

Fight between DiPoto, Scioscia and Pujols over coaches and players not following advanced stats from scouts/front office

[southsider2k5]

http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/mlb/story/_...poto-again-odds

 

Fight between DiPoto, Scioscia and Pujols over coaches and players not following advanced stats from scouts/front office

 

#loyalty

 

Scioscia and Dipoto have had an uneven relationship, with similar issues between the two arising most notably in both 2012 and 2013. Angels owner Arte Moreno decided to keep both men and force them to work out their differences.

 

[The Ginger Kid]

Couple of questions...

 

What's a solid metric for evaluating team pitching, FIP? xFIP? WAR?

 

Also, the Sox WAR for team batting, 1.5. Is that historically low? Seems like quite a jump to the next team, PHI with 6.0

[shysocks]

Couple of questions...

 

What's a solid metric for evaluating team pitching, FIP? xFIP? WAR?

 

Also, the Sox WAR for team batting, 1.5. Is that historically low? Seems like quite a jump to the next team, PHI with 6.0

WAR is pretty good. FIP is okay but it isn't park or league adjusted, so parks with extreme effects on homers can mess with it, and it makes no acknowledgement that the Dodgers staff faces a pitcher 2 or 3 times a game while the Sox face a DH. FIP- tries to address that, where 100 is average and lower numbers are better. I don't like xFIP that much in general.

 

The Sox are on pace for about 2.1 offensive WAR, which would be higher than 75 teams since 1900. That's roughly the bottom 3 percent, so it's really low. Whether it's "historically" low is up to your interpretation of the word. It would be the lowest total for a White Sox team; I'd say that qualifies as historic.

 

Like every other stat, WAR isn't perfect, so a guy with 3.0 WAR isn't automatically having a better season than a guy with 2.9 WAR, just as a guy with 100 RBI's isn't necessarily a better run producer than a guy with 95. It's helpful to divide guys/teams into tiers - "oh, here are the teams with 20+ WAR, here's 15-19, etc" - and then make your own judgments based on other information.

[OmarComing25]

WAR is pretty good. FIP is okay but it isn't park or league adjusted, so parks with extreme effects on homers can mess with it, and it makes no acknowledgement that the Dodgers staff faces a pitcher 2 or 3 times a game while the Sox face a DH. FIP- tries to address that, where 100 is average and lower numbers are better. I don't like xFIP that much in general.

cFIP does try to address that problem of who your staff faces, but we can only see that stat at the end of the season. Also, fWAR uses FIP as its main calculator for pitching WAR but it does adjust for league and parks in its WAR calculation.

[OmarComing25]

After watching Lester fail at holding runners, advanced metrics should really account for that as a stat somewhere. Pitchers who are good at it like Buehrle should get credit for it as well. Or do they already include this somewhere?

[Balta1701]

So, while waiting for a meeting earlier today, I was screwing around with baseball contracts because why not.

 

I compiled the top 31 contracts signed for people who were free agents last offseason - 31 was chosen because that's how many players signed $10 million total value deals or more. Basically an arbitrary cutoff but it does a good job of including anyone who got "decent' money.

 

I then rapidly scrolled through their fWAR and divided their contracts up evenly into years. For simplicity I ignored the slight increases that happen yearly in some of these contracts and just averaged over the full contract. The cutoff is right after Luke Hochevar.

 

What I was looking for was...given their performance this year, what was the total amount spent per fWAR on the free agent market?

 

I did a bit of a rough scaling to account for the fact that we're 85% of the way thorugh the season and assuming people would keep piling up fWAR at the same rate for the last 15%.

 

Given where we are now, the average price of 1 fWAR amongst well-paid free agents last offseason comes to about $9.4 million. If you factor in the fact that some guys contracts inflate with time, if you wanted to buy 1 fWAR on the free agent market last offseason it cost about $9 million plus an additional commitment the next year.

 

That blew my mind. We talk about teams spending $6 million or so per fWAR on the free agent market, but spending last year was so ineffective that 1 fWAR cost over $9 million on average. I think that really hits home how ineffective it is to spend money on the FA market if you're trying to significantly overhaul a franchise, at least to me.

[LDF]

So, while waiting for a meeting earlier today, I was screwing around with baseball contracts because why not.

 

I compiled the top 31 contracts signed for people who were free agents last offseason - 31 was chosen because that's how many players signed $10 million total value deals or more. Basically an arbitrary cutoff but it does a good job of including anyone who got "decent' money.

 

I then rapidly scrolled through their fWAR and divided their contracts up evenly into years. For simplicity I ignored the slight increases that happen yearly in some of these contracts and just averaged over the full contract. The cutoff is right after Luke Hochevar.

 

What I was looking for was...given their performance this year, what was the total amount spent per fWAR on the free agent market?

 

I did a bit of a rough scaling to account for the fact that we're 85% of the way thorugh the season and assuming people would keep piling up fWAR at the same rate for the last 15%.

 

Given where we are now, the average price of 1 fWAR amongst well-paid free agents last offseason comes to about $9.4 million. If you factor in the fact that some guys contracts inflate with time, if you wanted to buy 1 fWAR on the free agent market last offseason it cost about $9 million plus an additional commitment the next year.

 

That blew my mind. We talk about teams spending $6 million or so per fWAR on the free agent market, but spending last year was so ineffective that 1 fWAR cost over $9 million on average. I think that really hits home how ineffective it is to spend money on the FA market if you're trying to significantly overhaul a franchise, at least to me.

 

with ref to the advance stats... i appreciate the hard worked you did to compile this info.

 

many thanks.

[Balta1701]

To put that in more useful terms:

 

If you're buying 1 full priced guy on the free agent market, there's a decent chance you'll get a guy who will perform at or above his contract. If you need 1 guy to fill 1 hole and you've got a strong roster around them, you might actually fill that hole, but there's still a decent chance that guy will bust.

 

If you're buying 2 or more guys to fill 2 or more holes, so many guys who were signed on the free agent market last year struggled that the averages are going to win and out of 2+ guys, someone is going to underperform a lot and your roster better be strong enough to deal with that.

 

If you're trying to buy 3 or 4 guys, and you're spending $6 million per fWAR that you want to upgrade, you better be prepared 1/3 of your money to be completely wasted by guys underperforming or completely busting.

 

If your roster is so weak that you need to replace 3-4 positions or more, full priced free agents in 2015 was a terrible, horrible strategy. You couldn't win that way, the odds are stacked completely against it.

 

That may not hold in 2016, but that's what the market looked like in 2015.

[beautox]

I think the aside from the normal inflation of WAR the lack of young talent hitting the free agent market is having a direct impact on the inflation as well. Heyward and Upton are the only young position players that will be available this offseason. I think if you want an above average return on your money in free agency you must look east to the KBO and NPB.

[shysocks]

So, while waiting for a meeting earlier today, I was screwing around with baseball contracts because why not.

 

I compiled the top 31 contracts signed for people who were free agents last offseason - 31 was chosen because that's how many players signed $10 million total value deals or more. Basically an arbitrary cutoff but it does a good job of including anyone who got "decent' money.

 

I then rapidly scrolled through their fWAR and divided their contracts up evenly into years. For simplicity I ignored the slight increases that happen yearly in some of these contracts and just averaged over the full contract. The cutoff is right after Luke Hochevar.

 

What I was looking for was...given their performance this year, what was the total amount spent per fWAR on the free agent market?

 

I did a bit of a rough scaling to account for the fact that we're 85% of the way thorugh the season and assuming people would keep piling up fWAR at the same rate for the last 15%.

 

Given where we are now, the average price of 1 fWAR amongst well-paid free agents last offseason comes to about $9.4 million. If you factor in the fact that some guys contracts inflate with time, if you wanted to buy 1 fWAR on the free agent market last offseason it cost about $9 million plus an additional commitment the next year.

 

That blew my mind. We talk about teams spending $6 million or so per fWAR on the free agent market, but spending last year was so ineffective that 1 fWAR cost over $9 million on average. I think that really hits home how ineffective it is to spend money on the FA market if you're trying to significantly overhaul a franchise, at least to me.

That's good stuff, thanks for the research. Just want to point out that I think the $6M per WAR figure is a little dated, people have been placing it at $7M or above for quite a while now.

 

But nobody had it above $9M.

[Balta1701]

That's good stuff, thanks for the research. Just want to point out that I think the $6M per WAR figure is a little dated, people have been placing it at $7M or above for quite a while now.

 

But nobody had it above $9M.

I think the trick is that "you're paying $6-$7 million based on what the guy did last year".

 

You then wind up paying $9.5 million because "what they did last year" doesn't take into account the chances of a guy going all LaRoche/Melky/Rios/etc. And that is so common - guys underperform so incredibly much - that failures like them are the norm, not the exception. You sign a couple guys and you're bound to find someone who completely disappoints.

[Eminor3rd]

I think the trick is that "you're paying $6-$7 million based on what the guy did last year".

 

You then wind up paying $9.5 million because "what they did last year" doesn't take into account the chances of a guy going all LaRoche/Melky/Rios/etc. And that is so common - guys underperform so incredibly much - that failures like them are the norm, not the exception. You sign a couple guys and you're bound to find someone who completely disappoints.

 

Especially if you sign a dude who just had a career year. This is why I'm going to be vocally against Yoenis Cespedes all offseason when half this board is clambering for him every day.