From: steph@pegasus.cs.uiuc.edu (Dale Stephenson)
Subject: Re: Lists: The Best Players In Baseeball
Keywords: stars best baseball
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 19:28:00 GMT

In <1993Jan8.032738.23621@athena.mit.edu> cmk@athena.mit.edu (Charles M Kozierok) writes:
[...]

>based on your comments, and the post by Clay where he explains
>what the DA and RF are (thanks, btw), i would have to conclude that
>these statistics definitely are bogus. i don't know why anyone would
>use them to judge much of anything. i know i wouldn't.

Why use it?  Because, (lousy as it is) it's the best I have available to me.
It's really kind of frustrating, because it less useful than having batting
average without OBA or SLG.  There are no end of things that can wrong with
range factor -- balls not being distributed evenly is only one.  Another is
overall team defense -- even the worst defense still makes at least 24 outs per
9 inning game, and they've got to go somewhere.  A team with nine atrocious
fielders and a pitcher with 0 strikeouts would have about the same range
factors as a team with 9 incredible fielders.

So why use it all?  My alternatives would be 1) Error Totals, which is worse
than range, and 2) Gold glove voting.  Given who does the voting, I find it
hard to believe that it correlates better with reality than range factors.
In individual cases (Alomar?) it might, but as a general rule?

And defense *is* important, and should be talked about.  So I can't leave it
alone.  Range does have the advantage of measuring something positive the
player did do -- make outs.  If Alomar gets less groundballs than any other
AL second baseman, despite making *every play* hit his way, is his stellar
defense really that valuable to the Jays?  Shouldn't they try to put him in
a package for Frank Thomas and sign Jeff Treadway to play second?  Now, these
doesn't help a great deal when comparing players.  But both Sandberg and
Alomar are considered fine defensive second baseman.  But Sandberg helped his
team more defensively, as far as I can tell.

>maybe subjective judgment actually wins out here. or maybe someone
>can come up with a new stat that actually makes some sense.

Defensive Average makes sense to me.  It's going in the next revision of my
baseball game.

>anyone who disagrees, please explain why they do make sense. because
>it is clear that they ignore so many different important factors
>that they are essentially useless. or maybe worse, if they fool people
>into believing they are useful when they are not.

You could say the same thing about RBI totals, and you'd be right :->.  But
I believe that *if we had no better statistic available* RBI totals *would*
be more accurate than a random distribution in assessing worth, and most
likely would be more valuable than the Mediots assessment.  IMHO, of course.

Note that Defensive Average does not suffer from the distribution problem,
and therefore is much more reliable than range factor.  It still may suffer
from park effects, and of course distribution of "hard" chances, but I'm
inclined to believe those effects would be minor.  I definitely have more
faith in it than in subjective judgement.

-- 
Dale J. Stephenson |*| (steph@cs.uiuc.edu) |*| Baseball fanatic

  "It is considered good to look wise, especially when not 
   overburdened with information" -- J. Golden Kimball
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball