Filter posts by...
Linear_Weights
Friday, August 15, 2008
Adam Dunn is what WPA/LI was invented for. In 4500 PA, his wins added over an average hitter, given the base/out inning/score opportunities presented to him was +18 wins.
The most similar player to Adam Dunn in terms of OBP, SLG, and PA is JD Drew. In his career, Drew is +25 wins.
Three other players with less PA are: Teixeira (+12 situational wins), Bay (+14 wins), and Miguel Cabrera (+20 wins). If you add up their totals (+46) to Drew’s (+25), and take 30% (to align them to the same number of PA as Dunn), you get +21 wins.
I think there may be something to the fact that Dunn is not a good situational hitter (or that his skillset doesn’t lend itself to good situational hitting).
He’d definitely be a good case study.
Here is the comparison line, as of today:
+18 situational wins, .247 / .380 / .519 Dunn
+21 situational wins, .290 / .382 / .522 Dunn’s top 4 comps (Tex, JD, Miguel, Bay)… situational wins prorated to Dunn’s PA.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
UPDATE: This blog entry (not an article) has been linked from several places, and there are questions from non-LWTS followers about what the weights should be. One place to find them is the last line of this page. Had I intended to write this as an article, I would have been more complete in my description. I apologize to those who stumbled along here for the first time. Basically, anyone coming to this blog is walking into the middle of a conversation. Feel free to interrupt and ask a question.
***
Baseball Prospectus undervalues walks. By how much? As much as OPS. Don’t believe me? Let me walk you through the steps:
Read More
Monday, August 11, 2008
Your reliever gets an out. Your chances of winning go up. Your reliever allows a runner on. Your chances of winning go down. You add up the deltas of all the times that your chances went up, and you add up all the deltas of all the times your chances went down. Call the former “Win Advancement” (WA) and call the latter “Loss Advancement” (LA). WA+LA is GA (Game Advancement).
If you start the game at zero, you are marching toward 1 Win or 1 Loss. In a typical win, the pitching team will accumulate 1.8 WA and 0.8 LA. The difference in WA and LA, for every win, is always 1.0. Always. That is, on your march toward a win, you’ll accumulate some good things and some bad things. And in a win, you’ll accumulate alot more good things than bad things. The difference, in a win, will always be +1. Similarly, in a typical loss, the pitching team will accumulate 0.8 WA and 1.8 LA, with the difference always being -1.
So, in an average game, you have 1.3 WA, 1.3 LA, 0.5 wins, and 0.5 losses. The WA and LA capture the ebb and flow of the game, on your march toward the win or loss of the game. There is, on average, some 0.8 “wasted” WA and 0.8 “wasted” LA per game (2.6 GA minus 1 game). In order to align WA and LA to W and L, simply subtract the waste (average of 0.8 wasted advancements on each side) from the total accumulation in each game (average of 2.6 GA) from each of WA and LA.
Before we talk about relievers, let’s look at the last generation’s four greatest starters:
Read More
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Bill James responds:
Q: Why do you prefer RC to linear weights for assessing individual hitter performance? Asked by: WTE
A: The essential problem with Lawootas is that they start everybody out in the middle and then move players up and down. This is totally contrary to the nature of baseball, which is that you start out at zero and build up. All of their other malfunctions stem from this central failing.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Doomed to repeat history are these three posts. I want to highlight these posts because while it tries to make a good effort to make a good estimate, the author doesn’t provide the proper framework to test his work. It must be done against realistic averages, and not simply looking at that someone goes 1 for 4 or some sh!t like that. I provided the proper framework last year. I’m going to make an authoritative statement so that it leaves no doubt where I stand: you must use the plus 1 method (or differentials). Anything else that anyone does is almost certainly mathematical gymnastics that gives sabermetrics a black eye and proves that there are damned lies and statistics.
Anyway, using the plus 1 method, here are the corresponding LWTS values, if we force the out value as minus .28 runs, for 3 different metrics:
Read More
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Only fastballs. That’s a sweet layout too, where the horizontal axis is the count from 0-2 to 3-0, that follows the Linear Weights by Count chart we’ve discussed in the past.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Regression analysis is sabermetrics is probably the worst thing that has happened to its discipline. Rather than it being treated as a starting point, it’s treated as the target point. Even smart learned men make this goof. Nowhere is it more evident than in the regression run value of a double, as Patriot shows us here:
Read More
Monday, June 16, 2008
Bill James had said something that he had a to-do list, and that he will bump up some item if there was enough clamor for it. I added my two cents and he replied:
To-do list? Deprecate Runs Created in favor of Base Runs.
Asked by: Tangotiger
Answered: May 31, 2008
If you can’t convince anybody, how can I?
Funny guy! I believe that Bill James can move mountains, and the only thing stopping BaseRuns from supplanting Runs Created (the technical versions anyway) is that Bill James hasn’t embraced it. And maybe the reasons he hasn’t embraced it is that people still buy into Runs Created (the simple version). That is, the staying power of Runs Created (technical version) is the simplicity of Runs Created (simple version).
This is why I had suggested a while ago, to you guys, that Bill adopt BaseRuns as a technical version of Runs Created. Clearly, the version he has now bears little resemblance to the simple version. The technical version probably is more akin to Linear Weights (Estimated Runs Produced) than to the basic version of Runs Created.
Anyway, Bill can move mountains. And BaseRuns provides a more solid foundation than the current incarnations of Runs Created.
If you are a BillJames subscriber, then tell him that he should finally adopt BaseRuns to supplant Runs Created.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Why would Bill Madden say this about a terrible stat:
In the opinion of Craig Messmer, whose “Stat One” is one of the most logical systems for rating players (combining performance and efficiency by doubling the net runs, adding complete bases (total bases plus walks, plus hit by pitch, plus stolen bases minus caught stealing) and dividing by plate appearances)…
Friday, May 30, 2008
We either love Pete Palmer’s Linear Weights, or we hate them. Or maybe we know we should love them, but something just… you know, bothers us.
What really bothers us is the single number issue. If you are going to represent something as a single number, we want zero to mean something, since even a below average player should count for something. So, here then, is a way to turn Linear Weights into two numbers.
Read More
Monday, May 19, 2008
I would quote the entire post, as Patriot did a fantastic job in showing the glaring holes in EqR. However, let me highlight a few important passages for those who don’t have the time or inclination to understand the nuances that lead to absurdity:
Read More
Friday, May 09, 2008
Two excellent issues from editor Phil Birnbaum (Nov 07, Feb 08). Here are my thoughts:
Read More
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Patriot tells us:
Walks/PA is what you are after…the player’s walk rate. But OBA-BA multiplies walk rate by one minus BA. So if you have two guys who each draw 50 walks in 550 PA, but one gets 150 hits (.340) and one gets 135 hits (.270), the one with the lower BA has a higher OBA-BA, .066 to .060.
It is remarkably lazy to leave it in the form OBA-BA. You can very easily get walk rate from (OBA - BA)/(1 - BA).
Here’s more to back up Patriot:
Read More
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Let this be the last time someone invents this.
The amazing thing about this to me is that, as far as I can tell, all of these were presented as new ideas and new statistics. There were no disclaimers… Quite the opposite: Some of the metrics were introduced breathlessly by their respective authors as a completely new way to look at the game… As a final plea, certainly everyone can agree that the world has seen enough introductions of differently named, historically oblivious bases/something ratios, can’t we? Thirty years of reinventing the wheel should be sufficient.
And, there’s a little table I contributed in there. Nothing big.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
With a hat tip to David at Fangraphs for the idea…
What the f is wOBA anyway? If a guy’s walks and extra base hits, relative to each other, are similar to the league average, then a player’s wOBA is simply his OBP. Let’s look at some cases:
Read More
Monday, February 25, 2008
Patriot gives us a history lesson as to how often Bases per Out has been invented and published. Imagine the thousands of times it’s been invented but not published?
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Great job by Joe Sheehan, in looking at the run values of each pitcher’s pitch. We’ve been talking about this for a while, and Joe did the grunt work on it. We definitely need to look at it by count, but this is definitely a great big first step at it.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
This is a cut/paste from a Baseball-Fever post I made, which I don’t think I posted here. In response to someone who said “Although this would make a 300 K/150 BB guy better than a 195 K/50 BB guy, which I’m not so sure I agree with”. Here’s what I did:
Read More
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Studes checks in with a quick way to evaluate a seasonal batting line. For you Thomas Boswell fans, it’s basically a weighted version of Total Average. It also mimics my Linear Weights Ratio, but uses better-to-remember weights (if you take my numbers and multiply by 3, you get close to Studes’ numbers). And, for you Paul Johnson fans, Studes’ weights are the same as Estimated Runs Produced.
Basically, all of us offer some form of Linear Weights, in about as an easy form as we can. You have bases on one side and outs on the other.
Friday, January 04, 2008
I saw a post a long time ago, with Bill James acknowledging four things that he corrected with Win Shares, with Loss Shares being one of them. (I wonder if my constant hammering about it had an effect?) Anyway, Bill posted:
At the time that I developed Win Share I intended for that to be an end point for that analysis. But later, as I always do, I started finding fault with the way I had done certain things, and decided to go further down the road. I have developed what I call Win Shares and Loss Shares. At some point I will start publishing the Win Shares and Loss Shares formulas and results, and I would expect that those will be the basis of the next rating system that I attempt.
I shall be ready with my fine-tooth comb and ax, and will use them in as tempered a fashion as the situation dictates.
Page 1 of 3 pages 1 2 3 >
from Amazon
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 64 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date