THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, January 16, 2009

2B v 3B v CF

All data in this article is from 1996-2008.

I assigned a player a primary position each year.  Here are some numbers for 2B,3B,CF:

Average age:
29.0 CF
29.6 2B
29.7 3B

CF are a bit younger, as expected (SS are 28.9, the youngest in the group).  2B and 3B are almost identically aged.  I will be talking about salary at some point, so it is important to remember that we will have players with less service time among CF, and so, their salaries may be a bit depressed compared to the others.

The runs participated in (RPI, or R+RBI-HR):
155 CF
155 3B
147 2B

No surprise here.  CF and 3B are usually around the league average for hitting.  2B participated in 8 fewer runs than 3B, which again, is pretty much what we expected.

Salary paid, as a percentage of league average for that year:
112% 3B
108% CF
86% 2B

As noted a bit earlier, CF are younger, so we expect them to earn a bit less.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if we looked at it in terms of service time that 3B and CF earn roughly the same amount.  So, with regards to 3B and CF, we can safely say that since their offense is identical,and they are paid similarly, then their fielding and positional contributions are roughly similar.

So, in terms of the fielding spectrum, CF and 3B are the same. What about 2B? 

Let’s scale the salary % figures above to real dollars.  In 2008, there was some 2.6 billion$ paid in salaries, of which 58% went to non-pitchers, or 1.5 billion$ to non-pitchers.  That’s an average of 50 million$ per team.  With 8.3 non-pitcher positions (some players classified as DH as the primary position), that means each position earns, on average, if they had average players, 6 million$.

Was each position actually allocated 6 million$?  Well, no, we already showed that 2B earned 86% of the league average, while 3B earned 112% of the league average, even though both are the same age.

86% of 6 million$ is 5.16 million$, while 112% of 6 million$ is 6.72 million$.  This means that MLB paid 3B a total of 1.56 million$ more than 2B, per team.  The average win costs around 2 to 2.5 million$.  So, we see that teams have decided that 3B are worth 0.7 wins more than 2B.  And 0.7 wins is roughly 7 runs.

Remember how RPI showed that 3B was 8 runs ahead of 2B?  Well, if MLB is paying 3B 7 runs more than 2B, and the 3B hitting is 8 runs higher than 2B, then this must mean that their fielding plus positional contributions is almost identical to that of 2B.

And so, the fielding spectrum should have 2B, 3B, and CF as even.

This is consistent with how MLB has evaluated the talent, via salaries.  And this is consistent with how players who played both 2B and 3B fielded relative to their peers.

All indications point to the fact that the fielding and positional contributions of 2B, 3B, and CF are identical (from 1996-2008 anyway).  Any model that decides to ignore this reality should be required to address this issue.