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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
David Wright
Lots of MSM chatter about the non-MSM BABIP. Love it! I made these two posts at Primer:
Although I don’t know why I think this, for some reason I have it stuck in my head that Wright’s high BABIP is likely a statistical fluke, while his high K rate and lack of power are likely something to worry about. Can someone explain to me why I am wrong?
You are not wrong.
Every metric has a certain amount of noise to it. For something like K/PA, it has very little amount of noise. For something like BABIP, it has alot of noise.
The important thing is that this is not an either-or situation.
Thus, if I accept the premise that the metric of K/PA has very little noise—which I do—then the version of it I would accept as the most quiet in David Wright’s case is the one that has 2312 PAs of information to silence the noise.
What I was trying to say is that the metric K/PA allows you to weight recent performance more heavily.
If, for example, the “standard” weights for the last 3 years is 5/4/3, then you would weight BABIP as 4.5/4/3.5, and you would weight K/PA as 7/4/1 (or some such).
You NEVER ignore any past performance. What you do is weight them based on their persistency to forecast the future.
Since players are human beings, then we want a metric that more closely aligns to his current conditioning, strength, and speed. K/PA has limited noise, and so, you weight his recent performance more.
If players were NOT humans, then you would have no reason to weight recent performance more, and you’d stick with his career totals.