from Amazon
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
It’s impossible to create a terrible uber-stat
The point of a uber-stat is to make sure it’s not biased, as well as being reasonable. Any teenager out there (me included at the time) has attempted to combine various outcome numbers to create a superstat. It’s literally impossible to create a stat where Pujols is not near the top, as long as you are being anything close to reasonable. But, it’s extreme cases, guys who walk a ton, or steal a ton, or are fantastic fielders, or hit a ton of HR, disproportionate from the rest of their outcome lines, that are the issue. Since we don’t get that many kind of extreme players, we end up with significant overlap between Elias rankings and WAR-based rankings.
It’s clear that one source of bias is relief pitchers.
Another way to verify the rankings (after all, why is WAR necessarily better than Elias?), is to create the A and B types based on how much they signed. (Of course, the compensation aspect affects the signing, and that can be adjusted based on Victor’s numbers.)
By the way, I think Elias is just the trustee, and not the creator. So, scorn should be reserved, if deserved, to the creators of the system, and not the messenger.