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Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Strength of Schedule: Lee v Halladay
Yesterday, Batters Box highlighted the difference in opposition quality (both offense and pitching) faced by Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay, as did Joe Sheehan.
Since MGL includes strength of schedule and park in his adjustments, perhaps we can prevail upon him to comment on this wide disparity.
Also: In the Batter’s Box post, they show the ERA+ (note: if you have Firefox, it’s off the page, and you wouldn’t even know it’s there. Keep clicking CTRL-, that’s Control Key and Minus sign at the same time, until you see it). Guess how the average ERA+ was calculated? That’s right, the wrong way. As readers here know, since ERA+ flipped the denominator, in order to calculate the correct average ERA+, you need to do: 1 / average (1/ERA+). Indeed, once you do that, the opposition ERA+ of Hallday goes from 104 to 96! Cliff Lee goes from 96.5 to 89.
Sean Forman: please, stop the insanity, and stop making ERA+ a “bigger is better”. You’ve got alot of really smart people making simple math mistakes.