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Thursday, April 15, 2010
College splits by draftee / non-draftee opponents
Well, Jeff tests it, and it shows that I am wrong regarding weighting heavier against MLB-level competition:
Are the matchups against draftees more valuable? Do we get something worthwhile if we weight those plate appearances more heavily? No. In fact, the more heavily you weight them, the worse the results get. Here’s how bleak it is: Using plate appearances against draftees is only slightly more valuable than randomly choosing a sample of equal size.
That to me was the shocker (the part I added in bold). I could see that the non-draftee split would contain valuable information, based strictly on its size. My thinking was that I’d rather know 50 PA against elite competition than 100 PA against poor competition. But, Jeff says this is not true, that 50 PA against elite competition is as predictive as 50 PA against poor competition. In other words, the level to which Strasburg dominates his pitching peers against elite competition is the same gap as against poor competition.
The idea that Strasburg would be able to dominate the poor competition disproportionately relative to his pitching peers seems to not hold. The Strasburg gap is a constant. But as Jeff said:
Lest you get too excited, or even disappointed, remember it’s still early. In the grand scheme of play-by-play college analysis, we’re about as far along as Stephen Strasburg’s pro career. Maybe in five years, we’ll be able to identify that “invisible wall.” Maybe the “versus draftee” split has predictive value for performance at and above Double-A. Time will tell.
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