THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Just curious, which saberists’ metrics aren’t doing a good job of modelling that the average 3B is not better than the average 2B?
vr, Xei

The problem is with any metric that bases a position adjustment solely on the average offense provided by the positions.

3B outhit 2B?  Then 2B must be a tougher position to play.

CF outhit 1B (back in the days of 16 teams, where 3 of the CF are Willie, Mickey, and the Duke) - does this mean that 1B is a tougher defensive position than CF?

Anyone who forces that the overall average 2B = overall average 3B.

I’ll leave it to others to investigate and report their results.

Off the top of my head, VORP, WARP and TPR all do what Tango is railing against. I don’t believe Win Shares does, but I don’t know that Win Shares does any accounting for position outside of the fielding “claim points.”

Outside of that, I don’t know that there ARE any uberstats in common usage.

It looks like Chris Dial goes the other way:
http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/dialed_in/newsblog/

And he makes no positional adjustment at all it seems.  I don’t know why he does that. 

The offensive part of his equation compares a player to an overall average hitter.  But the fielding part compared a player to an average fielder for that position.

So, if I understand it correctly, an overall average hitter, who is an average fielding SS would come out to the same thing as if he were an average fielding 1B.

Not sure why Chris would do that. Maybe he will stop by and explain his reasoning.

My reasoning is always thus: how would Melvin Mora do at that position (given the experience level)?  So, it’s Wins Above Melvin Mora (WAMM).

To be clear, you need a single common baseline to compare against, and that’s Mora.

Pretty sure that Dial’s XRAA is based upon the player’s primary position.

It’s possible that the average 3B is better than the average 2B, but the replacement levels are about the same. (That would be the “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke” phenomenon.) On the other hand, maybe replacement level 3Bmen are better than replacement level 2Bmen. If that is true, teams must think the replacement 3Bmen would have a difficult time switching over to 2B. Does that make sense?

Replacement level 3B is identical to replacement level 2B, SS, CF, C: they all cost zero marginal dollars.

I know it isn’t Tango’s favorite, but Dan Rosenheck’s WARP does have 2B and 3B as basically equally difficult positions today, although not throughout all of baseball history.

I think Dan’s is pretty good.  It is unfortunate that he uses the term “WARP”.  He really should use something else.  WORP would be better.