THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Great work and an important area for future research.  I have long thought that components of performance with a potential career impact of five or more wins for players with long careers are worth analyzing intensively.

I have also long wondered how Boggs failed to score a lot more runs than he did--super high OBP, generally powerful offenses behind him.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Runs Produced [(R + RBI - HR)/(AB/10)] compared to Base Runs wouldn’t also show similar results.

Tom--read your article in this year’s Hardball Times Annual--terrific and very, very valuable, particularly for fielders with short careers or lots of part-time play.

I was wondering whether With You or Without You might yield up the current holy grail of first base fielding--measuring infielder throwing errors prevented.

Runs Produced produces again.

Unless I’ve screwed something up:

Wade Boggs BP EqR (not all-time adjusted):  1553

His RP (R + RBI - HR) - (AB/10) :  1491

Diff:  -62

Dan’s calculation: -48.

Boggs was a slow, poor baserunner, which shows up in any PBP baserunning metric.

With and without should be real good for first base fielding (catching the ball).  I would love to see the results for the various fielders.  For example, J.T. Snow was supposed to be great at that.  His UZR (fielding ground balls) was never very good, however, even though he was considered a very good fielder.  Some analysts have postulated that catching bad throws (or not) is not much of a skill in terms of runs saved per year.  I don’t know.  I would love to see some numbers.

I’d love to see that - watching Youkilis every game, I thought that was a big strength of his.

I guess it would require a couple steps - one being objectively coming up with a system of classification of throws to first.  I guess you could lump every throw that bounces before reaching the 1B as a particular degree of difficulty, but there’s a lot of gray area beyond that.  Having people eyeball the play and judge how difficult it was to catch brings in the Jeter bias ("Yeah but he had to JUMP UP AND SPIN to make the throw - that means it was a great defensive play!!!!!!").

The other thing is figuring out what replacement level is at catching bad throws.  Maybe scooping the ball out of the dirt doesn’t appear to save many runs because everyone (in the majors) can do it.  But we still need to know if the minor leaguers can do it as well, and to what extent.