THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tango,
Looking that Nate’s list, I’m reminded about the Elo application that he made to professional baseball (and that Clay Davenport also incorporated into team season projecttions).  Looking up Elo on Wikipedia I see that such ratings exist for some other major sports including basketball (Sagarin uses them in part).

But I don’t see one for hockey. I’d love to see one for both NHL and D1 college hockey (which maybe USCHO could add to their power rankings?).  Any chance you might take this on—just for fun and for us hockey fans?

Andy already does rankings for all the leagues on his site, including the NHL:
http://dolphinsim.com/ratings/

My problem with ELO, and really any of these rankings, is that once you have future information, you should revise your prior estimates.

For example, say Joba Chamberlain comes up in August.  You’ve got no idea how good he is, and so, even as the Yanks start to win, it’ll take a while for the Elo points to catch up to where they should be, since the Elo points are based on previous contests, weighted to a varying degree.

This is the same issue with a team win% of course.  A team like the Marlins could be .500, and then have a fire sale dumping all their great players post-World Series.  Well, we “know” how good the Marlins now are.  But, Elo looks at things at a team level, and is unaware of the fire sale.  And so, it takes time for things to catch up.

However, if you were to revise the estimate, saying “yup, Elo had the Marlins at 1400 points, but two months later, they are all the way down to 1100 points… clearly they were not at 1400 points at that time, but we didn’t know what team they really had”.

That said, it certainly sounds appealing as a discovery process.

This isn’t specifically related to BP’s free week, but Tango recently referenced Christina Kahrl’s long ago mention of the “soon” addition of comments.

She referenced that again today.

“Christina Kahrl: I should probably hesitate from making any great pronouncements, given that I relayed the answer that we’d have comments sections soon, and the answer is still “soon,” but it’s something that’s coming up.”

And here:

“Matt (SF, CA): What is your vision for the web site?

Christina Kahrl: Well, funny that you mention that, because we’re gearing up for our annual business meeting, and “the vision thing” is on the agenda. We’re all looking forward to getting comments added in one form or another. There will be changes in terms of the kind of statistical information we’ll be providing, some improvements on the surfability (finding all relevant articles to any one team on its Team Audit page is high on my wish list). We’re also always working on perfecting our content mix; the Preview segment has been a great addition in my opinion, especially given the amount of work Caleb and Marc invest in it.”

Not really new (or necessarily reliable at this point), but just a fyi.

I just wish they could be honest instead of political.  They’ve got smart technical people, and even a non-technical person could get comments working in minutes.  Do they not think we know this?  Everything is always about promises of changes for the better, yada yada yada, without saying anything specific.

Baseball Prospectus sometimes acts like the guy who continually promises his mistress that he’s going to leave his wife “soon”.

What’s so darn frustrating for some of us is that we like alot of the people there, so why in the world are they slaves to some of the crap going on there?

Maybe I’ll play along… guys, I have some huge announcement coming soon… can’t tell you right now, but it’ll be really good.  Just hang in there, and things will change soon. Ugh.  I can’t believe I said that, even in jest.

I’m less worried about those issues, and more worried about the actual sabermetrics at BP. They have an absolutely broken fielding metric that feeds into an absolutely broken replacement level measure - WARP, although VORP isn’t perfect either. Because of course what the world needs is two flawed replacement-level stats denominated in runs published on the same website.

It wouldn’t bother me, except a lot of well-meaning people are simply relying on BP to provide them with good, solid baseball metrics, and they’re not getting them. We’re raising an entire generation of baseball fans that think that VORP is sabermetrics (thanks, Fire Joe Morgan), and so everybody - for and against sabermetrics, and that bothers me.

With Fox gone to the Pirates and Silver splitting his time between BP and his political sidelight, there are an awful lot of days where BP is not distinguishable at all from SI, ESPN or just about any other national sports site. Obviously this is successful for them, so I can’t really begrudge them it. But a lot of grognards are painting BP as the lead sabermetric “heavy” in the fight to keep statistics from ruining the national past time - it’s funny and tragic at the same time, at least to me, because there’s so little daylight between what BP is right now and the national baseball media.

About Nate’s review of Scout’s Honor, there’s something someone told me a couple of years ago that’s kind of related to Nate’s point #4 (College versus High School).

A couple of years ago when I was like 12-13 (16 now) some of my teammates and I started getting recruited to the East Cobb baseball program (the program that has produced all of the talented players like Gordon Beckam). I ended up not playing for East Cobb because I had other sports ambitions (playing soccer). Anyways, at one of the try-outs one of the coaches started telling us about how soon (in our last few years in high school) the Braves were going to start inviting us to clinics. You’d go to their clinics and camps for a couple of years, and there they’d evaluate you, but they’d tell you that you would be good enough to get drafted in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th round, when in reality you were like a 16th round pick (at that point—maybe you were talented enough to be a top pick out of college). Then, they’d draft you very cheap as a very low pick.

Not sure of the validity of the story—but I just thought it was interesting.