THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think Helton is rated a little high.  His fielding seems a bit overvalued.

(Six great seasons are better than eight good ones.)

Hasn’t Pennants Added shown this to be untrue?

I’ll agree with Hawerchuk on Helton’s defense - great hands but no range - sort of the Derek Jeter of 1b.

I assume Nick is referring to David Gassko’s take on pennants added.  Gassko’s version came to a different conclusion than the other versions out there, and one that is quite counterintuitive. 

That’s not to say he’s wrong necessarily, but I think it’s safe to say that the matter is far from settled.

Even if a player is more valuable with seasons of 4, 4, 4, 4 WAR, I’m more impressed with seasons that go 8, 4, 2, 2.

For health reasons, I stay off message boards like ESPN’s, but I decided to peruse a little bit just too see what people were pissed off the most about.  The names I saw the most were Ryan Howard, Corey Koskie, Justin Morneau, and Mariano Rivera.  Obviously Rivera for only being 25 or whatever, Koskie for being on the list, and Morneau and Howard for being off of it.

Anyone have any legitimate qualms?

The funny thing about lists like this is looking towards the bottom.  Seeing Melvin Mora two spots from Hanley Ramirez, or Jarrod Washburn two spots from Matt Holliday.

I guess there’s something to be said for being average for 10 years and have those years all be in the same decade.  I’m just not sure what that something is.

#7

It’s called being Jack Morris.

Quick question. He has Beltran at 6. Does anyone see Beltran as a Hall of Famer? B-Ref’s HoF metrics say no. Just curious, because many believe C.Jones, Manny, Guerrero, Halladay, etc. have good chances.

@JD/#9: I was surprised at how much WAR he’s accumulated according to Rally. 54.6 WAR puts him 143rd on the list, right in front of and behind a couple of decent HoF. I like the cutoff of 60, and he should easily reach that barring injury.

That said, I don’t think he’ll have strong consideration. A good chunk of his value is defensive, and he’s never come off as an offensive powerhouse, even though he’s been a great offensive player.

You’ll be hard-pressed to make a distinction between Carlos Beltran and Ichiro.  Plus Beltran has that fantastic playoff.

The 50/50 point for the Hall of Fame is right around 55 WAR.  Basically, Andre Dawson.  Sounds about right to me.

While I completely agree the playing time argument pushes Pujols and Rodriguez to the top of the list, consider this: If Barry Bonds played one more season, got 600 plate appearances and made an out in every single one of them, he would still have an OBP above both Pujols and Rodriguez and a slugging percentage above Rodriguez.  His OPS would be just .006 behind Pujols.

Bonds, actual: 4072 PA, 2871 AB, .322/.517/.724
Bonds, adjusted: 4672 PA, 3471 AB, .266/.451/.599

Pujols: 6082 PA, 5146 AB, .334/.427/.628
Rodriguez: 6768 PA, 5732 AB, .304/.401/.587

While that’s an incredible stat on Bonds, I don’t think it’s only playing time that puts Pujols ahead of him, for a couple reasons:

One is that, while he was still a hitting machine when he was forced out, his defense was nowhere near what it once had been.  Over the decade, BaseballProjection has his defense as about a 4 win negative (about average for a left-fielder, so it’s 8 years of left-field position adjustments cutting into his value).  Pujols and A-Rod were 2-3 wins positive in the field on the decade (A-Rod because he played more premium positions and Pujols because he fielded superbly at first).

The other is that Bonds’ OBP numbers are inflated because of the huge number of intentional walks.  His wOBA for the decade was easily better than anyone else’, but not to the point that you could add 600 blank PAs and have him still come out a better hitter than Pujols (though it’s impressive how close he comes:  about .013 short, and he would still be slightly ahead of A-Rod).

Bonds would have to have played both 2008 and 2009, and played each at 6 WAR, to catch Pujols in Rally’s WAR tally.  Those years would have probably been as a DH.  That means he would have had to have been roughly a +80 hitter (with the 5 run DH penalty, so like being +85 as a LF) in both years to catch Pujols in WAR, so I think it’s more than playing time that pushes Pujols to the top.  It’s also defense.  Give Bonds the playing time, and I don’t see any way he catches Pujols anyway.  Or, take out a year from Pujols to give them the same number of years, and Albert’s still ahead.

There is a pretty good case for Bonds as hitter of the decade, though, and that is damn impressive considering the decades A-Rod and Pujols had, in their primes, in more years.  Also, considering how clearly Bonds was the player of the ‘90s, for it to take 2 all-time greats to push him to third in another decade is remarkable.

My first impression is that that seems a little (not a lot, though) high for Jeter unless you are giving quite a bit of consideration to playing in the AL East.  BaseballProjection has the Chipper/Ichiro/Beltran group about 4 wins ahead of Jeter on the decade and Helton about 7 wins ahead.  Beltran also did things in the playoffs Jeter never did and was significantly better in the postseason, albeit in a smaller sample.  Maybe playing in the AL East really is enough to move Jeter that high, though.  I don’t know.

The other is that I’d like to see Edmonds a bit higher, though 12 is pretty good for him, especially given his lack of notoriety.  He’s dead even with Jeter in WAR and was just as good in the playoffs, and Edmonds is way ahead in WAA.  Of the two, Edmonds was more spectacular over less playing time (and in general, Edmonds places so well with less playing time than most others around him on the list because he was so spectacular when he was on the field).  Edmonds doesn’t seem to get any credit for his excellence or his postseason performance, though, and actually places a few spots lower than his WAR rank.  I know Edmonds doesn’t have nearly the notoriety of someone like Jeter, and rightly so, but a lot of that is because of what Jeter did in the ‘90s and that Jeter is still going strong into the next decade.

Working around the framework of Rally’s database and adjusting from there almost guarantees the list isn’t going to make any unjustifiable picks.  It’s a nice blend of starting with an objective list to make it pretty accurate and his subjective adjustments to make it interesting to a general audience.  Kudos to Neyer for taking on a 100 player list, too.

@Tango/#11: I would indeed be hard-pressed to make that distinction, but somehow I think the Holy Writers will not be. Ichiro has set records and won an MVP over the span of his career. Beltran did have the amazing postseason with Houston, but has otherwise been completely under the radar in terms of his excellence. I just don’t think a whole lot of people involved in the HoF process will think Beltran is any better than a so-called “Hall of Very Good” player, even though it’s a wrong distinction.

If you weight big seasons disproportionately--which Tango does, at least during the Edgar HOF argument a few years ago--Bonds has a decent case to #1.  I actually think wOBA underrates his offensive value slightly, since it makes rationality assumptions about the other team’s choice to IBB Bonds that I don’t think hold in this particular case.

Kincaid: I do not disagree at all that defense is also a key factor in this, but those are important points to emphasize. In fact, the only way that Rodriguez gets close to Pujols is the credit he’s given for his years at shortstop; Pujols is clearly the superior hitter, at least by my reading of the numbers.  Just meant that the playing time gap is almost impossible to overcome, but Barry tried his hardest to do so.

maybe too hard.....

Gary: If “effort” is a disqualifying factor, Pujols is the only contender left standing.

I’m not sure that wOBA really does undervalue Bonds because of the intentional walks.  A while back, I looked at the WPA for all his IBBs in 2004 (the year he had 120 of them), figuring there was no way that many walks weren’t creating more value than his wOBA suggests, but the total value of his IBBs by WPA was actually really close to the total value of that number of PAs for Bonds by his wOBA.  There were some times when he was walked intentionally where he probably shouldn’t have been, but there were also times when the walk was clearly less valuable than an average Bonds PA from 2004, so the times he gets full credit for his average value in those cases balances out the times he was walked irrationally, and giving him credit for an average PA for each IBB ends up being pretty close to the total WPA those walks provided.  This is off of memory, but I’m pretty sure that was the case for 2004.  If excluding IBB from wOBA didn’t undervalue him in 2004, I can’t imagine it ever did.

If you only care about how good he was and not necessarily the value he provided, then it doesn’t really matter whether they walked him rationally or not.  It’s just like excluding SH from PAs.  If you only care about how good he was in the context of the pitcher/batter match-up, you only need to look at what happened when he was actually in a pitcher-batter match-up.  When either the batter or pitcher removes himself from that match-up by managerial choice, it does affect what value the hitter provides, but it doesn’t really give you a data point of performance for measuring how good he is (in the case of SH, ignoring the probabilities of a SH attempt not ending up a SH, anyway).  So in that sense, there is a good reason for removing IBB if you want to measure skill even if the value is off (which I don’t think it is in this case).

Mitch/18, no doubt Bonds made a hell of an effort for the top spot.  If he’d simply switched his 90s and 00s, his 00s performance was good enough it would have been neck and neck with Griffey for best of the 90s, and his 90s performance would have dominated the 00s.

Kincaid/21: Huh, that’s surprising.  I thought I remembered reading a Dan Rosenheck article where he argued for a significant amount of irrationality in the intentional walking of Bonds.

It sounds weird, but I’m not actually sure I agree with removing IBB in terms of assessing the “talent” of the player.  Assuming for the sake of argument that teams were irrational in how much they walked Bonds, why isn’t the ability to induce teams to behave in irrational ways any less of a “talent” than anything else?  It is certainly persistent.  It’s a little like Devern Hester on the Bears a while ago: he was returning so well that teams started squibbing all their kick-offs.  I would bet this was an irrational strategy on the other teams parts, but Hester certainly deserved credit for it; he was contributing to his team’s chances of winning in a repeatable manner.

Of course, Neyer’s list is clearly based on value, not talent.  Going by talent, there has probably never been a better baseball player than Bonds from 2001-2004, so that one would be pretty easy.

I think it just depends on what specifically you consider to be talent/ability as opposed to value or vice versa.  The two are obviously heavily related, and you can be anywhere on a sliding scale of what constitutes one vs. the other.  In at least some sense, he should get credit at some point for creating value as the result of teams acting irrationally toward him if that value is out of line with what you would otherwise get.  How much you want to consider that part of his talent or baseball ability and how much you want to consider it simply value created is something of a philosophical choice, I guess.

I would imagine a lot of the walks were irrational.  Theoretically, teams should only walk Bonds if the expected value of Bonds batting is more than the value of walking him, which means that his average value is the upper limit.  In fact, the upper limit for the value of a rational IBB would be lower than the value of his average PA, at least in his best years, because his expected (or projected) value in a given PA would be lower than his actual wOBA from those years since you would have to regress it some and weight it with past years where he had a lower wOBA.  So if teams are only walking him in rational situations, then the average value of all those walks would have to be lower than the value of his wOBA over that many PAs because the sample would be made up of only walks worth less than that limit.  That the total WPA and his average value over that number of PAs came out close to equal would seem to imply that teams were walking him irrationally a significant portion of the time.