THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Well Rice does have a better career fWAR than Cameron and Lofton and when I square the war in every season of his career, he’s better than Cameron, that adjusts for peak value.

AFaICT fWAR did not adjust for GiDP until 2002.  Rice is perhaps the extreme case for this, rWAR docks him 46 runs, about 4.7 wins.  Lofton, Ichiro and Cameron are all above average at avoiding double plays.  The different replacement levels affect the absolute numbers but won’t make a big difference in the relative numbers.  (Cameron’s fewer career PAs will hurt him here a little.) My guess is that most of the remaining difference probably has to do with figuring how park effects should be handled.

fWAR:

Lofton 66
Rice 56
Cameron 53

fWAR uses a slightly lower replacement level, so fWAR will be higher on average than rWAR.

Cameron beats Rice by 5 in rWAR.  rWAR has baserunning for him for his entire career, Fangraphs only 2002 on.  Adjusting for this gives Cameron 2 wins.  Rice was an average baserunner, so having fWAR not show this means nothing to him.

GIDP are not part of the fWAR equation.  Rice was -4.6 wins, and Cameron +0.4, so adjusting for DP and baserunning would put them:

Cameron 55
Rice 51

The same relative rank as on BBref.  And rWAR double play rating DOES consider GIDP opportunities.

Wow that’s awesome!

And I love you put it “everyone waits for the dust to settle and look at HR in peak years”. I find HR’s less exciting than most people. Sometimes I wish they’d declare all HR’s to be foul balls ‘cause they’re out of play. It’d be fun to see how people judge who the best players are, when HR’s are treated like fouls. Although I know they’ll never do it ‘cause it’ll lower scoring… but if they made the field’s bigger (CF fence 450ft or 500ft away?), it could make things very interesting.

I’d kind of like to see baseball on bigger fields like that.  The Ryan Howards of the world might only hit 10-15 homers.  But they’d get a bunch of doubles.

You could not afford a Manny Ramirez/Adam Dunn type in the outfield anymore.  You’d need 3 guys with center field speed to cover that ground.  Guys like Manny would either have to learn 1B, or not play at all.

Replacing the Adam Dunns with the Endy Chavez’s of the world would reduce offense even more.

Baseball is at its best when you guy put a small speedster like Tim Raines and a big bruiser like Pedro Guerrero and not know which is the better offensive player.

The ideal run environment is one where it’s at around 3.5 runs per 27 outs, and that you get a decent number of HR.

The value of small ball (SB, CS, sac bunts) will rise here, but so will the relative value of the HR to the other hits.

Endy Chavez is an ideal target player in this baseball setting.

"You could not afford a Manny Ramirez/Adam Dunn type in the outfield anymore.  You’d need 3 guys with center field speed to cover that ground.”

Is that true, though?

Let’s say a great left fielder has a range equal to the area of a circle with 90 ft diameter (just making stuff up).

A fielder with no range might have a range of 70 ft diameter.

The smaller left field is, the higher percentage of left field that great left fielder will cover.

Whereas the bigger left field, the more area that neither one of them will get to anyway.

Wouldn’t the greater fielder be worth more in a small outfield? (Assuming it’s not so small as to be smaller than the weak fielder’s range.)

It’d be much easier to show this in a drawing.

Good questions.  You probably would have a greater percentage of hits that nobody can catch.

I suspect a lot of the speedy guy’s value would be holding the runners to 2 bases instead of letting them circle the bases on deep hits.

And a player’s outfield arm becomes a lot more important, too, which always seemed to me orthogonal to body type.

The Mike Cameron - Jim Rice comp. 

First, Rice played in a much lower run environment, so using traditional stats as Poz did there is a not appropriate.

Second, players should be given credit for adjusting their play to their home park even if it is detrimental to their play on the road, since players play 1/2 of their games at home.

Third, sluggers like Rice were actually discouraged from walking in those days.  As Boggs said, getting on base had no value when you discussed contracts.  Fans at Fenway actually booed Ted Williams for walking.  Nobody knows what Jim Rice OBP would be if he played in the same era as Mike Cameron where OBP had value that translated into a bigger pay check

Cameron was certainly a much better defensive OF’er. I am not confident that any of the defensive metrics judge Fenway LF’ers properly, so the WAR’s are more uncertain, and may tend to be unfavorable for anyone playing LF at Fenway.

Camerons chief value was in his defense, something we measure only imperfectly, and which is not as rare as good hitting.  That Cameron was a decent hitter as well as a good defender made him a valuable player, and gave him a lengthy career, but he was not a HOF.er. 

Jim Rice was one of the top 10 hitting OF’ers of his generation.  Cameron is not even in the top 70 of his.

Love this Bill James line:

Benchmarks are simplifications.  They exist to make a complex discussion into a simple one.  If you articulate them by making position discounts, they’re no longer simple so they’re no longer meaningful.

Rice walked 52 times per full season.  That’s not a negative, it’s a perfectly average amount. It’s ridiculous to give him credit in any way, shape or form for walks he didn’t take.  Ken Singleton played in the same era.  He had no trouble taking walks.

The WAR numbers adjust Rice’s defense to the point where it’s slightly above average.  You really think that could be underrating him?  If so is there any evidence that while active people considered him an outstanding fielder?

People talk about Jim Rice (and Jack Morris) the way politicians talk about any topic, by ignoring half of the evidence, and making up unreasonable assumptions.

"Fans at Fenway actually booed Ted Williams for walking.”

I have a hard time believing this.

In any event, Poz does not only look at traditional stats. He spends time adjusting (however informally) for park and era and still concludes that Rice was the far superior hitter.

Jim Rice a better hitter than Mike Cameron?  Who is disputing that?

Cameron’s case rests on his fielding.

Tango/15: Agreed; I was just addressing pft/10’s complaint about Poz’s article. I think had he read the article in full, beyond just your excerpt, his comment would have been largely unnecessary.

Surprised no one has mentioned that the Red Sox, in effect, kept Jim Rice over a generally above average fielding CF with solid offense and higher WAR in his last two years with the Sox than Rice.  And it looks like they made the right call (mainly b/c Lynn’s injuries).  Seems like Mike Cameron was able to cheat the aging curve for CF’s by 2 or 3 years (partic. with fielding)

Fans at Fenway actually booed Ted Williams for walking.

True. I’ve read gripes about TSW was that he “wouldn’t swing at a pitch an 1/8th of an inch off the plate with a RISP”. I’ve heard ti said the difference between Musial and Williams is that Musial would expand his swing zone with runners in scoring position. Williams is famous for NEVER expanding his zone.

3-4-5 hitters were expected to drive in runs, not take walks with a man in scoring position. I don’t anyone can dispute that for the time period being discussed.

Ken Singleton played in the same era.  He had no trouble taking walks.

1. He was rare.
2. He played for one of the very few managers that appreciated this.
3. He was under-appreciated by everyone else.

When you take it all into account, Ken Singleton was saber before saber was cool. In other words, his production wasn’t valued enough during his playing days. Seems to indicate that everyone else valued and encourage “run driver inners”.

Baseball is at its best when you guy put a small speedster like Tim Raines and a big bruiser like Pedro Guerrero and not know which is the better offensive player.

Tom, I love this statement. I make no secret how much I love the 80s for baseball entertainment and diversity. Take away the artificial turf and bring in some of the fences a tad and it could be even better.

I hate it that Rice is in the HoF. Good hitter, but c’mon. I suppose it doesn’t affect me in my personal life, and I don’t look at the HoF as a joke ... but I do get tired of every player being compared to Jim Rice now. He’s the new Lowest Common Denominator.

Rudy: right.  I mean, we can make the discussion Rice v Lynn and Rice v Evans.

And from there, make it Lynn or Evans v Cameron.

Rice at this point is becoming a myth.

I think that the argument that walks shouldn’t be considered for Jim Rice is among the most inane position I have encountered in the silly world of Hall of Fame arguments.  Setting aside the various secondary premises one has to swallow (such as the fact that OBA and walks were ignored by the mainstream meant that baseball people were similarly benighted across the board, an especially odd argument considering that the folks advancing it tend to value traditional baseball wisdom more than the saber crowd), it requires one to believe that this phenomenon was unique to Jim Rice.  The overwhelming majority of power hitters of Rice’s era and previously had much better walk rates than Rice.

Rice’s career W/(AB + W) relative to his league was 79.  Yogi Berra’s was 77, Orlando Cepeda’s 76, and Lee May’s 64.  Those are the only 350+ HR hitters from before Rice’s time to have a poorer walk rate:

Ernie Banks 82
Dave Kingman 87
Tony Perez 91
Joe DiMaggio 92
Carlton Fisk 93
Dave Winfield 103
Johnny Bench 108
Billy Williams 110
Hank Aaron 111
Greg Nettles 112
Al Kaline 112
Frank Howard 113
Willie Stargell 114
Gil Hodges 119
Johnny Mize 122
Duke Snider 123
Reggie Jackson 127
Stan Musial 129
Willie Mays 129
Rocky Colavito 129
Frank Robinson 133

Well, you get the idea.  This is followed by sixteen 350 HR hitters whose walk rates dwarfed Rice’s, including rough contemporaries (+/- 10 yrs or so) Norm Cash, Mike Schmidt, Dwight Evans, Darrell Evans, Yaz, McCovey, Killebrew, and Dick Allen.  They all were somehow to immune to the horrific pressures of contemporary baseball that forced Jim Rice to eschew walks.  Lucky them.