THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Right, who cares. But I think it’s more likely that James 1) hasn’t had much occasion to compare play-by-play fielding metrics, at least in in a public discussion, and 2) when he does use a PBP metric he chooses to cite the one developed by his good buddy Dewan.

That’s for UZR, the MGL creation that we can be confident that James is well aware of. As far as the smaller studies that MGL posts on this blog and such, James himself has stated that he doesn’t keep up with that kind of stuff very diligently.

I doubt that James is harboring some sort of grudge.

Survey question. Do you believe that Bill James regularly reads this bog?

I don’t think he ever has read this blog and possibly does not know that it exists.  Not that he is derelict. As you said, he fully admits that he does not keep up with the new stuff.

Then again, since he is getting paid the big bucks by the Red Sox, perhaps he should…

UZR would probably be useless to Bill James if he can not see the data hidden behind the curtain. Dewan probably gives James more access to the detailed data for him to analyze as needed.  Having 3-4 cumulative numbers that cover hundreds of plays over a season probably does not do it for him.

I am pretty sure Bill James has some involvement with the Red Sox own fielding metrics which are probably more advanced than UZR and DRS since they can probably measure stuff like hang time, speed off the bat and positioning (distance from batted ball and time to cover the distance).

Of course, their metrics said Renteria and Lugo were better fielders than they were with the Red Sox, so maybe this is what he meant by the difficulty in projecting such players year to year.

i don’t expect BJ to use use uzr - my comments refer to the fact that he never mentions it or any of my work (as far as i know) in any discussions about defensive metrics, sabermetrics, etc., which suggests to me that he does hold a conscious or subconscious grudge.  as i said, no big deal and i could easily be wrong.

sorry, my shift key is having problems.

pft, where are you getting all of this information about the Red Sox’s fielding metrics?

Tom Tippett, when he was at Diamond Mind, had something very similar to UZR.

He’s been working for the Redsox for years now.

Tom Tippett has been a regular attendee at all the Sportvision Summits.  Sportvision has been marketing Hit Fx for a year.  BIS has been collecting hang time for at least the past year.  I would be very surprised if the Red Sox don’t have both Hit Fx data and hang time data and haven’t incorporated both into a proprietary fielding metric tha tis better than anything that can be constructed without those datasets.  I doubt that they have tried to incorporate fielder positioning into that metric, but I think it is very likely that they have a database that can pull up a visual of their fielders positions for any play they want to track in more detail.

By his own admission, Bill James is not good at keeping up on other baseball researchers’ work.  The fact that he (to our recollection) hasn’t cited mgl’s work is not unusual.

He is familar with Tom Tango’s work, probably due to the fact that Tango participates very actively in James’ running Q&A feature on James’ own website. 

James wrote this a couple weeks ago:  “Should [Felix Hernandez] say, “I would like to thank my manager, my coaches, my teammates and of course my parents, but also I would like to take a moment to thank Pete Palmer for this award, and Tom Tango, and Rob Neyer, and Keith Woolner and Eddie Epstein and Craig Wright, and all the others who have worked so hard for so long to demonstrate that there are good pitchers on teams that struggle to score runs.”” If you read that who’s who of names critically, Tango is the only one best known for work during the past 10 years.