THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Perhaps one of the reasons is that, in MLB, you can usually tell who the three stars were from the box score.  Not always—you can’t see great defensive plays, or certain context specific stuff (like coming in with the bases loaded and nobody out and escaping the inning with no runs scoring)—but most of the time.

In hockey, if you weren’t watching the game, you need someone to tell you who the best players were.  I mean, yeah, if some guy scored 4 goals, it’s a no-brainer, but you can’t tell if the goalie had a good game, or if a particular defenseman did a great job.

I see the three stars in hockey as part of the box score.  It isn’t really there, but it should be.

I think the fielding plays is what’s missing, as well as how “hard” a pitcher was hit.  I think it will be an interesting exercise to see what comes of it.

It’s been 25 years since I went to a lot of hockey games, but it seemed to me then that the three stars were stats-based picks, with a home-team bias.  Some guy from the winning home team gets 2 assists, that’s a third star, the goalie gets a second star if he gives up two goals, and the player with the most goals or the most pivotal goal gets the #1.  wikipedia (see link) even says, “Usually, the top point scorers or outstanding goaltenders are designated the three stars, but other players may be considered by affecting the game by other means (e.g. consistent physical play, many steals, blocked shots, etc.).”

Because the way the stars are noted in hockey, it has to be done with about 2-4 minutes left in the game.  So, if it’s a tie game with minutes to go, it’s an almost certainty that one of the stars of the game is held for whoever scores the game-winning goal.  This is even more apparent in OT games.

For the goalie, I would say no way on the “number of goals allowed”.  That’s not a criteria.  I think that’s one place where the star-voters do a good value-added job.

I don’t think there’s a home team bias, but if there is, it’s probably pretty tame.  There’s a winner-bias, as there should be.

It seems that after 3 days the correlation between WPA and the 3 Stars are 98%. Kind of useless.

I was hoping that there’d be pitching and fielding insight.