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Thursday, August 20, 2009
Educating a fan on… reliever impact
A fan said this:
No matter how you look at the math, the closer never comes close in value.
I would not use the numbers I’m about to present as-is (they require adjustments and change in baselines), but as a first step, Eric Gagne in 2003 is in the discussion:
WPA
+5.6 Gagne
+5.4 Pedro
+5.2 Halladay (that guy’s always in the discussion)
+4.9 Loaiza
+4.5 Schmidt
+4.2 Donnelly
+4.1 Wagner
+4.1 Prior
As I said, you have to change the baseline to something other than average, and you have to change the leverage aspect to realize that the reliever should only get partial credit for it. How do you do the adjustments?
First figure the LI of each pitcher. Starters are usually very close to 1, so you might as well leave them be. For Gagne, he had an LI of 1.8. We give him credit for 1.4 (halfway between the LI he found himself in and the average… we do that because we credit him for having the talent to leverage the situation, but realizing that if he wasn’t there, someone else, worse than him, would be there anyway… it’s a way to approximate the chaining effect). So, his 5.6 WPA, based on 1.8 LI, is worth 4.3 on 1.4 LI.
The replacement level for a reliever is .030 wins per 9 IP below average. So, you give every reliever that much, times his adjusted LI. For Gagne, we add +0.8 wins times 1.4, or +1.1 wins. That gives us an adjusted and rebaselined WPA of 5.4 WAR.
For starters, the replacement level is .120 wins per 9 IP below average. So, you give each starter that much more. For your typical workhorse starters of 210 IP (pretty much what Prior and Schmidt got), that adds 2.8 wins. That puts those guys at around 7 WAR.
So, I would not say that an ace reliever never comes close in value. But, he’s got a huge hill to overcome, that’s for sure.
FWIW, the way Fangraphs calculates WAR has Prior at 7.6, Schmidt at 6.7, and Gagne at 4.5.
Glove-slap: Repoz.
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