from Amazon
Thursday, April 02, 2009
MGL in… SI
Yet another MGL sighting.
(If link doesn’t work, try this one.)
In 2003, in a forum on the website Baseball Think Factory, a professional poker player living in Las Vegas named Michtel Licthman introduced, in a 6,800-word primer, a metric that he called Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Lichtman was crunching numbers with data he purchased from STATS Inc.—paying nearly $10,000 for it annually—and, like Dewan, was measuring the runs saved or lost by every fielder compared to the league average at his position. His UZR model was similar to the plus/minus system that Dewan had come up with, but with more parameters for each batted ball; among them, the ballpark, whether the pitcher and batter were left- or righthanded, and the ground ball and fly ball tendencies of the pitcher.
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That same year the Cardinals hired Lichtman as a consultant. But during his time with the organization Lichtman was mostly frustrated that even a team open-minded enough to hire him—he had been recommended to the team’s ownership by vice president of player personnel Jeff Luhnow—was so hesitant to embrace his analysis. “I met [manager] Tony La Russa once,” says Lichtman, “and he had no interest in what I was saying. Tony was not into it; [general manager] Walt Jocketty was agnostic.”This winter Lichtman, who left the Cardinals after the 2005 season, made UZR—considered by many to be the most comprehensive defensive metric out there—available to the public on the website FanGraphs, which will update player stats weekly during the season. “The funny thing is, all this information is now available free for anyone to see, so there’s really no reason for teams to do their own thing,” says Lichtman. “Yet it’s clear that half to three quarters of the teams still have no clue how to evaluate defense on that level and how to interpret that into a player’s overall value.”
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When asked how much further defensive metrics can go, Lichtman says the analysts are “90 percent there.” The other 10% will be reached when teams and companies such as Baseball Info Solutions and STATS Inc. start tracking the hang time of a ball and the exact positioning of a defender, as well as the player’s route to the ball.
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