from Amazon
Monday, September 12, 2011
On Defense: Subjective Data, Objectively Considered
Great piece by Keith Isley.
Sabermetrics evaluates a player’s “true” abilities as statistical regularities found in large samples. Defensive evaluation is the one aspect of the game that has been resistant to the statistical approach, at least so far. The customary sabermetric solution to this problem is to get more data and treat it with stronger mathematics, which is exactly what the advanced PBP-based defensive metrics do. Sometimes, though, progress requires not simply more data and better processing, but new methods that produce new observations that lead to new abstractions.
Fortunately, there is an established (if not well known) framework for the objective and rigorous analysis of subjective data. It’s called Q methodology, and it’s one of my favorite tools for understanding a phenomenon from a different perspective. Q provides instrumentation (the “Q sort”) for the quantification of subjectivity and a technology (factor analysis) for data reduction and interpretation.
A Q sort ranks orders subjects by a series of relatively subjective variables (such as those typically provided by baseball scouts) and the factor analysis uncovers the commonalities among those subjective elements. The result is a better understanding of what it is that makes a fielder great. Let me run through an example, and I’ll put the more technical details in a footnote.
Note: that article was from Feb, 2006. I took a two year blogging hiatus between Apr, 2004 (my old blog at Primer) and Jun 2006 (when I started blogging here), between which, I worked on The Book. I confined my comments to threads at the old Fanhome/Scout otherwise (for all intents and purposes, inaccessible now).
So, I happen to run into the above article, and, since there’s no active thread for it, I figured it would be a good one to link to. So, if you happen to see me link to more old pieces between those two dates, will, just treat it as something new.
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