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Monday, March 28, 2011
Reader mail of the day: Best Estimate of True Talent
If I wanted to create a “true-talent” estimate of a past year, how would you suggest weighting the surrounding years? I.e., for 1994 I would weight ‘93 as 3, ‘94 as 5, ‘95 as 3… Or how would I go about answering my own question by analyzing the data?
When we normally do our best estimate for a player’s true talent level, it’s usually based on known past information. So, today, March 28, 2011, what is Justin Verlander’s true talent level? And so, we look at his career, we weight the more recent performances higher, we consider his past performance relative to his age, and we come up with a best estimate of his true talent.
We can figure out the weights because we can look at an unbiased measure of his performance, the out-of-sample performance in 2011, and correlate that performance to his past performance (after adjusting appropriately). We do this historically with all pitchers, and we come up with a weight that basically says to take 4 parts last year, 3 parts the year before that, 2 parts the year before that, and 1 part the year before that (or some other similar scheme).
But, the reader is asking, what if today is July 1, 2014, and with the benefit of hindsight, we ask what is our best estimate of Verlander’s true talent level on July 1, 2011.
Our problem is now we don’t have an unbiased data point to compare against. Could we simply extend the above scheme and say that the performance in 2011 will be weighted as 4, the performances in 2010 and 2012 (one year before and after) will be weighted as 3, the 2009 and 2013 performances will be weighted as 2, and 2008/2014 will be weighted as 1. And we adjust for age. And can we simply apply the standard regression amount based on playing time?
I don’t really have a good answer, and I’d like to hear from the straight arrrows out there on presenting possible frameworks for discussion.
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