THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Friday, February 10, 2012

Reader Mail of the Day: Why do we need X years of fielding data?  And what about outliers?

By Tangotiger, 02:50 PM

Pete:

When it’s said 3 years’ defensive data is needed to judge a player, what does that mean?  I’ll use Biggio as an example (since they’re talking about him at Baseballthinkfactory) - from ‘92-’02, he was worth about -5 runs/year fielding except for ‘97 where he was +19.  Was he (1) a generally poor fielder who had a good/lucky year, or (2) still a poor fielder in ‘97 that looks good only because of the noise in the numbers?

Me:

You never throw data away, unless you have a REALLY REALLY good reason to do so.  And even then, it better be REALLY REALLY REALLY good.

The more data you have, the less you need to regress.  So, you need two years of fielding data to tell you as much as one year of hitting data.  Would you make conclusions based on one year of hitting data?  No?  Then, you need more than two years of fielding data.

(44) Comments • 2012/02/14 • SabermetricsStatistical_Theory
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

May 26 07:27
“Why Kickstarter works”

May 26 03:03
Pete Palmer’s new book: Basic Ball

May 26 01:11
Largest demonstration in Canadian history?

May 25 19:41
What sabermetrics is NOT

May 25 16:59
Howard Stern

May 25 15:12
Do pitcher’s reach back for velocity when needed?

May 25 12:51
Chad Curtis

May 25 11:26
Lack of hustle during a game

May 25 10:58
Rooting for laundry

May 25 02:38
NFLPA lawsuit against collusion

THREADS

February 10, 2012
Reader Mail of the Day: Why do we need X years of fielding data?  And what about outliers?