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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Yet another Montreal-teenager stat
I’ve written about how in my youth, I’d come up with the best hitting measure ever! I was in Montreal, it’s the 80s, and I discovered Bill James and Pete Palmer, the equivalent of being in the same room as Da Vinci and Edison as far as I was concerned. And what I did was add up all the numbers that I’d see, TB, BB, HR, SLG*1000, etc, and I’d get a great list. Cal Ripken would be the leader one year, I think.
Nate Silver points out to this new stat from ESPN. If Murray Chass is against this stat, then I stand should-to-shoulder with Chass. This is like version 2 of the Elias Player Ranking stat to determine compensation picks for free agents. Both of these version would be at the same level as the Montreal-teenager stat. These are freak show stats that tell you nothing, other than if you add up “good” numbers, and subtract “bad” numbers, you end up with something reasonable on a general sense. I challenge anyone to come up with a stat that looks semi-reasonable but gives you absurd results. That is, can you come up with anything that is worse than batting average? It’s not possible.
Two notes for Nate:
1. I believe that Palmer modified his weight for the SB so that it was no longer .30 runs. For some reason, I’m thinking 0.22 runs. I need to pick up his latest Encyclopedia. I’m long overdue to support him. In any case, The Book has the most comprehensive list (see the Win Values in Table 11), or one of these two tables.
2. It would be fairer for you to run the same regression test against VORP (and OPS). I’m pretty sure you will find that VORP does have at least one problem (walks being too low, if Woolner is still using what his site says he’s using). In any case, if you are going to compare two measures, you can’t take one on faith.
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