jay

Works for a guy who understands advanced stats. Doesn't work for the Royals fan running around to his friends and the internet saying Alex Gordon is the second-best non-pitcher in baseball. Unfortunately, the second scenario is probably more common and it gives WAR a bad name.

Right on! The FanGraphs primer on UZR talks about how a single season of UZR needs to be regressed by half and stresses the need to regress over and over (quote below). On the other hand, offensive stats generally become reliable within less than a season's worth of data. I wish FG would provide WAR values that are regressed instead of raw. You'd get rid of the big flaw people love to point out -- players who have single season values highly influenced by their unreliable defensive value.

I agree with most of your post, but this part seems both accurate and inaccurate. Offense and defense are measured on the same scale -- runs. At the end of the day, scoring 1 run and preventing 1 run accomplishes the exact same thing so that part certainly makes sense. However, simply being on the same scale doesn't mean they have the same influence. When you look at the wRAA leaderboard (the batting swinging component of WAR), the leaders are around 40 runs above average (RAA) and the top 30 are all above 16. The UZR leaders (the defense component of WAR) are around 25 runs (Gordon and Heyward) but the top 30 are only above 5. That pretty well shows it is easier to generate WAR with the bat than the glove. Somewhat ironically, it also highlights that the UZR numbers over this sample size are unreliable. Surely, Gordon and Heyward aren't 5x better on defense than the defenders at the bottom of the top 30. Until defense valuations are more accurate over smaller samples, it's my opinion that the UZR contributions to WAR should be weighted to account for less of the value.

My comment is more related to the finite level it is commonly used. I think that comes from the tradition of ranking players by the traditional counting stats (ie leading the league in RBIs). If the main complaint is accuracy, why insist on saying the SS ranked 11th by WAR was definitively better than the SS ranked 12th? I think it is accurate enough to see the range where a player's output across the full game fits, which is a massive improvement over simply looking at standard offensive counting stats. Also, comparing quite commonly actually means predicting. The comment about who would get drafted where is a perfect example. Alex Gordon being 2nd in WAR this season among position players is a view of his performance this season. It is not saying GMs would predict him to do that going forward and hence draft him 2nd in some mythical all-player draft.

This is exactly how NOT to use WAR, if you ask me... So-n-so has 4.24 WAR this year and This-Guy has 4.21 WAR so So-n-so is better at baseball and that's really dumb cause everyone I know thinks This-Guy is better at baseball. Unfortunately, it happens all the time.

To clarify one thing from the original post, it's 2 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) level... NOT above ML average. That's a big difference. Plenty of articles out there on how replacement level is defined. The concept is great -- combine all of the contributions a player makes in different aspects of the game and give it a value. It's relatively easy to understand. It's one number to tell you how good a player was. It's not perfect, but certainly a massive improvement over gawd-awful stats like RBIs and saves to value a player.

Hey John, the data is in fact from the first 90 loss season and not the most recent. Additional 90 loss seasons are ignored after the first one until the team makes the playoffs. So, for the Twins that is 2011 and they are included in the teams that have had 1 and 2 seasons to rebuild. The Cubs, for example, show up multiple times as they went from 90 losses to playoffs and back to 90 losses with 2011 being most recent.

P.S. Joe Mauer.

Good question, John. Looking at the data that way removes the skew in the average from teams that have taken the long route in their rebuild. We can add 2011 and 2012 to get a few more data points. 41 teams lost 90 games and faced a rebuild. 8 of them made the playoffs the next year (19.5%). 36 of them have had at least 5 years since that first 90 loss season. 20 of them had made the playoffs by that point (55.6%). After 11 years, 90.6% of the teams had made it back to the playoffs. The Royals are the team that break the chart. Every other team with at least 15 years since losing 90 games has made the playoffs. Looking at the data this way gives us an average rebuild of more like 4-5 years. If the Twins don't make the playoffs by 2016, they'll be beyond the average rebuild time.

On a related noted, I gathered some data to see how long the average rebuild takes. For teams that don't bounce right back to the playoffs after losing 90 games, it's an average of 7 years to get back to the playoffs. I'm hoping we end up closer to 5 (2016) than 7. The full blog post is here if you're interested: http://twinsdaily.com/blog/463/entry-5330-rebuilding-from-90-losses-to-playoff-team/

2011. The Year of the Injury. Nishioka. Bilateral leg weakness. 90+ losses. 2012. The Rebound That Wasn't. Brutal starting pitching. Marginal bullpen and offense. 2013. Stop the Pain. The farm is looking better, but the major league team isn't so major. 2014. TBD. On pace for 90 losses, the consensus seems to be that this year's team is easier to watch. The team has made moves to transition to the next generation of players. This brings us to the question I've pondered and will try to answer: How long does it take a team to rebuild and make the playoffs after a 90 loss season? 90 losses is bottoming out. It's bad. Since 1996 through 2010, we can find 36 instances of a team that lost 90 games and has either gone on to make the playoffs in a future year or is still trying -- looking at you, Royals. Some teams have done it more than once like the four-time Cubs while only two teams have avoided a 90 loss season -- the Yankees and Cardinals. Some teams lose 90 games and relive that pain multiple times. Other teams have rebounded quickly. Number of seasons it takes to reach the playoffs after first losing 90 games: Six of those teams are still adding to their streak of no playoffs since their first 90 loss season after the '95 strike: Royals (1985 in real life, represented as 1997 here), Blue Jays (2004), Mariners (2004), Marlins (2007), Padres (2008), Mets (2009). We can come to a couple of interesting conclusions by looking at that chart: 1) If you don't rebound immediately after your 90 loss season, you probably need to rebuild. This is pretty evident with the 2012 Twins. After a long playoff streak, it was reasonable for us all to think that 2011 might have been a blip. Turns out, no. 2) In this data set, the average rebuild to reach the playoffs takes 5.8 years. If we exclude the teams that rebounded after one bad year, that number goes up to 7 years. The Twins are about to wrap year 3 since 2011's 90+ losses. We're certainly hopeful that the Twins reach the playoffs before 2017 or 2018, but it's feasible to think that could be the case as prospects continue to develop and grow into producers at the MLB level. The Twins appear pretty close to on track for "average" or just ahead. Many of us would have liked the Twins to be more aggressive in acknolwedging the first conculsion. We'd all probably agree that the farm system has come a long way and the future holds hope. Hopefully, this data provides some insight on how long a rebuild takes across MLB and, therefore, provides something to compare our current rebuild against. Obligatory Joe Mauer reference for free pizza.

Is this the "part of the future" argument? I generally agree that should be a consideration, but it doesn't seem realisitic to think that every single rostered player is going to be under 30 and have 4-6 years of team control. A case can be made that the Twins gained not having to rush their SP prospects more than they wanted to and were able to more closely follow the development path they desired. Some here obviously don't agree with many of those paths and want every prospect here now, but to each their own. One could also make the case that the Twins gained not being forced to give more starts to AAA/AAAA filler. Sure, one of them could turn into something but it's nearly as likely to think Correia could generate value with a career year (while being significantly more reliable).

Ah, but see what happened there? We can just use this to further b!tch about other ones... Congrats, Trevor!

It's hard to assess the impact of injuries, playing time/platoons, multi-position players and more here. What I do take away is that the Twins need more guys like Suzuki, Dozier and maybe even Plouffe.

That certainly could make sense. Surely, the Twins have Alex at AAA to work on something. The fact that we don't definitively know what doesn't make the Twins idiots who can't figure out when to promote a pitcher, as many here are suggesting. With a prospect of his type, I'd be almost certain there's a heck-of-a-lot of discussion around how to best develop him. I'm hoping he ends up in the pen for September.

It's unfortunate to see Gladden attempting to advance this stereotype of the Twins' hitting approach. A hitter that is looking to pull the ball all the time is going to get taken advantage of by MLB pitchers. It might work in the minors, but it's rarely sustainable in MLB. Ortiz, Gomez, and Hardy are commonly cited as guys the Twins tried to break by teaching them how to hit the other way when situationally appropriate. The irony there is that when you look at their splits, Ortiz and Gomez had really good seasons after leaving the Twins by doing something... I'll let you decipher it yourself: Ortiz, 2002 with Twins. wRC+ by field: 259 to RF (pull), 66 to CF, 74 to LF Ortiz, 2003 with Red Sox (breakout year). wRC+ by field: 205 to RF (pull), 152 to CF, 149 to LF Gomez, 2008 with Twins. wRC+ by field: 183 to LF (pull), 45 to CF, 91 to RF Gomez, 2013 with Brewers (breakout year). wRC+ by field: 261 to LF (pull), 150 to CF, 154 to RF For those unfamiliar with wRC+, it is a number weighted to league and park factors with 100 representing league average offensive production. Hardy is the exception and has stayed a 'true-pull' hitter. This has given him 20 some homers most years which sounds great, but his overall offensive performances have varied above and below league average.

I don't see the need for a sixth man in the rotation. Take Pino out of the August rotation and put Darnell in the September pen.

From MLBTR: Gross.

This part is not true. The formula of every advanced metric I've ever seen is published. Generally, along with quite the explanation on the formula from the author. On the other hand, this is quite true and valid. Standard counting stats make sense to people, hence why they've stuck around despite their shortfalls. The concept of WAR is pretty easy to understand, so it has caught on fairly well. Helping larger portions of the fan base understand how and when to use advanced stats, along with what they mean, is the gap that sabermetrics needs to cross.

The return here is completely irrelevant. I appreciate that the Twins took a shot on Morales, I really do. Freeing up the playing time is most important at this point with the side benefit of shedding his $4.3M+ due for the next 2 months. It's surprising the Twins didn't have to cover a significant portion of that money.

Is that even a thing?

Every team could use a 50+ HR hitter. Your rationale here relies on perfect 20-20 hindsight. Abreu wasn't a guaranteed 50+ HR hitter just hitting his prime when he signed or anything even close to it. He was a big question mark who was already 26 with poor defense value and the promise of power. There's about a $100M difference between the two.

Yeah, maybe not... but at least qualifies as a candidate.

We must have different definitions of humiliation. If the owner can talk about the team, I don't see why the GM can't talk about players when warranted. Otherwise, it's just more generalities without specific, individual accountability. That shouldn't be limited to the players and includes the rest of the staff... however, any staff statements need to be a multiple more cautious given how easy it is to start the "fire X" talk.

Yeah, agreed. Sorry I took a nibble at the bait. The shiny spinner was so shiny.