Otto von Ballpark
-
Posts
20,669 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
74
Content Type
Profiles
Minnesota Twins News, Rumors & Analysis
Minnesota Twins Videos
2026 Minnesota Twins Top Prospect Rankings
2022 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses
Minnesota Twins Trade & Free Agent Rumors
Minnesota Twins Fan Guides & Resources
2023 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses
The Minnesota Twins Players Project
2024 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses
2025 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses
2026 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses
Forums
Blogs
Events
Store
Downloads
Gallery
Everything posted by Otto von Ballpark
-
Does Boyer have an opt-out? -
Brock, I think you are WAY under-estimating how hard it is to measure/estimate anything with more than one or two components. Baseball fielding is not like a 40 yard dash. Do you think we could easily calculate your abilities as a web designer over multiple projects, multiple years and not see a similar kind of swings in the result? I too welcome our SporTrac overlords, but I think you might be surprised how much noise will remain in calculating something so complicated.
-
You will have no disagreement from me that SportTrac could be better. But I think your tone about "absurd on the face of it" suggests you don't actually know or care what UZR claims to estimate, or how it goes about doing so. It seems you've adopted a very adversarial posture to the concept, which isn't really helpful.
-
It's accounted for in the result of UZR which is primarily what we've been discussing here. This whole debate came off a Fangraphs article quoting UZR.
-
Do you have an example of this "horrible skewing"? Where multiple players showed extreme single season outliers in UZR?
-
I know this seems like it should be true, but it really isn't. Maybe he had a nagging injury that impeded his first step. Maybe he or his coaches positioned him sub-optimally, perhaps in response to new player playing beside him. Maybe there was just some noise in the data plus one of the above effects and he was an outlier one season. Defensive metrics aren't recording "true talent" any more than offensive metrics. They are trying to approximate results on the field, that add up to the big result (team win/loss).
-
Gutierrez also went from 105 to 87 to 54 OPS+ those three seasons. And 3.3 to 2.2 to -0.3 oWAR (does not include fielding). Are those "insane fluctuations" too?
-
Alex Meyer's Wild Ride
Otto von Ballpark replied to Nick Nelson's topic in Twins Daily Front Page News
To be fair, spring training relief appearances are often "starts" with all of the accompanying preparations, just pushed back 40 minutes or however long it takes to play the first couple innings. Still, the main starting candidates do generally get the official starts in spring, so I think it is safe to conclude that Meyer and May were never on equal footing in the rotation derby. -
For the last time, those things aren't "unaccounted for". If a player positions himself well (or his teammates/coaches position him well), that affects the result. AND THE RESULT IS THE ONLY THING THAT UZR IS ATTEMPTING TO MEASURE. It's like if team A scores 10 runs, and team B scores 5. Those are results and are very valuable information on their own. Enough of those results and it is pretty clear team A is better than team B. That's what UZR is trying to do with very basic defensive results (out or not an out). Now obviously it is interesting and valuable too to delve further to see HOW those two teams scored those runs, but that doesn't mean that the high level information is worthless. And of course UZR isn't perfect. No one claimed that. But including UZR in evaluations (preferably with another defensive metric or two) is better than excluding it. And even using standard UZR ranges is better than guesstimating the effect of defense, I think.
-
We dismiss it for RISP because we have an additional sample, three times as large, of a nearly identical task (hitting without RISP). And while outliers exist all over (Al Newman even hit that one home run!), I don't know that defensive outliers are somehow worse. Willingham botching one or two routine plays isn't going to torpedo his UZR for the season. Willingham only converting 10 out of 50 difficult but not impossible plays, when the average LF converted 30 out of every 50 similar plays over the last 50 seasons, is what is going to hurt his UZR.
-
All of those things are interesting facets of defense, but in an overall grade of team defense, they are baked into the result. Maybe KC had a great shift, maybe Baltimore had great team speed. Either way they converted plays into outs at that rate. Also the zones are pretty small nowadays, and based on video as well as observation. It's not just some guy holding up his index finder and thumb and guesstimating. And the exact speed of the ball off the bat is already tracked, and I wouldn't be surprised if hang time is tracked too (pretty easy on video).
-
We're not assuming anything like that. UZR looks at every play from the past 5 years or whatever, classifying it into zones based on direction/landing spot and also batted ball speed. For each of those variables, it determines how often that play was converted into an out by each fielder. That's the average or replacement level rate. Then, when one of those plays happens, in that zone and with speed, if the particular fielder converts the play into an out, he gets credit for the 1 play minus the average rate. If he fails to convert it into an out, he gets docked the average rate. Obviously further granularity would be cool, but this isn't a bad method for looking at the result and grading how often teams/players achieve that result or fail to do so.
-
They are baked into the UZR equation, in the sense that all of those things either help or hinder the player from converting the play into an out. Agreed it would be useful and fascinating to get that level of detail, but the lack of that detail doesn't mean the current attempts at defensive stats are that bad.
-
By WAR, the gap between the best and worst fielding teams is comparable to the gap between the best and worst hitting or pitching teams, true. Which seems wrong -- fielding isn't nearly as difficult as hitting or pitching, right? But you have to consider there is immense competition between teams for hitting and pitching talent. Basically, if you live in North America and are capable of hitting or pitching in MLB, you are almost certainly in MLB. Fielding? Not so much. While fielders are scouted and graded too, very very few players make MLB for their fielding alone. So you're not going to see a godawful hitter in MLB, or a godawful pitcher (at least not for too long). But you could see a godawful fielder. So the fielders in MLB just happen to be the ones who are varying degrees above replacement as hitters, so you're going to see a mix of them, not some narrow range of player cultivated for their fielding skills. Extend it beyond individual fielding skills to team positioning and that's another range. Managers and coaches haven't necessarily been selected based on their abilities to optimally position their team defensively either. Plus like any data set, you're going to have noise which pushes the range to the outliers. It's understandably much easier to see in discrete hitting/pitching events than defensive run estimators, but I don't think its presence in those run estimators invalidates the stat.
-
UZR doesn't care how much he ran or how badly he missed. If it is in a zone that an average LF catches 25% of the time, and Willingham doesn't catch it, he gets a demerit below average. If he does catch it, he gets credit for the play (minus the 25% average). Obviously the new Statcast "Field/FX" data will be awesome, but I don't think that means the current method is as bad as you paint it.
-
Cain is obviously way better, and given equal health/aging, Cain will make way more money and have a longer career. But that doesn't mean Dyson is a slouch. He's kind of like the Royals outfield version of Eduardo Escobar right now. He's a few runs worse at hitting, almost entirely in the SLG department, but he more than makes up for it with consistently plus base running and defense. The knock on him is that he is basically just a platoon hitter so far in MLB, although he's left handed so he could get the greater share of starts in a platoon. And his pinch hitting/running and defensive work would still be valuable even on those days he's not starting.
-
Again, I don't think anybody is saying that. By Fangraphs, the absolute worst pitching staff in the league was worth 113 runs above replacement last year. The absolute BEST fielding team, as measured by UZR? Only 67 runs.
-
Some player statistics that might prove interesting
Otto von Ballpark replied to DocBauer's topic in Minnesota Twins Talk
Yup. AVG and ISO are each down about 15-20 points in the last 5 years, down to a level not consistently seen since the early 1970's. -
Sano Among Three Twins Optioned Monday
Otto von Ballpark replied to Seth Stohs's topic in Twins Daily Front Page News
Correct, although I doubt it is much of an issue in spring training outside of major injuries (i.e. surgery). The rule is there to prevent teams from denying service time to injured MLB players and using the minors as a de facto disabled list, not to force young players onto spring rosters prematurely. I can't recall a situation where a player with zero MLB experience had to be placed on the MLB disabled list. -
I didn't dismiss it. I am saying that 5 wins can be swung over 162 games for a lot of things, so it's not "absurd on the face of it" to see outliers stretch a standard range by 5 wins over a season-long run approximation.
-
Thanks, I actually just discovered those stats today. Any thoughts or experience with how BIP-Wins correlate with Fielding runs? Converting the runs, I get 26 teams within 98 runs, or 0.6 per game. Does that calculation bolster the argument that a standard 0.5 runs per game difference in fielding is not unreasonable?
-
We don't demand an error range for our hitting and pitching outliers. I think people just demand more from defense because it's harder to tabulate and compare.
-
The difference between 120 runs and 70 runs is like 5 wins over a season. 5 wins can swing on luck, bullpen management, etc. The Twins were 5 wins short of their Pythag record last year. Why is it so absurd that comparing the absolute best defense and absolute worst defense in the league stretch the top end of a range by that amount? Like I said, 26 of 30 MLB teams were within 80 runs on defense last year, by popular calculations. Now take the outliers on both sides of that, and yeah, you might see 120. Regress it down to 100, 80, 70, or whatever if you want, but it's still a big difference, and it's not any consolation for the fans of Indians -- their defense still stunk and it cost them games and quite possibly a playoff appearance. And no matter how confident a Fangraphs writer sounds, I don't think anyone will fight you to death over the exact 120 number.
-
I've heard that suggested before, but rather than regress every result toward the mean because it is imperfect, I'd rather just have the raw result with the understanding that it is imperfect. Maybe sometimes it's high/low due to measurement error, but sometimes it isn't, and that could be useful information.
-
Another point: Fangraphs pitching value breakdown: http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=0&type=6&season=2014&month=0&season1=2014&ind=0&team=0,ts&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0 FDP-Wins is how many wins they would add to their FIP-based pitcher WAR to account for defense/luck in the form of BABIP and LOB%. The Royals had 3.7 FDP-Wins, dwarfed by their 18.8 pitcher WAR and 15.5 offense WAR.
