jimmer

I like wRC+, RC27 and RE24 when talking about Mauer's 'lack of offensive production' and 'lack of value' over the years :-)

You're welcome. It's a great stat, IMO. It's been one of my favorites for a few years along with wOBA and wRC+, depending on what I'm talking about. RC27 is good too. Tells how many runs created per 27 outs (as opposed to the cumulative season #). It's a good stat when you want to compare players who regularly don't play 162 games, like catchers, to other position players.

When I read the title of this I thought it was a Span versus Revere discussion :-)

yes, one of the worst award voting in memory. the fact Colon wasn't even close to being worthy. he wasn't even a top 3 SP, maybe not even a top 5 guy.

-wRC+ is context neutral offensive stat that tells us what the player did offensively compared to others in the league and adjusted by park and league, period. -wOBA is context neutral on what a guy did at the plate, period. -RE24 does what wOBA does, but is context specific.

In fairness, Cabrera won the triple crown in 2013, not 2012. The article as about 2012. In 2013, Cabrera was #1 in that stat and Trout right behind him at #2. Santana got boned by the win stat that year and his inability to be as awesome as he was the year before (yet still the best in the Al, which is what it should be about).

Earlier in this thread the Trout/Cabrera MVP debate was mentioned. Here's an interesting article concerning the 2012 MVP debate. It's about a metric that 'measures only offense and credits hitters for their performances with men on base. At the risk of adding to the alphabet soup, I think it’s worth looking at this little-used metric that measures exactly what the Cabrera contingent wants us to measure.' (In other words, the people who only wanted to look at what was done at the plate and ignore minimal contributions like defense, baserunning, and difference in positions). http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/trout-versus-cabrera-offense-only-context-included/ The metric is called RE24. 'Unlike with context-neutral statistics like wRC+, RE24 takes the number of outs and number of baserunners into account. It does not assume that all home runs are equal, nor does it treat a strikeout with a man on third base and one out as just another out. The rewards for performing with men on base are higher, and the blame for failing in those same situations is steeper as well. This is a metric that essentially quantifies the total offensive value of a player based on the situations that he actually faced. This is not a theoretical metric. If you hit a three run home run, you get more credit than if you hit a solo home run. If you are consistently getting hits with two outs to drive in runs, you get more credit than if those hits come with no outs and the bases empty. And, of course, it’s only an offensive metric, so there’s no defensive component, no position adjustments, and no replacement level. This is just straight up offense, adjusted for the context of the situations that they faced.' And this can be tracked daily in player logs. 'this isn’t some kind of black box where you just have to take our word for it. We have RE24 on each player’s Play Log, so you can see the exact amount of value that each player was credited with on every single offensive play they were involved in all year long.' Trout finished 2nd in the AL. Cabrera finished 4th and 2nd on his own team. (oh, and Mauer finished 6th) Conclusion: 'And Trout still comes out on top. Ignore defense. Ignore things like going first to third on a single, or taking the extra base on a fly ball. Ignore WAR. Trout still wins. '

The guy who is so good he has seen three major league teams, has been traded twice (one time for Sam Fuld by a guy who has a good track record for knowing talent) and yet still hasn't reach arbitration yet. Has an AL FIP around 4.30 and likely had a quality ERA due to a very good pitcher's park and quality defense behind him because he isn't striking out a good chunk of guys.

thanks to you and Brock for the cap space info. I literally had no idea about this. Never heard this and I love to learn, so that's great stuff. And I appreciate you putting out that reasoning so eloquently. I agree May is more polished, I'm not sure Meyer is going to get any more out of being in the minors.

I'm trying to learn something here, that's why all the questions on this subject. If a team can trade a guy to a team and, in return, get international cap space that's new info to me and good to know.

how would that work?

and trading Milone would add to our international cap space?

Not saying you're wrong about Meyer and May, but I'm interested in knowing why you feel this way other than the fact the Twins sent Meyer down already and they haven't done so with May (along with May having a few games in the majors with wildly inconsistent results). Also, cap space? Please elaborate.

second guy in my example gets ZERO credit in regards to the RBI, the stat we are talking about, even though he had a huge effect on the guy being able to score. And my example isn't an outlier either. Not one of these rare unicorn occasions. Mauer is a good example of a guy effected by this. Like the win/loss stats for pitchers, there are too many players involved in scoring a run most of the time to give the most important stat to one guy. By itself, it tells us a run scored but it doesn't tell us the guy with a lot of them was the most important factor in that run scoring or that he is necessarily a good run producer (or the guy with not so many RBI is a bad one.)

By rising fastball do you mean a high fastball. Physics tells us that a pitches don't rise. Sam Fuld's dad did a study on this, by the way :-)

'You may also see UZR/150 around the site, which is simply UZR scaled to an average number of chances for a season.' I really don't look at UZR/150 that much, but it seems that it's just used on a season to season basis. Over the course of a career, UZR/150 wouldn't be used. I've never seen/heard anyone do it. As far as using it for an individual season, I wouldn't put much faith in it if the guy actually only played like 30 games or so. The assumption that however he performed over 30 games means that's what he'd do over 150 is too much for me. I wouldn't make that assumption with ANY stat. If a guy played 145 games, I may have less issues with it. That's just me though.

And as far as the RBI stat, let's look at this very common example. Guy gets on base (by walk, HBP, single). Then next guy gets a single and this allows the guy on 1B to go to 3B. The next guy flies out to the OF and the guy from 3B scores. Whoever made this RBI stat has decided that the only guy who made an out deserves the credit for the RBI. He's a run producer. The guy who scored gets the much less hyped stat, run scored. The guy who put the guy on 3B with his non-out-making-single gets ZERO credit for any of it in the traditional box score.

A pitcher can't win a game if his offense doesn't score. A starting pitcher can't get outs if his fielders don't make plays, A pitcher and a catcher and a coach in staff come up with a game plan. If a pitcher only goes five innings, he was only on the mound for a little more than half the game. If I had to choose one stat to get rid of when it's used to try to judge a player's actual performance, I'd say the win/loss stat of pitchers. IMO, of all the traditional stats, it tells us the least about the actions of the player who was assigned the stat. It is very likely THE stat most dependent on other player's actions. Even moreso in today's game.

A guy can get a win for pitching 5 innings and giving up 5 earned runs because his offense scored 6 and his bullpen shut down the opponent for the other four innings. He doesn't deserve a win, but he is pitcher of record. Next game the guy could throw 8 innings, give up one earned run, and lose 1-0. He doesn't deserve the loss, but he is pitcher of record. Wins and losses should always have been solely a team stat. It could be argued it had more validity, though not too much more, when pitchers started and finished a lot of their games.

I remember when Howard won MVP over Pujols in large part because of RBI. Howard hit in the mid 200s with RISP while Pujols hit a hair under .400 with RISP. Howard just had way more runners on base for him. So yeah, the RBI did happen (and it's not like Howarrd dwarfed him in RBI), but still. Meantime, for those that like SLG %, OPS and OPS+ Pujols led the league in all three categories and led Howard in BA and OBP too. Pujols could also field.

To me, it doesn't take a metric of any kind to tell me that if a quality defensive CF/Catcher/SS has very similar traditional offensive numbers to a poor fielding corner IF, that the CF/Catcher/SS is more valuable. Even better if the CF/catcher/SS can also do damage on the bases. Just makes sense to me based on position scarcity. And I've thought this for about 40 years and my view hasn't changed.

Have always loved that gif. That's kind of how I am when people tell me that one of the best ways to judge a pitcher's performance is by wins and losses. Or when someone quotes fielding % and errors as a valid way to judge defense. Or when someone quotes RBI as a way of saying how well a guy produces runs.

BTW, I'm having real reaction time issues with my computer/this site. It's causing all sorts of issues with posting so I am having to edit quite a bit.

Brock, I was just saying it agreed with you, nothing more. One example of anything doesn't validate anything. Or invalidate anything, by the way.

and the yearly DRS/UZR agrees with you. those say exactly the same thing your personal feeling is. And I mentioned this early in the thread you quoted, that while a -4.3 average DRS over 3 years ins't that bad, he's been trending down and he's turning 40, so we shouldn't expect him to really imporve going forward.