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How are Runs Really Created - Third Installment
September 17, 2002 - Arvid Engen (aka _some dogmatic person_)
"The competitors are not trying to work for extreme cases" So? That somehow makes it wrong to attempt to model the extremes?
One of the thrusts of Tango's criticism is that RC and XR don't do well in extreme cases; my point is that they don't make any pretense of doing so. I mean, so far as I know, Miguel Tejada can't dunk a basketball to save his life. Absolute goof on the basketball court. That doesn't have any bearing on his effectiveness as a baseball player.
That's why I've pressed Tango to provide examples of how and where the extreme cases are not trivial.
More to the point, I think Tango would have saved himself some trouble if he presented BaseRuns from the outset as a complementary approach to the existing metrics, and not as a replacement for them. This is closer to the tone reflected in his follow-up comments, which come across as a lot more reasonable.
But somebody mentioned that if BsR is 1% less accurate in normal cases then RC or LW, it is "1 step forward and two steps back". BS. 1% error for a true 100 RC player means we would be erring and saying he actually created 99 or 101 runs.
Look, "how are runs generated?" is not one of those sabermetric questions that remains mysterious to us. There isn't much room left for improvement; you have to sweat the small stuff. A small error on a very large number of cases doesn't seem any better to me than a large error on a very small number of cases. And if you look at the OBP data cited above, the error isn't even particularly small in some instances.
By definition, extreme cases are going to be very rare.
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