See copyright notice at the bottom of this page.
List of All Posters
Patriot: Baselines (September 17, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 10:01 a.m.,
November 12, 2003
(#18) -
Joshua
Patriot, thanks for this comprehensive look at baselines.
I hope you can expand on your response to Bill James.
For instance, in Win Shares, he writes: "Total Baseball tells us that Billy Herman was three times the player that Buddy Myer was." No, that's not what it's telling you. It's telling you that Herman had three times more value above his actual .500 opponent than did Myer. He writes "In a plus/minus system, below average players have no value." No, it tells you that below average players are less valuable than their opponent, and if you had a whole team of them you would lose more than you would win.
I didn't get "his actual .500 opponent" at first, but I think now that that term refers to the sum of players Herman competed against over his career, which we can assume to be very close to average in aggregate.
But that's really beside the point. Isn't TPR both saying
(i) that Herman had three times more value above his actual .500 opponent than did Myer; and
(ii) that value exists in outperforming your actual .500 opponent?
Put another way, I don't see how saying
Herman had three times more value above his actual .500 opponent than did Myer
is meaningfully different from saying
Herman was three times the player that Buddy Myer was.
James purports to have a reductio for TPR. Your response is to deny that there's anything absurd at the bottom, but I'm left not understanding what it is TPR is saying, if you can't conclude from its ratings that Herman = 3x Myer, because that's certainly what it looks like on the face of it: Herman's TPR = 3x Myer's TPR.
I guess my bias is strongly against the average baseline, but I don't have any good idea what should be a baseline, and I'm suspicious of most of the replacement level numbers I've seen generated, for many of the reasons you give in your article. I'm firmly convinced, though, that there's value in being less than average, and any system that doesn't acknowledge this has a lot of work to do getting around this prima facie fact.
For now, I suppose the best ways to present the data would be to show many baselines. I don't really see how there could be a single baseline. I mean, shouldn't it even be manager-dependent? For example, the player Dusty Baker uses to replace an injured 1B might be different from the player Earl Weaver would use....