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Win Shares, Loss Shares, and Game Shares (November 15, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 5:10 p.m.,
November 17, 2003
(#21) -
Straggler
One problem I always run into when I try to play around with apportioning wins and losses among players is what to do about pitcher's offense. Given that pitcher offense is generally terrible, a lot of times you wind up with pitchers who wind up with offensive records of, say, 0-2. That's fine insofar as it goes, but when you try to add everything up at the end, it drags the pitchers down.
IOW, let's say you conclude that Luis Gonzalez's W-L record (or WPA record, or whatever system you want to use) is 7-3, and that Randy Johnson's record is 6-1 as a pitcher and 0-2 as a hitter for a combined record of 6-3. Intuitively, that seems wrong; the Dbacks aren't expecting much of a contribution from Johnson at the plate--nor are their opponents expecting much of a contribution from their own #9 hitters--so it seems wrong to say that Johnson's hitting drags him down to the point where he has less value than Gonzalez.
I know the easiest way to deal with it is just to ignore pitcher's offense altogether, and to measure performance against the baseline of all non-pitchers, but (bringing this back to studes's site), this isn't something that win shares does, and it doesn't sound like it's in the framework for WPA, and I think it gets you into trouble whenever you're trying to compare something like wins above average across leagues. But I'm not a stats guy, so I'm probably missing something here.