pacino wrote:Joe Morgan sent this letter to all HOF voters

Nice choice of the word "sent." Sounds too well thought out and written for Morgan.

Read this very interesting piece by Joe Posnanski about Bill James and WAR, and it set me to thinking, along two different tracks.

The thing Posnanski flags about bWAR is that BOTH the 2017 Houston Astros and the 2017 New York Yankees posted 53.2 WAR, collectively, although the Astros' WAR was more offense-dependent, and the Yankees got more WAR out of their pitching.

However, the Astros won 101 games, while the Yankees won "only" 91, which leads to the disparate conclusions that a "replacement" level team might win 48 games, or 58 games. But if the stat is supposed to measure a player's performance against a fixed, theoretical level - the replacement level - and a team's performance against what a team of such replacements would do - shouldn't that replacement team's win total be, well, fixed? Either an all replacement player team would win 48 games in 2017, or 58, but not both. This, combined with his discussions with James, to identify the problem with WAR as this: it has no direct connection to actual wins. The "win" calculation is an adjustment to the runs created calculation, an adjustment that is tenuous at best, at least in Posnanski's telling/reasoning.

This got me thinking, first, about the relationship between OPS+ - supposedly one way of measuring an individual player's offensive output - and BtWins (I only used baseball reference for this, for now). I decided to take a look at all of the players with enough qualifying PAs who hit at exactly 100 OPS+ for each MLB season from 2000-2017, then look at their BtWins, and their Runs Created. I reasoned that a 100 OPS+ player should always be worth the same number of BtWins and Runs Created to his team, no matter what that number was. Or, at the very least, since I know OPS+ depends on an average that changes from season to season, that all 100 OPS+ players in a given season should be worth the same number of BtWins and Runs Created to their respective teams. This is what I found:

Year Player BtWins Bt Runs Created
2017 Adam Duvall -0.1 -0.6
2017 Chase Headley 0.2 1.8
2017 Ender Inciarte 0 -0.1
2017 Evan Longoria 0.2 2.1
2017 Denard Span 0 -0.4
2016 Nick Markakis 0.3 3.3
2015 Marlon Byrd -0.2 -1.7
2015 Ender Inciarte -0.1 -0.7
2014 Shin-Soo Choo 0.2 1.4
2014 Alejandro De Aza -0.1 -0.6
2014 Desmond Jennings 0.1 0.8
2014 Garrett Jones 0 0.4
2014 Jimmy Rollins 0 -0.1
2013 Norichika Aoki 0.1 1
2013 Jon Jay 0.2 2.2
2013 Russell Martin 0.1 1.4
2012 Marco Scutaro 0.1 1.2
2011 Derek Jeter 0.3 0.3
2010 Starlin Castro 0 0.1
2009 Yadier Molina 0.2 1.7
2009 Ryan Sweeney 0.1 1.1
2008 Delmon Young 0 -0.5
2007 Ronnie Belliard 0.1 0.7
2007 Shannon Stewart 0.1 0.7
2006 Geoff Jenkins 0.2 1.9
2006 Dave Roberts 0.3 2.9
2006 Jimmy Rollins -0.1 -0.6
2006 Luis Gonzalez 0.1 0.6
2006 Craig Monroe -0.3 -2.9
2005 Eric Hinske 0.1 0.9
2005 Adam LaRoche -0.1 -0.7
2004 Rocco Baldelli 0 -0.2
2004 Pedro Feliz -0.2 -2.4
2004 Adam Kennedy 0 0.4
2004 Alfonso Soriano -0.2 -2.1
2003 Jose Valentin -0.2 -1.6
2002 Moises Alou 0 -0.3
2001 Brad Fullmer -0.1 -0.7
2001 Fernando Vina 0 -0.5
2000 Kenny Lofton 0.1 1.6
0.035 0.295
0.149443412 1.391724626

One thing to note about the above: in 2006, no qualifying player hit on exactly 100 OPS+, so I used the 3 players who were at 101 and the two who were at 99. The mean of each column appears at the bottom, followed by the standard deviation.

Obviously, the grouping remains in the range from -0.3 to 0.3 offensive WAR, with the runs created running from -2.9 to 3.3. I am no statistician, but these seem like fairly wide ranges for players who are all hitting at exactly 100 OPS+. Perhaps tellingly, the one season, 2006, with no player who hit at 100 and so I had to use those who hit at 101 and 99, you see Jimmy Rollins - a 101 player - being worth -.1 WAR on offense and with -.6 runs created, while Luis Gonzalez, a 99 OPS+ player, did exactly the opposite: .1 WAR, .6 runs created.

Perhaps this is telling me something about OPS+ rather than offensive WAR. One thing I couldn't help but notice about OPS+ as I did this was that supposedly "average" 100 posting players were regularly at the top of the bottom third of all qualifying players - that is, of players with qualifying numbers of PAs, fully 2/3 were regularly above the "average" level of 100. I reasoned this had to do with the fact that players who don't perform at above the 100 level simply aren't given enough PAs to qualify, and that PAs from people who really shouldn't count when calculating what, exactly, average MLB offensive output ought to be - namely pitchers - are included in the OPS+ calculation because they are included in the league OPS divisor. Don't know how you exclude pitchers without a lot of work, but the effect to me would be to make the "average" appear to be lower than it really is, because most of us don't, for example, consider pitchers or fifth outfielders or backup catchers when evaluating whether or not one of our regulars is a league-average hitter or not. Would be great for OPS+ to account for this - as best as I can tell, neither does batting wins, although the positional adjustment in bWAR maybe gestures in that direction.

This also got me thinking about what a "replacement" team really is. It seems to me the WAR stat would be best constructed if it proceeded from a standard, constant (at least constant within league season) sense of what a team of all replacements would do, and correspond to lived reality, such that, in Posnanski's example, a team like the Astros would have performed at the exact number of wins above such a level that would lead to its actual record, whereas the Yankees would have hit their exact number of wins. I know this is like saying that every team should hit its Pythagorean mark exactly, and that life does not work this way. We're dealing with what a given set of numeric results would predict in the notoriously hard-to-predict wins category.

But the interesting thing about a "replacement" team to me is how one would construct such a thing in real life if one were so inclined. Let's say that there were a good argument for tanking in baseball - although I think most of us would agree that there isn't - and you are the GM, of say, the Detroit Tigers, and have concluded that the team as it has been constructed has run its course and now it needs to be dismantled not just to rebuild it but also the farm system, which means going ahead and trying to field a bad team for 2018 to improve draft position. How would you do it? I figure "replacement" players fall into one of three categories:

1. The former decent MLB sub/fringe starter who is now over the hill and is facing being organizational filler for some team that doesn't have a AAA prospect at his position or who needs a credible SP to fill out a AAA rotation;
2. The never-was MiLB player who is good for a .290 / .330 / .400 every year he ever plays at AAA, or 165 IP at 4.00 ERA as a starter at AAA, but whose numbers will crater to replacement level at the ML level where he gets overmatched by the surrounding talent;
3. The genuine prospect who is not ready to face major league hitters/pitchers (I always think of Jeremy Bonderman of the Tigers, who was on their 119 loss team in 2003 and lost 19 games on his way to an ERA+ of 78 in 162 IP at 20 years of age, but who was an important part of their 2006 AL Champion team, going 214 IP to a 111 ERA+).

These are all different kinds of players, and any one from any type is a threat to outperform expectations at any time. When you start thinking about trying to construct such a team in reality, it is an interesting reminder that players are not numbers on a page but people in reality, who will sometimes underperform, and sometimes outperform, expectations. It's hard to know what a team of replacements REALLY is - because you almost never get exactly that.

Except for the 1962 Mets, the sainted Richie Ashburn notwithstanding.

Not sure if you saw this...

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/putting ... ill-james/

WAR , huh, yeah.

What is it good for?

Absolutely nuthin.

Say it again!

Sounds like the Yankees will be hiring Aaron Boone or Hensley Meulens as their next manager

Boone gets the job

Cooney posted his HOF ballot.

No love for Aubrey Huff or Orlando Hudson?

A new meaning to "Hot" Stove"

Former Cards pitcher Anthony Reyes is now an LA County Firefighter, battling the wildfires. Wow. See, even baseball players want to be firemen when they grow up!!

Actually, looking at his career baseball earnings, the dude probably needs the paycheck and possibly benefits. Not sure how the MLB pension program works with regards to health insurance, but he's got less than 4 year of ML service time.

But did he buy his own firetruck to drive to the games?

he's the Rube Waddell of our times

Cashman is getting a 5/$25M extension with the Yankees

BigEd76 wrote:Cashman is getting a 5/$25M extension with the Yankees

Is interesting that according to baseball economics he's considered about half as valuable as Starlin Castro.

I have no memory of Richard Hildago

I have no memory of Richard Hildago

you don't remember 7 minutes into the past?

Jack Morris and Alan Trammell elected to the HOF.

I did the best I could to keep the bulldog at the door

gr wrote:I did the best I could to keep the bulldog at the door

Morris explained that if someone had told him back then that preventing the other team from scoring was his job, he would have done better at it.