For Serious Baseball Stat Geeks: Does Your Gut EVER Overrule Your Numbers?

The Game Room
41

prr, I’ve always found this kind of amusing, but you’re now deliberately misrepresenting what I’ve said and it really pisses me off, because I make a hell of an effort to be honest and open in these threads.

I am not saying your eyes were deceiving you. I have NEVER said that, ever, not across thread after thread after thread of this topic have I ever once even hinted that you were wrong in assessing Alomar’s performance with New York as being poor. Alomar played poorly in New York. That is the fact; your observations are borne out by all the pertinent facts, and are consistent with the observations of pretty much everyone who watched him play in New York. I’m very sorry if other Met fans told you otherwise at the time, but that is not my fault.

What I have tried to point out is that Alomar played extraordinarily well for most of his career prior to joining the Mets. I have said this over and over and over in a manner that cannot possibly be misconstrued. Why you would now claim that I am doubting your assessment of his play when he was playing for the Mets, I cannot even begin to imagine. You can even see from my posts just a few posts before this one that I am not doubting he played poorly in New York, and am obviously constrasting his play there with his play in San Diego, Toronto, Baltimore and Cleveland.

So I’d like you to take that back, please.

That is certainly beyond question.

Almost every fielder who’s won a lot of Gold Gloves probably didn’t deserve half of them. Even Ozzie Smith won a few that should have gone to Barry Larkin.

42

I’m sorry. I should have put the phrase related to you here: “every Met official for sure asserted that he was a skilled, gifted All-Star, exactly as RickJay maintains, and that my eyes were deceiving me”

instead of where I did put it (“every Met official for sure asserted that he was a skilled, gifted All-Star and that my eyes were deceiving me, exactly as RickJay maintains”)

Your interpretation of our past and current disagreement about his stardom is exactly as you relate it, and I apologize for misconstruing your meaning.

43

comes in thread curious to learn about a topic he knows little about, then starts backing away slowly

44

And I probably shouldn’t have snapped that hard, sorry.

To clarify, I really don’t trust WAR. I don’t trust many defensive stats, really, but I specifically don’t buy WAR because, as I’ve said, it seems to be disconnected from team performance.

It also bears almost no relationship to defensive reputation. Now, of course, defensive reputations can be wrong (Derek Jeter) and they usually lag in time behind the facts, as you have pointed out; players will keep winning Gold Gloves long after they stopped deserving them. But it’s kind of hard to believe that there’s NO relationship between defensie reputation and the numbers.

Just for the fun of it I looked up some great defensive players… Johnny Bench, for instance, has a career defensive WAR of 6.1. Really? JOHNNY BENCH was just 60 runs better than a good Triple-A catcher?

His teammate, Joe Morgan, is rated is being below replacement level for his career. (Defensively, you understand.) Davey Conception is just 1.1 dWAR,though he was about +4 until the last five years of his career. And the 1976 Reds, who won 102 games and swept both the NLCS and WS, are rated as being below replacement value, as a team.

Like, do you believe ANY of that? I’m not a Reds fan but I think that’s an absolute load of horsecrap. The Reds assembled one of the best teams in the history of baseball, and yet, defensively, they were no better than an assemblage of quadruple-A scrubs? I just don’t buy it.

I wish I had my Win Shares book, but it seems to be lost.

45

To be fair to it, in general reps seem to match WAR’s career rankings (even tho in Concepcion and Bench’s cases they seem to fail-catcher defense in particular is quite hard to quantify even in our play-by-play era). Here for example are the top shortstops of all time by Baseball Ref’s WAR rankings (which uses Total Zone):

[ul]
[li]1. Ozzie Smith+ 239 R[/li][li]2. Mark Belanger 238 R[/li][li]3. Cal Ripken+ 176 R[/li][li]4. Luis Aparicio+ 149 R[/li][li]5. Omar Vizquel 134 R[/li][li]6. Rey Sanchez 112 R[/li][li]7. Ozzie Guillen 99 R[/li][li]8. Roy McMillan 88 R[/li][li]9. Ron Hansen 87 R[/li][li]10. Greg Gagne 81 R[/li][li]11. Alan Trammell 81 R[/li][li]12. Ed Brinkman 77 R[/li][li]13. Jack Wilson 75 R[/li][li]14. Adam Everett 72 R[/li][li]15. B. Campaneris 71 R[/li][li]16. Mike Bordick 69 R[/li][li]17. Tony Kubek 66 R[/li][li]18. Royce Clayton 65 R[/li][li]19. Bucky Dent 65 R[/li][li]20. Ernie Banks+ 62 R[/li][/ul]

Now, there are a few admitted oddities here-Ernie Banks at #20 after only half a career spent at SS? Royce Effin’ Clayton? But if you asked 100 fans who the best 5 defensive SS of all time were, it would almost certainly be very similar to the top 5 here (Ripken might drop off tho). The vast majority of these guys had the reps. Examine the other lists and there aren’t very many other surprises: Andruw Jones beating out Willie Mays in CF might be the oddest. Bench is 6th on the C list by the way (Pudge Rodriguez is #1). Keith Hernandez at 1B, Bill Mazeroski at 2nd, Brooks Robinson at 3rd, and Barry Bonds in LF and Roberto Clemente in RF round out the rest of the lineup, and each of these players are almost universally agreed to be the best ever defensively at their positions.

46

I wouldn’t put much stock into historical defensive WAR numbers. It goes off total zone which is determined from play-by-play data, but not from human observation. It makes assumptions which may not actually be true.

Defensive WAR for current players uses UZR, which is a much more accurate method. (A guy sits in front of a monitor, watches each play, and depending on where the ball is hit gives credit/blame to fielders in a specific ratio.)

As a result I wouldn’t pay attention to WAR numbers pre-2000 or so.