I use Win Shares (from The Master’s magnum opus The BJ New Historical Baseball Abstract. He probably had the highest peak of the 8 players I mentioned (3 best seasons are 38, 37 & 34, where anything over 30 will likely make you a serious MVP candidate). He also was in the lineup almost all the time during his peak years (only one season out of 11 consecutive with less than 153 games, which in this group is the best), which generates a lot of value that strict rate stats will miss. Whitaker was fine player but he was in and out of the lineup on a regular basis (some of which may be Sparky’s platooning-if so QED if he couldn’t hit lefties enough to play full time=note that I like Sweet Lou and his dropping off the ballot after just one year was an outrage).
As for the ballpark, I prefer this philosophical approach: adjust the stats at both home and away based on the run environments in question. Do not just toss all home stats out the window, because you are likely throwing away real wins by doing so. Yes he had some help from Wrigley (.853 OPS at home, .738 on the road, 115 point advantage), but players tend to play better in their home parks anyway (30-50 points).
In percentage terms, compared to his teammates, Ryno was taking significant advantage of Wrigley (just checked-the Cubs’ hitter’s home/road splits during his peak were typically between 40 and 120 points of OPS in favor of the home park). Win Shares does a very good job of adjusting for that kind of thing anyway, yet he got into the mid-high 30’s in WS’s despite the Friendly Confines.
As for the base-stealing, Alomar has an extra 130 bases, which really isn’t that big a deal. Both were good percentage base thieves. And as for defense there really isn’t much difference there no matter what metric you look at (James had them both at B+ I think, with the A+ guys being people like Mazeroski and Grich).
To John DiFool, **pseudotriton ruber ruber ** & RickJay:
I need to try to understand what you are saying here?
To the best of my knowledge the friendly confines of Wrigley fields adds home runs to most players totals and the relatively small foul areas adds hits as there are less outs in foul territory. To me Sandberg benefited greatly from both aspects and it shows strongly in his splits. His power and BA take a steep drop outside of Wrigley and thus his Ops take a huge hit of .115. I believe he would have had a much more mediocre career in almost any other park.
Now because Sandberg was well suited toWrigley, I should not worry about how much worse his numbers were outside of Wrigley and measure him in the same way as a player that played most of his career in a park like Shea, McAfee Coliseum in Oakland or Dodger Stadium.
This just does not add up to me. As to the fielding, I am surprised the statistics put them that close as Robbie to my eye was a great glove and Sandberg a good glove. On the other side, I will admit, I am not giving Sandberg any credit as a leader or taking points off of Robbie for not being one and choosing to slide head first.
So as everyone likes quoting Win Shares, are these stats available at all on line?
Here’s what we’re saying; when you are adjusting a player’s statistics for his home park, you need to adjust it for the GENERAL effect it has on all hitters, not for the effect it has on a particular hitter. Otherwise you are adjusting away real value.
To use Sandberg as an example, it is indisputably the case that Wrigley Field during his career was a hitter’s park. Hitters who played for the Cubs were not quite as good as thier numbers suggest because the numbers of all National League hitters of that time are inflated slightly; so, runs created in Wrigley are of slightly less importance than runs created elsewhere. So when looking at Sandberg’s stats it is necessary to consider that they are not quite as valuable as they appear at first glance.
However, what you definitely don’t want to do is adjust Sandberg’s stats based on his own personal splits. Sandberg’s stats are only meaningful in the context of how they help or hurt his team. If Sandberg was unusually capable of taking advantage of WRigley Field, so that he exceeded his usual production by more than the 6-7 percent all hitters as a group did, that is real value. The 6-7 percent that WRigley helped all hitters is, itself, meaningless; a hitter who was 6-7 percent better while playing in Wrigley was just as good as a normal hitter, because he was the same as everyone else. But if Sandberg’s production went up, say, 15 percent, that is real value, 8-9 percent better than other hitters. That helped the Cubs win games.
Suppose you had a player, Pete Pullhitter, who was lefthanded and was a super-extreme pull hitter who hit every single ball within four degrees of the right field line. He plays in a normal park, and hits 25 homers a year. Then he signs with the Red Sox, and because he pulls every ball right down the line he starts hitting an immense number of homers, and he hits 46 home runs in Fenway and 12 on the road. Should you adjust his stats as if the extra 34 home runs did not happen? Of course not. That’s insane; those 34 home runs are a real value to Boston. You should adjust his overall stats to reflect the fact that Fenway increases offense by about ten percent, but since Pete takes advantage of Fenway to a much greater extent, he is adding real value, giving the Red Sox lots of extra wins, and he should be credited for that.
If in fact Sandberg took more advantage of Wrigley than other players, that can’t logically be counted against him. It’s a GOOD thing, a real product of his particular mix of abilities.
No, you should adjust for the park. A hitter who put up exactly the same numbers in Shea would in fact be a better hitter. But you don’t adjust for Ryne Sandberg’s personal stats. You adjust for EVERYONE’S stats and see how that adjusts the value of Ryne Sandberg’s contribution.
I watched Alomar in hundreds of games. He was a very good defensive second baseman but wasn’t as good as his reputation; his wasn’t as quick to his right as he was to his left. The Blue Jays since then have had one better defensive second baseman (Orlando Hudson) and one just as good (Aaron Hill.) I think the James evaluation is spot on, a B+. He was well above average but not at the level of true glove wizards like Mazeroski, White, or Fox.
Nor should you. What credit does Sandberg deserve for being a leader Alomar doesn’t? Alomar was a career .313 hitter in the playoffs, an ALCS MVP, and won two World Series rings. Sandberg played for precisely zero World Series winners, so what extra “leadership” credit he deserves I cannot imagine.
No, that’s not what we’re saying. Yes, it is true that he had mediocre numbers on the road-not disputing that, and that didn’t lead to as many wins as another player might have managed when on the road. But the alternative you are suggesting-to throw out his home stats altogether-is no alternative at all, as what he did in Wrigley lead to real runs, and real wins. Yes a run in Wrigley is worth less than a run in say Dodger Stadium (or it used to be), but it still wins ballgames for you.
Here is a quick and dirty comparison to Lou Whitaker. Their adjusted OPS+ numbers (compared on a scale based on 100 as average, anything over 100 is good, and yes they are adjusted for ballpark) are 114 for Ryno, and 116 for Sweet Lou, so slight advantage there for Whitaker. Now let’s take a look at their splits, home first, away 2nd (unadjusted OPS by the way, as Baseball Reference doesn’t have the “+” figures for home/road):
Sandberg
.853
.738
Whitaker
.817
.762
So yes, Whitaker was a better hitter on the road-but, Sandberg did NOT have the advantage of having Wrigley Field as one of his road ballparks (while Whitaker played 6-11 times a year in the AL hitting paradise Fenway Park), so this overstates the gap between them a bit. But that .853 at home lead to lots of runs and hence lots of wins. Treat Sandberg as just a .738 hitter and you (A) ignore those runs, (B) make him look worse than he was because there’s no Wrigley Field on the road, and (C) disregard the fact that most players have a home field advantage anyway (as Whitaker does), yes even in neutral parks.
And like I said Sandberg murders Whitaker in terms of playing time and had arguably better peak seasons. And OPS+ ignores baserunning; Whitaker had a SB rate less than 2 thefts out of 3 attempts (Sparky liked the hit and run). Whitaker will get a bit of a boost from being better on the road, but that will only affect half his stats (and I believe OPS+ adjusts for the no-home-park-on-the-road factor). Joe Morgan, a demonstratably better hitter than Ryno, had a .834 OPS at home-but an .800 on the road, which is one reason he should rate significantly ahead of him (both of them) with the bat.
Here’s a Win Shares page that I found, with career stats.
I see Rickjay beat me to the punch, with essentially the same arguments.
I never said I would rate Sandberg by just his road record, did I? I think I said, I take away from his record as he did play at Wrigley.
As to Win Shares, thank you for the link, what exactly is a win share anyway. To an old Baseball Encyclopedia Stat head, it leaves me scratching my head.
BTW: It looks like on Win Share, Alomar slightly edges out Sandberg. However, I know we are not going only by Win Share, or we would not even be having these threads.
Win Shares was a method developed by Bill James to come up with a universal system for rating players.
It’s really complicated but there’s a simple beauty to it, actually. Basically what it does is this, and I’ll use Alomar’s team, the 1992 Blue Jays, as an example. It says that all value must come from wins; therefore, the 1992 Blue Jays had 96 wins’ worth of value, which have to have been generated by the players who played for the team. So multiply the wins by 3 - 96 wins equals 288 Win Shares. (there’s no particular reason for 3 except the numbers are easy to work with) Then:
Of those 288 Win Shares, figure out how many were due to the offense, and how many to pitching/defense.
Of the pitching/defense, figure out how many were pitching and how many defense (this part is tricky)
Now, you can figure out how many win shares each player generated, using their hitting, pitching and (very trickily manipulated) fielding stats. Robbie Alomar had 34 in 1992, IIRC, the highest total in the AL.
The system is good for broad questions; it wasn’t intended for really precise decisions. The beauty of it is that, unlike most other systems, it always adds up; it attributes exactly the amount of credit to individual players as their team deserves. But the methodology is complex, still under development, and it was intended to attack large-scale issues, not find tiny differences. Even Bill James would admit a guy who puts up 24 Win Shares this year might not actually be better than a guy who puts up 23.
A lovely thing about it is that standards for Win Shares sort of approximate standards for home runs, pre-steroids. An average regular player will have 12-15, a really good player 20. At 30 you’re an MVP candidate, at 40 you’re putting up a huge season, and only a handful of players have hit 50.
So Win Share = the best estimations/calculations of how many wins a player earned his team that year of the teams total wins.
I still have not seen anything to convince me Sandberg was better than Alomar. Not even in the Win Shares and definitely not with the older stats I tend to use.
Just for the record, Sandberg was in my top 15, he just did not make the cut for my top 10.
I hope you don’t do pitchers. I really can not vote for players of the 1800 to 1910. It just not relate to what baseball eviolved into. Cy Young was pitching a different game. Yet he wins 511. Impressive but impossible in any other era. It does not relate.
Jim, based on the last few posts I assume you haven’t read the latest version of BJ’s New Historical Baseball Abstract? I think you’d love it. Much more than a compilation of stats. Really good commentary and rankings of players. One of my all-time favorite books of any sort.
Not really. James used a multiple of actual wins (I think it was 3 Win Shares= 1 actual win) because it wouldn’t work out right on a 1 to 1 basis. That is, the differences between players would seem insignificant. If Sandberg had 30 WIn Shares in a season, that would mean that he contributed about 10 net wins for the Cubs that year, a record like 13-3, or 12-2. (A full-time player accounts for maybe 14 to 16 games a year, more if he bats at the top of lineup and plays a key defensive positon, fewer if he bats lower in the order and plays a relatively unimportant position.) Instead of Sandberg’s advantage of a single win over, say, Dawson in a given year, or the advantage of a two wins a year over any other decent regular, which could seem like a problem that could be overcome by rounding up or rounding down (because you wouldn’t know if Dawson’s 9 was actually 9.4 wins and Sandberg’s 10 was 9.5, making them virtually tied), James multiplies the figures by 3, and so makes it possible to use whole integers that are clearly significant in themselves, with no need for rounding off or using decimal places.
Which is my problem with a HoF that starts at some modern point in history.
Many records are now out of our contemplation: Chesbro’s 41 wins in an age when pitchers don’t come close to getting 41 starts in a season, Owen Wilson’s 36 triples in an age when you can lead the league with a third of that total–these don’t compute, and we judge outselves (rightly) unable to make distinctions when stats are so foreign to our contexts, yet there were great players 100 years ago, and 120 years ago, and 140 years ago. Can we just say “Our HoF begins when I recognize how records were made, and the names of some of the record makers”?
Yes, it’s impossible to win 511 games now. But it was apparently damn near impossible to win 511 games back then, too, since Cy Young was the only man of his time to do it.
If you don’t feel you want to vote for Cy Young, by all means excuse yourself from that part of the vote, but I don’t think it would be very interesting to arbitrarily start the vote with players who played after Cy Young retired.
I don’t understand why we can’t consider those players honestly (36 triples, by the way, was a crazy fluke then, too.) I think most knowledgable baseball fans know Wilson wasn’t a Hall of Famer but Tris Speaker was, and I think the votes will be pretty smart at the end of it all. So far it’s been a lot of fun.
The problem with Win Shares is that they are an approximation. They are very inexact numbers. They are good at giving a general sense of the picture, but the fact that player A had 30 win shares one year and player B had 28 doesn’t mean necessarily that player A had a better season. I don’t think it is a great way to try to separate out players close in value. There are better numbers out there.
Frankly, they are about as dead-even as two guys can get, and that’s all I’m really saying. Keep in mind Ryno went on his little vacation right when offensive levels shot up all over both leagues in 1993, while that is about the moment that Alomar developed into a superstar, so a straight comparison of their “official” stats would be misleading on that basis. And that, BTW, outweighs the Wrigley Effect surprisingly enough, such that Alomar was getting more help from playing in a high-offense era than Sandberg was from his bandbox pre-1993. Same reason why I left Gehringer off (tho I reserve the right to put one guy on my ballot who was underrated by most pundits and Hall voters, hence Grich).
The problem with all stats is that they are an approximation. Take HRs, a simple counting stat–except that 30 HRs in Fenway may be fewer than 25 HRs somewhere else, at least as far as using that figure to determine a player’s power. And 30 HRs from a full-time player may be less impressive than 25 HRs from a platoon player. And 30 HRs from a DH may be less of a contribution than 25 HRs from a Gold Glove shortstop. And hitting 30 HRs in 2000 may be less of an achievement than hitting 25 HRs in 1968… and so on. You need to put any stats in context to appreciate their meaning, and that’s what we’re doing with Win Shares, which seek to eliminate all of these biases and more. Frankly, to discount Win Shares because they represent many factors, some of which are difficult to bear in mind simultaneously, is to privilege the ignorance that causes many common misunderstandings about baseball stats.
In even a small sample, Win Shares display great accuracy, though of course you’re right that a player with 28 WS may be more valuable than one with 30 WS. I’m sure you could find a case where that argument could be made, though I doubt you could find one where most people would agree. But if you took a team made of all players with 30 WS and I took one with 28-WS players, you’d clean my clock. So it’s a useful metric, and not merely an approximation, as you’d have it.
Another good example was with Twins. We knew that if you were trading for a singles hitter from the Twins, take a quick look at his splits as his road average was nearly always lower and you should expect the player to only match his road average coming to Yankee stadium. My brother and I knew Knobloch would lose about 15 to 20 points off his BA. I believe he ended up losing closer to 25 but he some other issues after coming to NY.
We knew Ortiz going to Fenway would show an increase in power, but of course we never expected the huge increase he got. We forgot to factor in not only was his swing built for Fenway but he would be protected by Manny. Even with those factors, he still showed more power than I ever expected.
We also knew that Giambi would probably show an increase in power but should stay about the same BA moving from Oakland to Yanks. Sadly the BA fell way off and then all his other problems happened.
Going much further back, Paul O’Neill showed some very good power to right field and hit really well against right handers. He looked like a good fit in Yankee Stadium and should show an increase in power and a slight increase in BA. Instead, apparently Mattingly helped him fix a huge hole in his swing and his power stay roughly the same as he made himself a really good line drive hitter and saw a huge bump upwards in Batting average.
No matter how much we can take an educated guess at park affect, it is still just a guess and dozens of other variables can cause very unexpected results.
I’ll just point out one misconception: Fenway has been a pretty poor home run park for a number of years now. Oh, it is still a hitter’s park, but mainly in the singles and (especially) doubles categories. And David Ortiz has hit 18 more road home runs than Fenway home runs over the past 4 years. Fenway used to be good for homers, but I think the consensus explanation is that the big luxury box structure they built behind home plate affected the wind when it was blowing out, or somesuch.
Also the myth of one player (like Papi) protecting another player (Ramirez) is another Sasquatch–no one has actually seen this occurrring in nature (at least not so’s they can explain it to anyone else) but uninformed people routinely assume it exists and that everyone agrees with them that it does.
It doesn’t, and I’ve cited serious studies showing that it doesn’t.