Thanks Tom

Suntan Superman

WC's Resident Samoan

I really never looked at Sabermetric stats too hard til I came here... they helped me prove a guy was overreacting to the Mets collapse things he said include:

Jose Reyes is overrated. He's energetic but we need a better SS

Tom Glavine absolutely needs to go

Lastings Milledge and Carlos Gomez need to go

Only Maine and Perez should be kept as starters


Why is that fans are overreacting to the Mets collapse?

Dr. Giganto

Sports Moderator

You're welcome lol

Glad I could convert somebody

Suntan Superman

WC's Resident Samoan

I mean I wasn't Joe Morgan esque, I just never knew how much better they measured players, such as VORP and eqa

Simon

Founder/Admin

Tom, do you ever think that Sabermetrics backfire sometimes? I do agree that they are a great way to evaulate perhaps unknown talent or show you some things about a veteran that will add to your interest in him.

I ask this because all off season the rumor was that JD Drew was coming to the Red Sox. We were then bombarded with reports and accounts via numbers numbers numbers about why he is a Red Sox hitting dream come true.

Now they threw all that shit at me via Radio, newspapers etc. What I saw was a guy that is always going on the DL, hits with little to no passion for his career and an all around "average" player. I just knew it would NEVER work here.

Basically my question is....

Should gut instinct overrule what all the numbers in the world say sometimes?

Dr. Giganto

Sports Moderator

well, there are some people who think you can learn everything about a player from JUST the numbers, or at least enough to make any sort of baseball/managerial decisions you want to make. However, I am not one of those people

I think you have to use all available information. Part of that is stats. Part of that is traditional scouting. Part of that is character evaluation.

That being said, I think there are two major impacts of sabermetrics. First off, it's allowing people to understand that some of the traditional stats we use arent good ways to evaluate if a guy is good or not. For pitchers, wins and losses are highly dependent on run support and bullpen performance. And saves are just an absolute mess. For hitters, runs and RBIs depend on the team around you. If you dont have a lot of hitters on base, you cant drive in runs. And if the guys behind you suck, you're not gonna score a lot of runs

Secondly, it's made a positive impact in certain uses of in-game strategy. For instance, bunting early in the game. Sacrificing a runner over to 2nd increases your chance of scoring at least one run, but it limits the number of big innings you have. Put another way, imagine you have 10 situations of no outs runner on 1st. And you sacrifice all 10 times. The number of runs you score in those 10 innings might end up looking something like this:

1 0 1 0 2 1 0 1 3 0

You scored at least 1 run in 7 of the 10 innings, but you only scored more than 1 twice.

Now let's say you let the #2 hitter swing away. You might up like this:

2 0 0 1 0 4 0 3 0 2

Now, you were held scoreless in 5 of the 10 innings, but you had 4 multi-run innings. And, you scored 12 runs in this situation, instead of 9, as in the previous example

Not only that, but sabermetric analysis actually kinda foresaw Drew's struggles this year. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system projected Drew to struggle this year. Their projection for Drew's VORP (BP's primary offensive stat) this year was 18.8. In the last three years, his VORP was 34.9 (2006), 26.9, and 69.5 (2004). So, they expected a big drop. He was a little bit worse than they thought (15.5), but still...they were able to see that Drew would be much worse this year than he was last year

They projected 14 HRs and 59 RBIs. He was at 11 and 64 this year. They projected BA/OBP/SLG of 270/382/463. His actual numbers: 270/373/423. Close enough.

Blitzkrieg

Administrator

Wow.. but what did they use to figure that out?

Suntan Superman

WC's Resident Samoan

So anyway, it seems no one wants to debate with me anymore due to my sabermetricness

God

Super Moderator

Him? He fell over whenever the wind blew! How is he making it in America?




Oh wait, you mean the other one?