2012 MLB Regular Season Running Thread

And they're just a half-game behind Baltimore for the No. 1 wild card. They should be ahead of Baltimore already, fucking Scioscia.

 

Oh ... you meant someone else.

 

What's Ken Hitchcock doing on the MLB thread?

 

Jeter is even worse than some of the statistics say. People like you try to focus on his low error totals and ignore the fact that he has about as much range as a batting cage these days.
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This is where you are wrong. I saw Jeter several times last week. I also saw a batting cage.

A batting cage moves. Therefore it has more range.

But he has all those gold gloves, you know?
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A thousand pardons. I don't know what I was thinking.

 

Whenever I'm using WAR as a quick reference guide comparing player performance, I just go to oWAR and leave out the defensive stuff. And that was before this Lawrie thing, which doesn't invalidate the entire formula so much as it reveals a ghost in the machine.

I just don't trust defensive advanced statistics as of yet, partly because I don't understand them and partly because they seem to vary so wildly from season to season and that raises my suspicions.

 

That "ghost in the machine" makes me wonder what other flaws there are. Way too much subjectivity involved. Wake me (and explain it to me) once y'all manage to agree upon one version of it.

Isn't the entire point of this to evaluate players fairly, taking positions into account? If so, that would mean by this one measure, the metric rated Brett Lawrie as the best player in the game. Sorry, if the rating can be that far off, it needs some work before it can be considered worthwhile.

 

The Blue Jays are one of the teams that employ shifts on defense but they do it a bit differently. Instead of just sliding everyone over they take the third baseman, Lawrie, and move him into the gap in short right field. Thus any ball hit there gets counted to him under DRS. So he is getting mega mega runs added to his fielding runs. I believe Dewan, who created DRS, stated that Lawrie is getting .99 runs for every ball he turns into an out on the shift.

Now there is a downside in which if someone bunts down the third base line while Lawrie is over in right that will cost him .95 outs but that doesn't happen too often.

I never once said that Lawrie was the best player or that he deserved is WAR

BTW, I do not even own a calculator at home. I guess there is one on my PC, I guess.

 

I get where the mistake is coming from, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists. The fact that something like that can fuck up the whole process makes me think the process has very limited value, if any.

 

The defensive one, you mean?

 

Good read on (I think he's been around these parts) Gordon Edes's day spent behind the mic at Fenway:

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2012/06/former_la_media_guy_annou.php