2012 MLB Regular Season Running Thread

Well, the fact is that there IS a lot of buzz about Rizzo.

 

Cubs fans are bored and have shiny new toy syndrome (as Kevin Goldstein put it). I like Rizzo a lot as a prospect, but he's not even close to the best young position player on that team. Or all that close. Rizzo is probably going to be an above-average but not All-Star quality 1b for a long time. The Cubs have done a nice job trying to tighten up his mechanics, but I still think he's got a slider-speed bat and won't be able to dominate MLB the way he did AAA (duh, I guess).

 

No, actually the burden is on the statheads to come up with something better. Your system failed. Miserably. It proved itself to be useless. If it can be that far off, it does not work. It does not deserve to be trusted.

I'm not going to replace it. I'm just going to ignore it, which is exactly what should be done.

 

And he has earned that by tearing up the minors, but he did that before he was called up and then failed to hit last season, too.

 

Regarding dWAR and proper defensive metrics, here's the thing: Maybe there just isn't one. Thinking about where all these advanced metrics took off, it was so front offices could figure out a more efficient way to spend their money, right? That's Moneyball.

So, for the purposes of defense and evaluating who can play what position how well, those front offices probably are just going to be a whole lot better off putting up a reel of every FA or trade candidate's plays or potential plays at the position, just like NFL teams do with quarterbacks, and evaluating it using their experience and their EYES OMG!!!! And everyone who isn't a front-office employee is going to have this system of statistical masturbation that they think tells them a lot but doesn't really say much of anything.

 

This is a step too far.

It is akin to saying that batting average is useless because, for one week, Mark Reynolds got some bloop singles and a couple infield hits and batted .330 because of it.

It's a tiny sample size affected by an anomaly. Like I said, a ghost in the machine that the formula doesn't account for.

It doesn't make it "useless."

And I'm not a dWAR supporter. But I recognize continuums of usefulness, whether it's dWAR or pitching wins or batting average or whatever else stat you want to throw out there, old, new, or in-between.

It's not all binary.

 

Reminds me of what they say about winning the 100-meter dash in the Special Olympics...

 

This isn't a week. It is nearly three months of a season. That is not a good comparison at all.

This just revealed a huge flaw in the system, enough of one that it needs to be changed to make it worthwhile. It is not worth using in its current form.

 

OK, perhaps Mark Reynolds has a .300 batting average through three months of the season because he has a ridiculously high BABIP. Same thing happens with pitchers.

I don't understand what Brett Lawrie's dWAR, because of a peculiarity in the way the Blue Jays line up on defense, has to do with the accuracy of, say, Alex Rodriguez's dWar.

I get the doubts it gives you. It gives me doubts, too. Or, rather, reaffirms my doubt. But I don't think, alone, that this makes the stat "useless."

 

Then, if it's not worth using in its current form, either: A) a different form will be contrived; or B) it won't be used.

All statistics (as mere glimpses of reality rather than reality itself) are flawed. Some are just more flawed than others ... we think.

 

It doesn't mean anything because it's putting stock in a 21-game sample size. The American League has won interleague play the past nine seasons, and this year it wasn't even close at 142-110.

The National League isn't the Special Olympics, just Class AAAA.