Posted by tecwrg on 6/15/2016 6:06:00 PM (view original):
Or, they could say "all this advanced defensive metrics is a big crock of ****".

Why would they say that?

I like to think I understand advanced metrics fairly well, but I still think advanced defensive metrics tend to be pretty much a big crock of ****. I mean, the real problem remains that defenders get few enough "important" chances that the sample sizes are small. By important chances, I mean chances that don't fit into one of these 2 categories:

1) 90% of Major League players make the play 90% of the time or better
2) nobody makes the play ever

Realistically, how many marginal chances does a defender get in a full season? Somewhere between 20 and 100 depending on his position? So a couple of uncharacteristically good or poor plays can swing your whole season far off of equilibrium. It doesn't mean that advanced defensive metrics can't tell you useful things. In a sense, they are the *most* precise metrics in baseball. Any analysis of what a hitter does is, to an extent, limited by the fact that we are basically a lot less good at numerically estimating how hard a pitch is to hit than we are at estimating how hard a hit is to field. Knowing the velocity and trajectory of a batted baseball is 100% of the relevant information. Hitting also has a lot to do with release point, delivery, etc. which are hard to quantitatively analyze. So in a sense, we can very effectively say how many balls a fielder got to and how often fielders tend to get to balls with similar hit characteristics.

The problem is, as we keep coming back to, that the samples of such balls are so small it takes a long time for guys to amass enough borderline chances to get a good read on how they're performing if they aren't ridiculously good or ridiculously bad. And not many Major League players are either. Watching the Orioles these days I do get to see 2 though... Machado is a ridiculously good 3B, and Mark Trumbo is a hilarious RF.

I guess we disagree on this. I look at UZR and DRS like BA or OBP. They aren't an evaluation of a player's defense, they are a record of what happened.

In small samples, you get a wide range of results. But in a larger sample, you get a pretty good picture.

For example, Ichiro is hitting something like .350 this year. But no one thinks that's indicative of his hitting ability. It's just a fluke from a part time player.

I think that's pretty much exactly what I said...

I was probably thrown off by the whole "big crock of ****" part.

But if we do agree, then the problem isn't with the stats but with how people view and use them.

For example, by putting them into single-season and partial-season dWAR values. dWAR is inherently ****** because defensive metrics are inherently inaccurate over the typical sample sizes over which WAR is calculated.

Small sample or not, it's still a reflection of what happened.

It's the same reason you prefer ERA to FIP. FIP gives you a better idea of the true talent of the pitcher but ERA better reflects what happened.

No, FIP is a serious crock of ****.

SIERA is a pretty reasonable estimate of the true talent of a pitcher.

I was using FIP as a stand in for all DIPS. SIERRA is better but similar.

Wait a sec.

A pitcher's strikeout rate is one of the three components of FIP, which according to you is "the true talent of the pitcher".

But also according to you, a strikeout is just "a different kind of out", nothing more.

So either strikeouts are important, or they're not important. Which is it? Pick one, but you can't have it both ways.

For a hitter, an out is an out.

For a pitcher, how he gets outs matters.

Is that hard to understand?

Why does it matter how a pitcher gets outs, but it doesn't matter how a hitter makes outs?

If strikeouts are a good thing for a pitcher, doesn't it follow that they would be a bad thing for a hitter?

If strikeouts make a pitcher better, then wouldn't it be in the hitter's best interests to try to cut down on strikeouts?

Do you understand baseball? (Rhetorical question: I know that you don't).

So BL is finally admitting he's a fan of FIP? What was his alias that loved FIP?