kramnoj

Variability in and of itself isn't a sign that the metric is flawed. Player's defense can vary throughout a season and through a career. People who study defense say that you often need two seasons of play to get a true sense of a player's ability. That's not a flaw of the metrics, it just means that most plays that are made are routine, and there aren't enough non-routine plays to get a big enough sample to accurately judge a players ability.

That's a circular argument -- how do you know, because ESPN told you No, that's not a circular argument. I use ZR because people that study defense say that it's the best easily available defensive play by play statistic. People like MGL, Chris Dial, SG at replacementlevel, etc.

Brown is 28 and has 10 major league ABs. He doesn't have any significant future as a major leaguer. Was that in response to end pointing out that Brown's problems were personal, not performance? His minor-league numbers are pretty solid. They look solid enough, but I don't know enough about the park effects of minor leagues to really gauge them. All I pointed out that one of the people featured in the Moneyball draft is out of baseball and doesn't look to have any kind of future in the game. And I specifically pointed it out because orca mentioned him in his post.

Braun has been average to above-avg. out there imo -- a lot better than most thought he'd be, but certainly not 7th best in all of MLB How would you know he's not the 7th best LF defensively in the majors? You don't get to see enough of other teams to really know that, do you? For reference, Ryan is ranked 15th among MLB corner OF for GPA, per THT's stats page. That's about the 'tier' that I personally though he was in or near, but I just checked now. A top-20 corner OF just in terms of hitting. The one thing that GPA doesn't take into account is playing time. Runs Created does.

I don't think sayting that there are 6 corner OF better than Braun to this point is anything but fact right now. What stats would you use to support that? Braun is currently 6th in all OF in Runs Created according to ESPN with 53.3. Ahead of him are Josh Hamilton, who is primarily a CF, Nate McClouth who is a CF, Grady Sizemore who is a CF, Pat Burrell and Jason Bay. So there are only two corner OFs having better years than Braun so far. When you add that Braun's defense is 7th in LF so that it's a positive and not a negative, I don't think there are 4 corner OF who are passing him with their defensive contributions.

I think Gamel will stick at third long term because he'll be granted the time there that Braun was never given. Do you mean he'll stay in the minors until the Brewers feel he's ready? That makes sense to me. The Brewers could put in a player x/Hall platoon at 3B for another season if needed.

That doesn't really make sense. Harden has never been a healthy ace for a full season. Peavy was last year, and he was also very good in 2005.

Neither of them have been great and healthy in one season. It's a stretch to call either one a proven ace. They could both be good additions, but I don't see either team being motivated to trade their pitchers away.

I couldn't understand why you would call Braun well above average as opposed to good or very good. Calling someone who is at the top 5 of their position well above average seemed odd to me. It seemed like you were going out of your way to not call him good, and say he wasn't a superstar, when nobody in the thread recently said he was.

cwolf2012, your whole point is that Braun isn't yet a superstar? Are you refuting someone who said that?

I've seen moderators a couple of times talk about avoiding back to back posts, but I haven't seen that actually in an official rule. Is this something that should be made official? I think I even saw one mod call it bad netiquette, as if it's equivalent to 10 line paragraphs or heavy emoticon usage, but I've never encountered this preference on any other discussion forum. I don't get the feeling that anyone is being disciplined for this, but if it's a guideline that we should be following, I think it only makes sense to officially list it as a guideline.

Braun is a flashy player who makes it seem like he is better than he actually is. He comes off as a superstar, but he's really more of just a well above average player. You may be going for hyperbole to make you point, but I don't know how you can back up what you are saying. Braun is probably a top 5 leftfielder in the majors so far this year with offense and defense considered. And considering that one of the left fielders ahead of him is Damon, Braun is likely to move up a notch come season end.

One thing that the As did (still might) is that they wanted their minor leaguers to have one walk for every 10 ABs. You couldn't earn a minor league award from the team if you didn't meet that minimum. So if a player gets 600 ABs you would want a player to have about 60 walks. Braun last year had 29 walks in 451 ABs. When I peruse the league leaders in slugging, they often have 80-100 walks a year, and the best have even more. Most of those players will have OBP of .380-.420. Even notorious hacker Kirby Puckett got on base 36% of the time for his career and he was at .370-.379 in his best years. I guess it depends on how few people you describe as elite. Of the top 5 players last year in the NL in OPS+, Fielder's .395 OBP was the lowest. Braun probably needs to be around .400 OBP to be one of the best hitters in the game, even with a slugging over .600.

Brown is 28 and has 10 major league ABs. He doesn't have any significant future as a major leaguer. Cust only slugged .504 last year. He didn't slug above .450 from 2003-2005 in AAA. I think it's fairly easy to imagine that he won't be the powerhouse that he was last year. Branyan type power only applies in a weak way. Branyan never went through a 3 year power dip like Cust did.

I don't know that you'll get a single right answer to what you are asking. With regards to Jeremy Brown, the catcher that Beane wanted because of his OBP, he's now out of baseball. One thing that I've observed is that you don't really want people who just get on base. You want good hitters who will allow themselves to take a walk if they don't get a pitch to hit. The difference being that if your only skill is not swinging at the ball, teams will eventually find that out and they will force the hitter to take the bat off his shoulders. One example of a player like that is Mark Bellhorn. He basically had two good years. They were the only years he hit above .250, but he also had OBP of over .370 both of those years. The Red Sox traded for him before the 2004 season and were able to get him cheap because he had an awful 2003. The move paid off when Bellhorn gave them decent defense at 2B and an OPS+ of 109 fueled by an OBP of .373. That was just one of the moves that led to the Red Sox winning that year. The Red Sox brought him back next year. It made sense, going into 2005 he had good years in two of the previous 3 years. He presumably would have had a good projection in any forecasting system. But he never hit again, and was cut the following season. He continued to show a decent walk rate in the stops he got after that, but if you can't hit the ball a walk rate isn't going to do anything. He's an extreme example, but it makes the point. To get back to the As. Last year they gave Jack Cust his biggest chance to play in the majors. Before last year, Cust's longest stint in the majors was 73 ABs in 2003 with the Orioles. He put up a .260/.357/.521 line that was good for a 129 OPS+. But his best position is DH and he only got 4 ABs over the following 3 seasons. So the A's give him a shot last year, and even though he only hit .256 his OBP was over .400 and his slugging was over .500 which equaled an OPS+ of 147. He's continuing to put up a .400 OBP this year, but his slugging is down to .435. He's valuable now, but if his power doesn't go back up, pitchers will catch on and Cust may walk himself out of the league again.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/dialed_in/discussion/2007_nl_opd_offense_plus_defense/ is a link to a rating from Chris Dial, a guy who has his own ratings system for players. I don't know enough about the system, but Dial is an intelligent guy who has a lot of passion for the game and studies it very closely. Highlighting the Brewers: Fielder weighs in at 30.6 Runs Above Average, or about 3 Wins above average. That put him at 10th in the NL last year. Hart is better than I thought he would be with 23.4, 16th in the NL. Braun is at 15.6. Without his negative defensive value of 14.9, he has an offensive value of 30.5, and this is a total value #, not prorated. Weeks had a value of .5, so he was essentially an average player last year. Dillon was exactly zero, so he was absolutely average. Hardy was rated with bad defense, he had a total rating of -12. I won't list all the players, I'd recommend checking it out if you find the ratings interesting. For me the biggest surprises were how well Hart was rated and how poorly Hardy fared.

He wants to be "The man" somewhere and I don't think its gonna happen here since there is no way he stays with us long term. Boras won't allow that. Do you really think that Boras controls what Fielder does? Why do you think this? Bernie Williams turned down more money from Boston to stay with the Yankees when he had Boras as his agent.

The clubhouse meals aren't really free. Players pay clubouse dues of $25-$30 a day. Obviously not anything close to a big deal, but not free as some understand it to be. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_24_228/ai_n6126922 is one look at the life of a big leaguer.

A few examples -- in these studies, doubles always correlate with runs scored more strongly than triples. I've even seen some where team strikeouts had a slight positive correlation with team runs and team stolen bases had a slight negative correlation. Would it make sense to argue as a consequence of these findings that a double is better than a triple or that striking out is better than stealing a base? Both of those could make sense to me. Doubles are often a function of power, whereas triples are usually speed based. Power leads to more runs than speed, so if you have a team full of doubles hitters, I think they will score more than a team full of triples (assuming normal levels). As far as the strikeout vs sb, that makes sense to me as well. Teams do a fairly good job of only allowing people who strike out that have power in the bigs. Basically, the swing that leads to power will lead to strikeouts. If you don't strikeout, you're not trying to hit for power. The selection bias that exists within front offices actually works out. Obviously if you go grab a bunch of minor leaguers who strike out without power, that's going to screw things up, but the studies are based on the rosters that major league teams construct. Here's an example of OBP based OPS or slugging heavy OPS. Braun has an OBP of .320 and a slugging of .575 which equals a OPS + of 130. Johnny Damon is having a very good year, with an OBP of .394 and slugging .493 with an OPS+ of 139. Braun slightly edges out Damon in OPS, but because increases in OBP are more valuable than in slugging, Damon is having a more valuable year so far. This was surprising to me when I saw that. I knew that Braun had 20 HR, but didn't know that Damon was on pace to have a career year. To get back to the bbtf thread. It was from a blog post that talked about how the Blue Jays had a decent OBP and were 5th in the league in OBP but only 12th in the league in Runs. That blogger has heard from the stat community that OBP=Runs, and so he says the stat guys are obviously wrong. What this blogger hasn't understood is that power also leads to runs, and the fact that the team is 13th in slugging has a lot more to do with how few runs they've scored than their OBP. That's obviously an extreme example, but I do think that some in the stat community have banged the OBP drum so heavily that the message has become distorted.

values: OBP = .904, SLG = .926. This does NOT mean that 1 marginal point of SLG > 1 marginal point of OBP, nor that SLG is more important than OBP. I'm FoP in the where Szymborsk has that remark, but it's not clear to me what that quote means. I'm far from an expert in stats, but when I hear that slugging correlates higher to runs, I understand that having a really high slugging is more important than a really high OBP (not by much, granted, but that's what the stats seem to say). Now, I don't understand why you felt the need to capitalize the NOT, there, nobody was claiming that one point of slug is better than OBP. What I don't understand is why slug isn't more important than OBP if it correlates higher on a team level to runs. If I just try to understand this in the common sense of observation, I would say that for the vast majority of players, the range of OBP is from .300 - .400 (the right end isn't exact, just a round number), whereas for slugging it again starts at around the .300 level but extends to .600 (maybe .575). Because the range for OBP is smaller, a marginal gain in OBP is worth more than an equal gain in slugging. That makes sense to me. But I think I would prefer a guy who is leading the league in slugging than a guy who leads the league in OBP.

http://jinaz-reds.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-do-i-keep-using-ops.html is the link. The difference is small, but it was revealing to me.

I don't think this is media bias. I think that this is just another example of how BA centric the media is. Jeter is hitting .276. Sure, it's the lowest that Jeter has hit since he was 21, but a standard MSM type is going to gloss over .276 and not think much about it. His BA and OBP are above league average, and an OPS+ of 93 isn't horrid for a SS. Also, Jeter is currently about 17th in ZR for SS, ahead of Jose Reyes. Below average for sure, but not really bad. Jeter has been overpaid since he got the big contract. Just another example of contracts paying for the past rather than the future.

Braun is currently 8th in the NL in slugging. Yes, his OBP is not acceptable for an elite hitter, but I have read that slugging has correlated higher to runs than OBP in the last few years. Braun has been a special player so far, I don't have much doubt that he will eventually be able to combine his ability to hit for contact and power with the eye to take walks when he doesn't get a good pitch to hit.

And I understand "progress" but simply because it's available, doesn't mean it's the best option. I understand personal preference. I don't understand how not righting obvious wrongs is the best option.

Exactly. Sheets is sure to be a type A free agent. I would take a first round pick and a sandwich pick over Hughes. Hughes is starting to look a lot like an over-hyped NY prospect. What makes you think that? 22 innings this year? He pitched 72 league average innings last year as a 21 year old. In 2006, he was brilliant as a 20 year old in AA: 138 ks and 32 bbs in 116 innings and a WHIP of .91. You think the average haul from two draft picks will give you better results than that?