OT: Verlander
14 k's in 8 innings.. that is one bad mutha
Why don't you, or better yet, Bill James apply to be a baseball GM?
After all, all you need to know is a pitcher's FIP and you can put together the best team ever.
Every major league teams uses advanced stats. Why? Because they tell us more.
These stats being mentioned were created to sort out the noise that is prevalent in a stat like wins.
They tell us how a player performed after adjusting for the things that are or aren't in their control.
Your only counter argument is that somehow advanced stats don't measure things situationally. Well, yes some don't. But there are also stats such as Leverage Index and Win Probability Added that do measure those things in a much more concise manner than a simplistic stat such as wins. Whether you perscribe to their usefulness is up to you, but just know that the entire educated baseball community uses advanced stats in some combination with their own subjective opinions.
You should root for wins as a fan.
They just don't necessarily tell you the truth about a players performance on an individual level.
For proof, the correlation between wins in one season and wins in the next is lower than the correlations between expected wins based on FIP in the 1st season and wins in the next season
It is not a computer game, Nick.
I have a feeling that I am arguing with a bunch of math nerds who never played real baseball, but do play a lot of computer simulations.
Real baseball is played by real people in the real world.
These real people are inconsistent in how much of their potential they realize from game to game and season to season. You can't just say that Felix Hernandez is at a particular skill level in real life the way computer games allow you to. Every pitch Felix makes is another challenge for Felix to rise up to or falter in the face of.
That means that there is no "truth" about a player's performance.
And that only leaves whether the performance was good enough to win or not.
For the better competitors it is good enough more often. For the lesser competitors it more often isn't.
Finally, whether this "dude" is going to "win" this argument is beside the point. No major league team uses statistics, no matter how advanced, to the exclusion of everything else.I hate to break it to you,but statistical measurements are incapable or measuring all relavant considerations. They can never be more than a tool that provides extra insight.
BTW: major league teams root for wins also, not just fans.
I actually played baseball in high school, and am a huge baseball fan. You can call me a nerd if you'd like, there are a lot of us on this blog, since many of us actually went to Michigan. It seems like you're scared of stats, that they may make baseball less "real," and more like a computer simulation. Really, statistics (especiallly sabermetric statistics) help us make sense of what is real. This is true in every area where statistics are used, but especially in baseball. Without statistics, we have to rely soley on human perception, and human perception is the worst thing to go off of to evaluate a player, as we often distort things to fit what we want to have seen rather than what actually happened.
Stats do actually cover more relevant considerations than we can even think of. A statistic called leverage actually measures how important each at bat is in a game. Other statistics can give probabilities as to how many runs a team is likely to score based on their scenario. No, this number will never be exactly correct, but it gives an average, and a fair approximation for a manger to make decisions off of. Even though the game is really all about players performing, statistics lie behind every rational decision in baseball.
If you really did play baseball then you must know yhat there is more to baseball than just statistics.
You also have to know that many statistics are attempts to find some more definitive measure. You have to buy in fo believe that that they actually measure what you think they do.
Why buy in? Well, actually many statistics including "advanced"
statistics do offer insight.
Why not buy in? Well, the statistics exist for the purpose of helping you make insightful decisions in your pursuit of winning. Winning is what is important, not some esoteric statistic. Winning is the goal of playing.
There is no "perfect" statistic. All give at least some insight. None are definitive. They do not explain or predict or measure everything. They are best used as tools. Tools to gain insight from.
An example would be that statistics suggest that Felix Hernandez pitched better than his W-L record would suggest.
Fine. But to say that Hernandez was a more successful pitcher than someone with a better W-L record is to define "success" by how well someone performs by these statistical measures.
This loses sight of the fact that winning is the goal of playing. It substitutes having good statistics for winning.
I used the example of Steve Carlton. Carlton actually "won" 27 games out the Phillies' 59 games won . Hernandez won 15 of Seattle's 61. Are you afraid of that statistic?
New York is not Seattle. No guarantee that Felix Hernandez could handle the pressure of pitching for the Yankees. Also, as a number 1 starter, Hernandez would often be matched up against the other team's best starter and that starter might shut down the Yankee offense and he will again lose the close low scoring game.
would not have been shut down as frequently as Seatle's offense last year.
Yeah, usually a "better" offense will do... well..ur ...better.
smartass comment. I guess that is what somebody has to resort to when their argument is nonsense. I was simply pointing that the instances of a Felix's offense being shutdown and him having to pitch in low scoring games would have been signficantly lessened by playing on a better offensive team.
My argument isn't nonsense. I may not have articulated it very well, but I wasn't planning on getting into a debate.
I would concede that Felix probably would have won more games with better run support.
For the sake of this argument, I don't see how that matters.
Yes, winning requires help from your teammates. Yes, pitchers on otherwise good teams win more. So?
The SABR argument requires that there is nothing a pitcher can do to help himself (and his team) win. The pitcher is going to give up "x" number of runs based on how good a pitcher he is and then it is all up to his teammates.
I call BS. A pitcher's competitiveness and skill (often bred of experience) in dealing with tough situations can make all the difference in the world.
The guy who held Morris' Hall of Fame vote to just around 53% last year? Are you going to keep him out next winter?
Look at the Verlander and Jack Morris numbers. Or the Lolich numbers. Verlander is great. And he would have to be thrilled with Morris/Lolich numbers. We're talking about three of the best pitchers in modern franchise history. But you'd probably like to fight about that.
lol
Let's look at the numbers. Here are the stats of Morris and Verlander side-by-side:
Morris:
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1009211&position=P
Verlander:
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=8700&position=P
Jack Morris had a career k/9 of 5.83 and a career bb/9 of 3.27. He had a career ERA of 3.9 and a career FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, controls for luck/defense/ballpack, and is a better measure than ERA) of 3.94. Career Wins Above Replacement of about 57 in 16 full seasons (about 3.5 per season, which is good but not great).
Justin Verlander has a career k/9 of 8.16 and a career bb/9 of 2.88. He has a career ERA of 3.68 and a career FIP of 3.55. He has been worth 28 wins in 5 and a half full seasons, good for about 5 wins per season, which is Hall of Fame worthy. I know Verlander hasn't hit his decline phase yet, but his 5.5 seasons up to this point are so far above any 5 year period Jack Morris ever had that it's not even funny.
The only stat Morris does well in is pitcher wins, which is one of the worst stats in baseball (gives the pitcher credit for how good his lineup and defense are).
Oh snap! If you are gonna call for a judgement based on numbers, you better know the numbers!
I'm so sorry now, that I said that this is historically great stuff by Verlander, and that I compared him to Jack Morris.
I meant to compare him to Walter Johnson. Sorry. My bad.
j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t
Come on, you're smart enough to know that according to most dictionarys, either spelling of judgment is acceptable.
Not dictionarys.
Now that is a valid correction.
First, I think it is a mistake to use advanced stats to compare a pitcher in an era of advanced stats and a pitcher that may not have even been aware of them.
Second, Verlander hasn't hit his decline phase. For all we know Verlander will pull a Favre and absolutely kill his career stats when he is way past his prime
Third, Morris is known as a "personality". I think its naive to think he didn't have any effect on the performance of the rest of the team.