Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Dec 05, 2008
In Part I of this post the ides of Win Shares was introduced as the creation of the sabermetrician Bill James. It is a single number that encompasses the complete contribution of a baseball player during a season and hence allows measurement and comparison of player values over time. In this part we will look at specific Win Share numbers and players who excelled over time.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Dec 05, 2008
Baseball fans love to argue. That much we can say with certainty. Where uncertainty begins is in the facts brought forward to support the arguments. Baseball is awash with statistics but a common mistake (the availability error) is to use the easy ones to make one's argument regardless of its relevance. Situationally, a fan can use batting average, home runs, RBI, ERA, saves or other easily available statistics to bolster his case. Alternately, more subjective criteria such as fielding ability, speed, clutch hitting and leadership are also used to contend that certain players are better. Sabermetricians have created many objective measures (OPS, VORP, etc) for player quality which, while sometimes used, have not caught the popular imagination, largely because of a lack of simplicity and comparability. Wouldn't it be nice to have a single, simple number that can accurately summarize a player's complete contribution during a season and that allows players to be easily compared? That is what Bill James the patron saint of sabermetricians has developed. It is called Win Shares. In Part I of this post we will take a non-technical look at this statistic. In Part II we will look at highs and lows over time and why we may be witnessing one of the greatest baseball players of all time.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Aug 30, 2008
Why aren't there any more 0.400 hitters in baseball? The eminent evolutionary biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould answers this great sporting puzzle in his book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, which is only partly about baseball. It is really about understanding basic statistics and along the way you get a great discourse on the animal world and in particular bacteria. He uses these examples, and a terrifying intellect, to argue that just looking at averages (such as the mean) is not sufficient and one has to look at variation within the system as a whole to fully understand trends. With this approach he is also able to answer the question of whether quality of play overall has declined or improved in baseball over time. If you are not into animals, you may want to go straight to the baseball portion, which by itself is not at all a hard read. So why aren't there any more 0.400 hitters in baseball?
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Jul 07, 2008
First let's discuss leverage and then get to (the Philadelphia Phillies outfielder) Burrell. Leverage can briefly be described as the ability to exert influence. When a person has the ability to influence another or a situation, then that person is said to have leverage. It is a term often used in financial dealings. Have you seen it applied in sports such as baseball? Here's the set-up. In baseball are all runs equal? In other words, do runs scored in the early innings have the same importance as the runs scored in later innings? Sabermetricians will argue that they are not, simply because runs scored later have lower probabilities of being overtaken. (Click here for an introduction to sabermetrics).
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Books, Baseball on
Jun 18, 2008
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? Fascinated by this question Lewis begins an investigation that takes him into an area of baseball that was shrouded in mystery about a decade ago. This was an area dominated by people who believed that to truly understand baseball you have to use numbers. Not just any number from a box score (such as an RBI) but those that were shown to be related to winning (such as on-base percentage).
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