Mauer on wrong side of pitchf/x framing leaderboard

[Brock Beauchamp]

Yeah, those are the rest of season projections. When you look under the Standings menu it's listed as "Team WAR Totals (RoS)".

 

 

You have to go under the "Teams" menu heading then look at the team batting and team pitching sections to see year-to-date WAR totals.

 

Ah, that's pretty poorly labeled.

 

Anyway, the point still stands... The Pirates are the best in baseball and they're 6.5 WAR behind the Rays. Hell, they're 3.5 WAR games behind the Orioles, despite having a much better record.

 

I believe WAR is a pretty good metric but you can't say "ignore your eyeballs" when there are some pretty large discrepancies to account for.

 

After all, the Angels beat the living crap out of everyone in 2012 WAR, yet managed to finish third in their own division and didn't even make the playoffs.

[ThePuck]

My point was, I either trust a stat, or don't trust a stat. I don't trust it only when it tells me the same thing my eyes tell me. I wouldn't use it in an argument to back up what I'm saying and then later disregard it when that stat is brought up in a debate and it doesn't back my opinion.

 

As far as WAR goes, I don't think it was ever meant to tell a story as a team stat...but that's just my opinion.

[Brock Beauchamp]

My point was, I either trust a stat, or don't trust a stat. I don't trust it only when it tells me the same thing my eyes tell me. I wouldn't use it in an argument to back up what I'm saying and then later disregard it when that stat is brought up in a debate and it doesn't back my opinion.

 

As far as WAR goes, I don't think it was ever meant to tell a story as a team stat...but that's just my opinion.

 

I'm not discounting pitch framing but it's very much in question how accurate it is as a whole. Is Mauer suddenly bad at catching or does the pitching staff have more influence on the metric than many would like to believe? Red flags should be raised at some of the inconsistencies we see with these various metrics. Hey, maybe Mauer isn't doing something that he did in previous seasons. That is absolutely a possibility.

 

In the end, trusting a metric without any way to verify its accuracy is no better than blindly discarding anything more complex than OPS as new-fangled garbage. The quest is to find a good number, not just any number.

 

As for WAR, I've thought about this quite a bit and I can't come up with a reason why it should be any different when compiled as a team stat than when it is used as a solitary player stat. Hell, it should be more accurate as a team stat given the large number of opportunities to balance out SSS variance. The fact that it outputs such bizarre numbers at times casts the metric in a pretty poor light.

[ThePuck]

I'm not discounting pitch framing but it's very much in question how accurate it is as a whole. Is Mauer suddenly bad at catching or does the pitching staff have more influence on the metric than many would like to believe? Red flags should be raised at some of the inconsistencies we see with these various metrics. Hey, maybe Mauer isn't doing something that he did in previous seasons. That is absolutely a possibility.

 

In the end, trusting a metric without any way to verify its accuracy is no better than blindly discarding anything more complex than OPS as new-fangled garbage. The quest is to find a good number, not just any number.

 

As for WAR, I've thought about this quite a bit and honestly, I can't come up with a reason why it should be any different when compiled as a team stat than when it is used as a solitary player stat. Hell, it should be more accurate as a team stat given the large number of opportunities to balance out SSS variance. The fact that it outputs such bizarre numbers at times casts the metric in a pretty poor light.

 

My point is...take defensive metrics for example...most fans of a team watch their team way more than any other team. Some, that's all they watch. So most, if not all, of their views of another team's player's abilities comes from the few games against their team and highlights on XYZ station. Do we really have a feel for how well our CF plays compared to the each other CF in the majors? We've watched our guy 150 or so times, other CFs maybe 18, 20 times at most (probably a lot less)? The people who make the defensive metrics watch every game. They compare players for a living.

 

And as far as WAR goes, your post makes it seem like you feel it's a carpy stat. Fine. don't use the stat. I'm not arguing FOR the team WAR stat...heck I've never mentioned it in a conversation till now. I'm saying it, like all other stats, is either reliable or it's not. It's not a matter of it being reliable during the times a fan's eyes say it's correct and not reliable other times because that same fan's eyes disagree.

 

If I like the UZR stat, and I think my guy is a very good defender, but I find out his UZR is in the negative, I'm not going to say, 'well, it's good most of the time, but obviously not in this instance'. Why would I say that? Was his UZR calculated differently than everyone else's? No

[Brock Beauchamp]

My point is...take defensive metrics for example...most fans of a team watch their team way more than any other team. Some, that's all they watch. So most, if not all, of their views of another team's player's abilities comes from the few games against their team and highlights on XYZ station. Do we really have a feel for how well our CF plays compared to the each other CF in the majors? We've watched our guy 150 or so times, other CFs maybe 18, 20 times at most (probably a lot less)? The people who make the defensive metrics watch every game. They compare players for a living.

 

And as far as WAR goes, your post makes it seem like you feel it's a carpy stat. Fine. don't use the stat. I'm not arguing FOR the team WAR stat...heck I've never mentioned it in a conversation till now. I'm saying it, like all other stats, is either reliable or it's not. It's not a matter of it being reliable during the times a fan's eyes say it's correct and not reliable other times because that same fan's eyes disagree.

 

If I like the UZR stat, and I think my guy is a very good defender, but I find out his UZR is in the negative, I'm not going to say, 'well, it's good most of the time, but obviously not in this instance'. Why would I say that? Was his UZR calculated differently than everyone else's? No

 

I can agree with that. When I say "the eyeball test", I'm not referring to my eyeballs per se. If I'm skeptical of a metric, I tend to dig into scouting reports, manager comments, that sort of thing. I almost never rely on my own eyeballs as the sole measure of whether a player is good or not for the reasons you just listed. We simply don't see enough games... But that doesn't mean there aren't people out there who actually watch enough players to give a pretty good indication of whether Player A is a good or bad defender.

 

Anyone who discards a metric entirely because they saw a highlight play two weeks ago isn't very good at parsing information. It's too easy to trick the brain into believing what you want instead of what actually happened.

[drjim]

My instinct would be that much of the WAR discrepancy comes from trying to quantify defense.

[Guest USAFChief]

No, they're using the average zone that umpires actually call.

 

And after what, 100 games, and maybe a turn and a half through all the umpires in MLB, I think we can basically wash away an umpire bias at this point.

So they use an average? They make no adjustment on what "should" be a strike regardless whether the hitter is 5'8" or 6'8"?