Tagged: Fielding
Career WAR
So in my downtime I’ve been slowly compiling historical stats for the world. I’ve got all 22 seasons of offensive and fielding data, and the first seven seasons for pitching data.
The spreadsheet with all the data I’ve got so far can be found here.
For the batters, the season count is how many times the player appears in the spreadsheet. If a player played on two teams in a given season, he’ll appear twice, so it’s not an exact representation of how many seasons they appeared in the majors.
The positional columns are the fielding statistic developed, including positional adjustments based on games played. If two fielders were close in a given season on the raw data, but one played more game, that guy will have a higher run data based on the adjustments. So just take that into account.
FRAA is just a sum of all the positional columns.
wRAA is exactly what is, weight runs above average based on wOBA.
wSB is just a gauge for how much a player contributes by stealing bases.
FRAA, wRAA and wSB is all expressed in runs.
Total WAR is expressed in wins.
The pitcher sheet is pretty self-explanatory.
I’ll update the pitcher sheet once I get more time.
Vin Scully – Season 22 – L.C.’s Golden Gloves
I know I said I was going to post this almost immediately after the full season 22 WAR numbers were up, but I got distracted and totally forgot about it. I can’t remember if I explained the changes to the defensive metric I’m using, and I’m too lazy right now to go back and check. Essentially what it is, is converted chances minus league average rate converting total chances times the value of an out for the specified season. The full equation for those so inclined is ((PO+A)-((PO+A+E+minus play – plus plays)*lgavgrate) )*outvalue. A plus play is considered a play that a normal fielder wouldn’t make, and thus is subtracted from the total amount of chances, while a minus play is essentially treated as an error as it’s a play the fielder should have made, though not all minus plays would have been an out in the engine, there is no way of knowing without combing box scores, and like Sweet Brown, ain’t nobody got time for dat.
For a demonstration I’ll use Ed Stockton‘s numbers from last season, in which he had 193 PO, 362 A, 11 E and 22 + plays. The league average conversion rate for chances at SS was .96, while an out was worth .296 runs. So the formula would look something like this: ((193+362)-((193+362+11+0-22)*.96))*.296=9.63.
The calculations for catcher and first base are a little different, but revolve around the same concept.
The numbers posted are raw numbers without positional adjustments for calculating total WAR, which is why they are different from the numbers on the spreadsheet I posted for season 22.
Catcher
AL: Richard Clapp – NB – 23.2
NL: Yamid Beltran – CH1 – 16.5
First Base
AL: Nicholas Dreifort – LA – 7.3
NL: Frank Nakamura – NO – 5.8
Second Base
AL: Otis Justice – MIN – 6.5
NL: Al Javier – TAC – 2.9
Third Base
AL: Huston Kielty – TUC – 7.5
NL: Al Barrios – BUF – 5.6
Shortstop
AL: Ralph Simpson – TUC – 13.4
NL: Carlos Gonzalez - HON - 8.7
Left Field
AL: Harry Figureoa – FLA- 5.4
NL: Albert Locke – COL – 4.3
Center Field
AL: Denny Beard – RIC – 6.8
NL: Harry Manto – BUF – 6.1
Right Field
AL: Cesar Arrojo – MIN – 3.5
NL: Julio Sosa – OK – 3.5
Season 22 – Third Quarter WAR
I’m not going to bother writing up something short on what the third quarter pitching WAR numbers are, as I basically laid it all out in the little chat message. McCartin is the clear favorite in the NL, with Lawrie, Oliva and Bourchard fighting it out in the AL. If I had to bet, I’d bet on Bourchard was his BABIP is near .300, and the other two are well under .300. I’d expect them to fall back a little, but hey, who knows.
As far as batter WAR figures, in the AL it’s a close race between Giovanni Boyd, and Ewell Torrealba. Interesting enough, neither are playing on a team that looks like they’re going to make it to the playoffs.
To find that player, you’d have to go down to Dennis Park with Little Rock, who is definitely overplaying his ratings offensively.
In the NL, clearly Sid O'Keefe is the favorite for NL MVP in my opinion.
First Quarter Power Rankings
So this will be the inaugural “Power Rankings” based off of first quarter WAR for each team based on fielding, hitting, and pitching.
Power Rankings
1. Hartford – 12.91
2. Seattle – 11.39
3. Salem – 11.18
4. Richmond – 10.66
5. Austin – 9.97
6. Jacksonville – 9.25
7. Colorado – 8.87
8. Little Rock – 8.72
9. Minnesota – 8.15
10. Washington D.C. – 8.02
11. New Orleans – 7.88
12. Trenton – 7.21
13. Tacoma – 7.03
14. Florida – 6.47
15. Oklahoma City – 6.05
16. Louisville – 5.86
17. New York – 5.81
18. Honolulu – 5.74
19. Anaheim – 5.59
20. Chicago – 5.24
21. Atlanta – 4.97
22. Cleveland – 4.40
23. Detroit – 4.38
24. Toronto – 4.37
25. Tucson – 3.65
26. Scottsdale – 2.93
27. New Britain – 2.57
28. San Francisco – 2.35
29. Memphis – 1.37
30. Los Angeles – 1.05
31. Dover – 0.53
32. Buffalo – -0.12
To see a breakdown of the total based on the individual components, click here.
Season 22 – First Quarter
The first quarter of the season has come and gone, so I felt it would be an opportune time to take a quick peak and see how things are shaking out.
On the American League side, both Hartford and Salem have built pretty sizable leads in their divisions. Things are a little tighter in the National League three divisions are withing three games of the leader.
My 1st quarter MVP in the NL would have to be Jordy Mitchell – HON, who has combined solid play at third base with a fairly decent bat.
MY AL MVP might surprise a lot of people because I chose Marv Brinkley – LA. His stats don’t jump out at you, but he’s got five assists in CF already, combined with zero errors. His .376 OBP also helps him a lot. He barely beats out Malcolm Post – SAL, because he actually plays a valuable position, rather than DHing.
Least valuable players would have to be Pablo Benitez – COL, who really shouldn’t be playing short, and Lazy Jenkins – NB.
In terms of overall team performance, LA’s batters are surprisingly good for a team that has a .300 winning percentage. They are the best fielding team by my metrics, and the fifth best offense. If only they could find some pitching…
Best overall team performance between fielding and hitting has to be Hartford, besting LA by about 1.4 WAR total so far.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a look at pitching and the blog’s initial “power rankings” looking at fielding, batting, and pitching.
Note – Everything from here on out will be park adjusted using the values I developed and posted in the forums a week ago.
Season 20 – Offensive WAR
So for the first time ever I’ve been able to combine the fielding data I’ve come up with, and the offensive totals to derive total contribution for position players. These numbers are also adjusted for defensive position played. So a SS will get a little boost in runs, while 1B get a decrease.
For information on how WAR is computed, check out these posts over at Fangraphs.
Top Five AL Batters
1. Cleatus Frazier – RIC – LF – 7.2
2. Jayson Walker – HAR – CF – 6.8
3. Ewell Torrealba – FLA – 1B – 6.4
4. Alex Zhou – MIN – C – 6.4
5. Esmailyn Ibarra – NY1 – LF -6.2
Top Five NL Batters
1.Sid O'Keefe – TAC – 2B – 6.9
2.Mitch Garcia – TRE – CF – 6.7
3. Jonathan Todd – LOU – 1B – 6.4
4. Darrel Sweeney – NO – RF – 5.9
5. Maverick Buss – TOR – 3B – 5.6
The full spreadsheet can be seen here. Note: the number in the column underneath position represent the fielding stats I came up with, plus their positional adjustment.
As with all the other statistics I’ve posted, these are not park adjusted. Maybe sometime this season I’ll try and figure out that beast.
Season 20 L.C. Golden Gloves
Now that the league is completely filled, it makes grabbing historical data a lot easier, not that getting data from WIS is ever easy. I wish there was a button I could hit and it would all just automatically download, but that’s wishful thinking.
Anyway, since I last published fielding data, I’ve made some revisions to my formula. “+” and “-” play values are both weighted higher than they were before, along with outfield assists. I’ve also changed the way I convert the number of plays above/below average a lot lower than it was. No more 50 runs saved for some of the extremes. Previously I was considering an out to be worth .67 runs, while a play missed was .34 runs, based off the research into the value of a stolen base versus being thrown out. Now I’ve kind of just chosen an arbitrary value to get it onto a scale resembling UZR. I’ve got it setup right now so that the best fielders will save about 25/30 runs, and even that might be a little higher than I’m really comfortable with. I might have to come back and tweak a couple of positions to bring it more in line, but for now we’ll run with it.
I didn’t break the players into AL/NL like last time.
Here are Season 20’s L.C. Golden Glove Winners:
C – D'Angelo Alberro – DOV – 13
1B – Edgard Batista – TRE – 15.2
2B – Kazuo Lee – FLA – 17.4
3B – Gio Solano – DET – 18.7
SS – Huston Kielty – TUC – 29.4
LF – Craig Hardy – SCO – 18.9
CF – Alex Buhner – DOV – 28.9
RF – Ronnie Stratton – CLE – 11.8
Cities are those in Season 22. I didn’t want to bother going back and finding what city the team was in season 20, plus it might help the new people find players currently on their team.
Fielding spreadsheet
I finally got around to creating a google drive spreadsheet for the fielding statistics that I had published earlier.
It can be found here.
I only did it for players in the top 25 for innings plaid at each position, in each league. I figured anyone less than 200-300 innings played wouldn’t have much of an impact, and when you are talking about a sample size that small it’s hardly meaningful.
So take a browse, let me know what you think. If you think you have any improvements, share them. This isn’t supposed to be like the gospel delivered by me on high. It’s just a crude attempt at quantifying something that tends to be subjective.
Defensive Statistics
As anyone who saw the numerous posts from yesterday on the world chat know, I’ve been trying to take the limited number of stats that What If gives us for fielding, and translate them into runs prevented versus an average fielder at a position. After coming up with stats for the AL and posting them, I felt pretty happy with the results. So I went ahead and calculated the NL, and I was pretty happy again, until I saw Harry Manto sitting there with 52 runs saved over the season. That’s a rather large number for a fielder to prevent over the course of a season. I thought maybe my system was over accounting for plus/minus plays.
So I went ahead and tried to calculate Fielding Runs (the first time I had ever done so) for the entire league, and I was getting some really odd results. Like Ed Stockton giving up four runs this season, when my stat had him leading the AL with 26 runs saved, while Chick Conroy saved about 10 runs. After looking at some other results, I decided to scrap the FR stats, and am going to stick with my system with some minor tweaks in the future. I felt a lot better after looking at the single season record for plus plays in center, and saw that Manto’s 35 were good for second best.
While I posted both the AL/NL winners of the “L.C. Golden Gloves,” I thought I would re-post them here so they can be viewed after rollover.
Catcher
AL: D'Angelo Alberro - 8
NL: Endy Allen - 18
1st Base
AL: Ewell Torrealba - 10
NL: Edgard Batista - 11
2nd Base
AL: Edgard Batista - 20
NL: Sammy Bennett - 33
3rd Base
AL: Otto Stanley - 26
NL: Pablo Mateo - 37
Shortsop
AL: Ed Stockton - 26
NL: Ruben Suarez - 26
Left Field
AL: Wilfredo Rijo - 25
NL: Ruben Suarez - 23
Center Field
AL: Cody Rodney - 30
NL: Harry Manto - 52
Right Field
AL: Alex Buhner - 25
NL: Julio Sosa - 18
So there you have it, the inaugural “L.C. Golden Gloves.” As for Manto, the guy was a beast in center this year.
Vin Scully 
