Comments on: Position Adjustments

By: Margery

Margery — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 06:20:01 +0000

There is a critical shortage of ionfrmatvie articles like this.

By: d

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:50:59 +0000

I should read better… I saw runs and then 3 wins, my mind substituted… thanks for clarifying

By: Dave Cameron

Dave Cameron — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:43:14 +0000

We start by figuring out where DH’s come from. In pretty much every case, a full time DH is a miserable defensive LF or 1B. The guys who end up as designated hitters are guys who couldn’t hack it in the field. Therefore, we know that the DH population has to be a subset of bad defensive first baseman, and therefore, will be worse defensively as a group than first baseman. Therefore, they have to be worse than -12.5.

So, if we look at the performance of DH’s when they play 1B, they’re usually something like 10 runs worse than average as a group. That would make the positional adjustment -22.5. However, we bump it back up to -17.5 to account for the fact that it’s harder to hit while DH’ing than it is while playing the field – the evidence for this is in The Book by Tango/Lichtman/Dolphin.

By: Lark11

Lark11 — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:20:17 +0000

Dave,

How do you arrive at the -17.5 runs for the DH? I’m a little unclear on how you establish the positional adjustment for a player that doesn’t play defense.

Thanks!!

By: philosofool

philosofool — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:50:01 +0000

Dave,

Shouldn’t SS defense be more valuable that 1B defense in part because of the number of balls that the player is eligible to field?

I would think that this is the primary reason that CF is considered a defensive “premium” position while the others are not. (Since a CF will see twice as many play opportunities each 1% difference in the rate at which he makes plays counts twice as much in a sense.)

How does the rate at which balls enter the region where a field could get them affect defesive adjustments and the value of defesive abilities?

By: Sky

Sky — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:47:11 +0000

Assuming league-average talent at a position (well, maybe right in-between the average of the two positions being considered) and a league-normal skillset, there shouldn’t be much benefit or cost to moving a player, beyond the learning curve.

But as players get much better than positional-average, moving them to a tougher position allows them to show off more of their skills, because they receive more opportunities. And moving crappy fielders to “easier” positions is a good move, because their gap below average will shrink. It’s an absolute change versus percentage change thing. The further you are away from zero, the more a percentage change will matter.

By: lookatthosetwins

lookatthosetwins — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:25:14 +0000

One thing I’d like to know is, how much value does Crawford gain by being in center field? I would guess not as much as most people think. The position adjustment and the increased competition should cancel out so the only thing adding value is the amount of balls he gets. So I guess I’m wondering what the increase would be in balls in his zone, and how much value does that actually increase? How much value does Manny lose if he gets moved to center?

By: Dave Cameron

Dave Cameron — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:19:20 +0000

Yea, the sum to zero question is an interesting one. I’ll probably do a whole post on it in the next few days.

By: Dave Cameron

Dave Cameron — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:09:41 +0000

Right, I’d phrase it in the latter way – teams hide players at positions where they’ll have the least amount of opportunities to display their awfulness. They play LF instead of CF because LFs get fewer chances to screw up.

I wouldn’t say CF is harder to play than LF, only that the extra opportunities magnify defensive abilities, both good and bad. And for lousy defenders, magnification of that lousiness is not what teams are looking for.

By: Eric Walkingshaw

Eric Walkingshaw — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:07:51 +0000

One problem with normalizing AL and NL position adjustments differently is that it would become more difficult to compare players across leagues, so that doesn’t seem like a good solution.

Relatedly, if position adjustments were renormalized to prevent undervaluing, we have to keep in mind that there are fewer DHs than players at other positions. So to prevent overvaluing, we wouldn’t want the position adjustments to sum directly to zero, instead, the weighted (by the number of positional slots) position adjustments would sum to zero.

All of this assumes that this is even relevant / a problem.