vorosmccracken.com

Jesus, cool stuff like this (Spatial Aggregate Fielding Evaluation) makes me wish I did better in school. The recent spate of detailed play by play information has changed the way a lot of analysis is done. Used to be some mope like me would look at what Enos Slaughter did in 1939 and draw all sorts of conclusions about baseball today. Or, as the case may be, he’d go down to NCAA headquarters and photocopy a bunch of basic college stats handwritten in 1993 (lotsa fun). I suppose there’s still some of that, but all these smart folks are coming up with cool new ways to crunch the cool new data. Maybe if I had cool stuff like this, the Red Sox would have paid me in something other than Dave & Busters tokens.

There’s always a little bit of worry with stuff like this that you’ll zoom in too close and maybe miss some of the forest from the trees (I don’t actually know what that phrase means but I’ll use it anyway). What I mean is that if you get very, very precise with things you often can begin to value the measurement over the ability it’s trying to measure. Abilities tend to be the sorts of things you can pick up with work gloves rather than things you use tweezers to grab.

However in this instance these guys seem to be doing a good job of keeping their eyes on the prize, though I’ve only skimmed it. The data they’re presenting is over several years which should weed out some of the noise.

I suppose all the general questions about ability versus “things that happened to go on while the player was out there” still apply and still need to be looked at in detail. But I’ll leave that to the experts. I’m having trouble concentrating due to all the carbon-monoxide fumes from my garage.

(H/T) BTF

UPDATE: jeTeR is tEh rOOlZ!!