Oh, I agree. Grady needs to do more to be in that conversation. I just think the conversation has to be about more than BA and OPS.

Oooo, shiny.

Well … I see where you’re coming from on this … but you’re not actually right. Looking at WARP3 — which seems to be the best tool for this particular job — Grady has produced 35.3 marginal wins over his four full seasons. Very few players on the 95 Indians, or any club, ever do that in any four seaons, let alone their first four.

Belle 93-96 — 35.2 (prorated 40.4)
Baerga 92-95 — 27.9 (prorated 28.6)
Lofton 92-95 — 30.7 (prorated 31.3)
Presidente 92-95 — 24.1 (prorated 27.4)
Hershiser 86-89 — 31.0
Murray 81-84 — 30.9
Manny 99-02 — 29.8
Omar 96-99 — 21.2
Thome 95-98 — 27.3 (prorated 28.3)

(For players whose four-year peak included the strike-shortened 94 and 95 seasons, I prorated by adding in 25% of their combined 94-95 WARP3 total. If it only included 95, I added in one-eighth of the WARP3 total.)

And we are looking at each player’s peak, and many of them declined sharply after 1995, and a couple of them peaked while not with the Indians. Few of them had an extended peak, which Grady may or may not have, but each of them benefits from our hindsight in choosing their best seasons.

For Grady, this may or may not be his best four seasons. He is better than Lofton was at his peak, and had he been on the 1995 club, he’d have been the second or third best player on it.

Adam let’s not forget that baseball is a child’s game – it ain’t life and death. Emotions are certainly a part of how I view sports and reading the posts here it’s also clear that emotions drive every poster on this site. Stupid? I dunno, it all depends on how you view it. When I played the game if I struck out I saw it as the ultimate calamity. “At least you didn’t hit into a double-play” was no consolation. So no, I don’t view it as "stupid". BTW I rarely, if ever, use the word "stupid" with regards to ideas. I find it – well – stupid.

Now when baseball is played by grown-ups and is supposed to be devoid of emotion – and we all know this never happens except in Bill James’s einsteinian head – strike outs are considered just another lost at bat. So yeah, using Ks as a primary metric for evaluating a player is not the best method. But I can see it as one of many metrics one could include to measure a player’s skill level.

I thought all you new-media types wrote from your Mom’s basements, illuminated only by the pale glow of LCD panels full of statistical data, and screeched like a banshee when exposed to sunlight.

I should at this point join in and say that I was the king of the little league strikeout. In fact, I went two full seasons without a hit. The bat never came off my shoulder, so with pitching the way it is at that age, I had lots of walks and runs. But anyway. Every AB was either a BB or a backwards K.

Yeah! My little league team won 4 games in three years and once got beat 45-0.

We owned humiliation.

I’m having serious flashbacks to the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Rec League team for which I so badly sucked. But the fact that I couldn’t see the ball doesn’t blind me to actual statistical tools.

Catcher dropping the ball on a third strike is the only exception, right? A 12-pitch K is valuable. My point is that a routine fly to right is more likely to be dropped or get lost in the sun than a strikeout pitch is likely to skip past a catcher. There is a greater possibility of something positive occurring for the offense.

It is a fool’s errand, but I am intrigued with the now nearly universal agreement that says strikeouts aren’t bad forms of making outs—they’re neutral events for hitters. I understand that in the old days strikeouts were viewed more harshly than they should have been, even though it was because of the psychological onus you mentioned. That was an overreaction, it turns out. But now, to criticize strikeouts is to be viewed as a benighted old-timer or idiot.

If strikeouts were simply another form of out, why would K rates be so important for judging pitchers?

Fact: Paul is the only person ever to be hired by both Swerbinsky and me.

You ask to define a subjective, don’t define it, and, then, by your own lack of definition, make a judgment. Solid stuff there.

It’s very hard to know what he “will be” when he’s only a few years in to his major league career. Grady certainly could go down as the best player in franchise history Will he — only time will tell.

Oh, and here’s another thing — plenty of non-Indians fans have said that Grady is one of the 5 best players in baseball. Are those people “blinded by fandom”?

Let’s not do this. We’re all Indians fans here.

And ignore the additional information Jay provided. Brilliant!

Just thought I’d lend an assist, that’s all.

Then is it also possible he might be 4th best? Or 5th best? Someone else is going the other way, I think.

Listen, as I’ve said all along, he’s about in the 5-8 range. It’s hard to be more precise than that. He’s not in the upper echelon (Pujols and A-Rod pre-injury) but he’s just a notch below that. I think that’s fair value, and many non-Indians fans agree with that assessment.

It’s not really that it’s that loose, it’s more that those players aren’t that far apart regardless.

Bill James acknowledged this in explaining why there were three Win Shares for every Win. He said, if we did 10 Win Shares per win, that would imply a level of precision that wasn’t really there, and for two players who were 3-4 shares apart, it would create the appearance a difference less slight than it really is.

Here’s the 2008 Win Shares leaderboard:

1. Berkman – 38
2. Pujols – 35
3. Beltran – 33
4. H-Ram – 32
5. Mauer – 31
6. Utley – 30
7. Wright – 29
8. Reyes – 29
9. Youkilis – 29
10. Sizemore – 28
11. Hamilton – 27
12. McLouth – 27
13. Lincecum – 27

First, to address Grady’s #10 ranking, keep in mind that this is only one way to look at it. Some of these guys were playing over their heads in 2008 and were likely to regress, and Grady wasn’t and wasn’t. Few of these guys were 27 and are likely to sustain or improve this elite level, and Grady was and is. So he’s #10 just looking 2008, but he’s higher than that looking at multiple seasons both forward and backward, as the less consistently excellent drop out of the spots ahead of him.

My main point, though, is that Bill James, who invented the method, would tell you that there’s very little difference between the #6 player at 30 and the #13 player at 27, and what little difference there is, our tools are not precise enough to measure with any real reliability.

And Grady may be overrated by statheads. Most informal fans know who Sizemore is. I would imagine he’s the most identifiable Indian. People think he’s a young superstar.

Is second base the most uninspiring position ever?

That’s funny; on BBTN they were talking about all the great second baseman we have playing right now.

Of course, on BBTN today, Jon Kruk also said something about how the Blue Jays are scoring runs because they stopped trying to work pitch counts and just hit the first good pitch they saw. He said their hitting coach came up with this brilliant plan — you don’t have to run up a pitcher’s pitch count to get him out of the game, you just have to score 6 or 7 runs off him every night because that will get him out of the game! I don’t know why other teams hadn’t thought of that strategy sooner. Good thing we have Jon Kruk giving us such fabulous insight in to the game of baseball.

There are some dizzingly short peaks on that list.

Chuck did not make any sort of argument backed up by anything remotely resembling facts. You have. Key difference.

If you are referring to me, I never said Grady was the best player in baseball, or even necessarily always in the top 5. I said his name was mentioned when people talk about the best 5 playes in baseball, along with about 10 others. Trying pick out 5 from that list would be very difficult. As I’ve said, these rankings are imprecise and if you survey different people you’d get different results. His name has always been mentioned by people like Neyer and other writers whom I respect when they mention the best players in the game, so he’s up there near the top. Not in the top 3, but just a notch below that. I’ve repeated this several times and am tired of having my words rearranged and misinterpreted. He’s in the 5-10 range; trying to get it more specific than that is a fool’s game.

I’ve also said that he could end up in the HoF and he could end up being an all-time great Indian; I never said he was going to. There is obviously a lot more of his career ahead of him which will determine that. But to say right now that he can’t do either of those things is ridiculous. Again, not saying he will. but that his career could go down that path if he keeps improving and stays at a high level for the next decade. Check out his BB-Ref page; his most similar batters are Duke Snider and Barry Bonds. That’s high company, and if he stays in that range for the next 10 years he’s a HoF and an all-time great. Again, there is no guarentee that he will, but to assume that he won’t is premature.