Game Thread: September 4, 2010
by Ryan on Sep 4, 2010 9:45 PM EDT
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PrintCleveland Indians at Seattle Mariners, Sep 4, 2010 10:15 PM EDT
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I gotta bet with Logodaedalus (sp?) and fwembt that has me rooting for the WS and agains the Red Sox. So now I’m a little more engaged in the MLB season.
Resident LGT results-oriented boob.
Brings back memories, don’t it? BTW, I’ve picked out potential avatars for Logo and fwembt. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Resident LGT results-oriented boob.
Donald!!!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:05 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
Donald and Cabrera!!! Woo! Hoo!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:17 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
Talbot baby! Out looking!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:27 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
That’s my Mitch!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:32 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
Great Clips! Rock on!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:42 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
Mitch-y Baby!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..." C. Darwin
by Spidey on Sep 4, 2010 11:50 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
Jeff brought this up to me. Has anyone else noticed the coincidence about giving away free blankets when we’re facing the Indians? Man, this team is insensitive.
—LL
tx for a couple solid months, buddy
Fortuitous? We are just GIVING AWAY that #3 overall pick!
by Jay on Sep 5, 2010 1:05 AM EDT up reply actions
I am wholly ignorant of, among many things, amateur baseball. Are there only three great choices coming up next year? fwembt showed that, as far as HOF players go, even the #1 pick doesn’t give you an advantage; I’ll bet that extrapolates into: “There’s no appreciable difference in talent acquired in any of the top five, or ten, first round slots.” Plus, you get to spend a few million dollars less on your #4 pick. Cheap Dolan is probably deliberately trying to win.
Yeah, what a jerk!
I’m not looking for HOF players. There is far more difference among the top handful of picks than across any other stretch of players in the draft. This year, there was a definite difference between #4 and #5, at least in terms of consensus value at the time, and we picked at #5.
by Jay on Sep 5, 2010 9:45 AM EDT up reply actions
Agreed. A Hall-of-Famer, while that’s always nice of course, is not what we need in order to consider a draft pick successful. There are also other types of success, and even if we do draft a hall of famer, he’s likely only playing 5 or 6 seasons out of his 20 hall of fame seasons on the Indians. So a simple “all star” would suffice, no?
In the new Geico commercial, Marte sings "Let me be myself" on Wedge's front lawn (with the cavemen).
by V-Mart Shopper on Sep 5, 2010 12:14 PM EDT up reply actions
Total collective WAR out of the top 50 draft picks, since 2000:
1. 51.5 2. 42.4 3. 5.7 4. 21.1 5. 43.3 6.28.3 7. 44.1 8. 4.4 9. 19.2 10. 18
11. 8.4 12. 20.6 13. 28.5 14. -1.7 15. 63.6 16. 11.7 17. 15.7 18. -2.5 19. 9.2 20. 15
21. 0.6 22. 11.1 23. 11.8 24. 21.3 25. 29.9 26. 4.4 27. 4.9 28. 7.1 29. 19.8 30. 7.3
31. 4.4 32. 2.6 33. -0.8 34. -2.2 35. 1.6 36. 3.4 37. 3.4 38. 35.1 39. -0.1 40. 7.8
41. 4.0 42. 0.9 43. -4.6 44. 7.5 45. 2.6 46. 6.3 47. -1.9 48. 2.2 49. 3.5 50. 4.9
Not responsible for lost articles or errors in addition.
by YoDaddyWags on Sep 5, 2010 2:35 PM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
Not enough data. Agreed that #3 overall ain’t lookin’ too hot here.
by Jay on Sep 5, 2010 4:12 PM EDT up reply actions
Just our luck, huh.
In the new Geico commercial, Marte sings "Let me be myself" on Wedge's front lawn (with the cavemen).
by V-Mart Shopper on Sep 5, 2010 6:12 PM EDT up reply actions
But realistically that’s, what, six, maybe seven players per slot who’ve actually been around long enough to make it to the majors, and even for most of those, quite few ML appearances.
Not saying I don’t appreciate all this effort, but to say anything about the value of draft picks you’re probably going to need several decades worth of this kind of data.
Right. And the nature of the draft is a moving target, so you won’t get several decades.
by Jay on Sep 5, 2010 5:01 PM EDT up reply actions
Okay, you tedious nitpickers. Here’s the top 25 total WAR, for the entire history of the draft, among the top 50 picks, with the average WAR per MLB player:
Pick/TotalWAR/aWAR
1 732.9 17.9
4 474.5 13.6
2 466 11.9
6 462.3 14.0
3 421.3 12.0
10 368.3 9.4
30 321.7 12.4
22 307.1 10.6
20 286 11.9
19 280.6 9.1
5 249 9.2
13 243 10.1
39 230.8 13.6
16 220.6 7.1
12 213.1 7.9
29 206.6 9.4
15 205.2 10.8
9 199 7.7
14 198.8 6.2
7 193 5.8
8 192 6.6
36 190.2 7.6
17 189.5 6.5
50 161.7 8.5
49 160.4 9.4
by YoDaddyWags on Sep 5, 2010 7:18 PM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
Why not the fourth spot?
In the new Geico commercial, Marte sings "Let me be myself" on Wedge's front lawn (with the cavemen).
by V-Mart Shopper on Sep 6, 2010 3:17 PM EDT up reply actions
Not to pick on you, but computing an average per MLB player is going to distort things since the percentage at each round that make it to the majors is varying, too, and in a way that’s unlikely to be independent of how well they do if they get there. Ideally, you’d like to have some way of assigning scores to the ones that don’t make it at all, also (possibly some constant negative value).
I would expect the “long run” curve to look more or less like a power law distribution.
Just throw out the average and look at Total WAR. Picks one to four are pretty solid, a lot of misfires apparently from five to ten. Are the shrewd picks in the high 20s and low 30s?
Right, of course. Although that’s counting 0 for guys that never make it, right? Depending on how many guys make it to the majors with negative WAR, you might rather assign a negative score. But that is picking nits.
Here’s a graph of Total WAR by pick with the best fitting power law curve. For those who aren’t familiar with the power law, if you transformed both axes with a logarithm, the fit would be a straight line. The way I fit this, I took the first round as essentially fixed, and looked at the “decay” from there. It looks like it fits pretty well, though you might argue that the dropoff is even steeper than this over the first ten rounds or so, and then pretty much unchanging after that.
So, in other words, the higher the pick, the more talented the potential player being picked, and the better off we are?
In the new Geico commercial, Marte sings "Let me be myself" on Wedge's front lawn (with the cavemen).
by V-Mart Shopper on Sep 6, 2010 3:16 PM EDT up reply actions
Shocking, I know. I’m basically saying there’s little reason to think that there are certain “special” spots to shoot for, and indeed the drop-off is much steeper in the first few picks than after that. This simple analysis doesn’t take cost-efficiency into account, of course, which would be a reasonable next step. My hunch is that the bonuses players get have a less steep drop-off (they might drop off exponentially, for example), which would suggest that the value of picking early, in terms of expected return per dollar shelled out, is even greater.
No. 1 picks hit MLB 89%. #2 and #10, 84%. Ave. of top 10: 73%. Ave of next 10: 59%. Ave of #21-30: 55%. Ave of #31-40: 43%. Ave of #41-50: 39%.
Just as a bit of randomness, here’s some selected picks, followed by % to play MLB, total WAR, and Ave WAR per MLB:
- 26% 54.4 4.5
- 28% 6.9 0.5
- 15% 54.4 4.5
- 3% 55.7 18.6
- 10% 29.2 5.8
- 8% 4.8 0.6
- 13% 11.4 1.9
- 6% 71.7 12.0
- 15% 25.5 3.6
- 2% 6.3 3.2
- 8% -1.1 -0.3
- 1% -0.6 -0.6
- 6% 17.9 6.0
- 2% 4.4 2.2
Sorry, I think I got waylaid by some formatting stuff. The picks aren’t 1 through 14, but rather the 100th pick in each draft, then the 150th, the 200th, the 250th, and so on through the 750th player chosen in each MLB draft.
I know you’ll hate this, but you really need to restrict the study to WAR earned in the first seven years in the majors.
The WAR that get earned after that point really are not relevant, and more important they really skew the results.
The point of this was to see how randomly—or not—talent is distributed, and if we should care whether the Indians finish with the 3rd worst- or 5th worst- or 7th worst-record this year. My suspicion going in was that after the #1 pick, it doesn’t really matter (though in any given year, the actual talent might be clearly 2 deep. or 3 deep, in which case it might matter a great deal).
I’m still not sure if it matters, after #1, but there are clearly steep drop-offs after 5 or 6 picks, and the talent erosion proceeds apace, as per logo and Sky Andrecheck. The WAR data from this past decade, SSS that it is, was isolated initially on the premise that draft strategies from this era might be different from earlier times because of the greater influence of the anti-mauichucks in FOs.
Does the Tribe utilize the 7-years-of-WAR studies in their own drafting strategy? I think those studies indicate one should be drafting college hitters, not HS pitchers, but I’m not sure any of the small-market teams are following this lead.
Bonus filled-with-more-holes-than-a-bag-o-donuts WAR data! Here’s how ALC teams stack up since 2000, in # of MLB players and total WAR:
MIN: 36/81.4
CLE: 28/59.8
DET: 43/44.4
KC: 29/44.4
CHI: 39/2.2
Your control group: the Jackasses: 36/5.1.
FWIW. Though, even if the last decade means you’ve got 5 or 7 years worth of guys getting to the majors, it still represents something like 10% of the entire history of the MLB draft, which is a lot for a study; maybe it isn’t SSS after all. Not that anythiing I do in this regard is anything more than idle morning whimsies.
Does the Tribe utilize the 7-years-of-WAR studies in their own drafting strategy?
My guess is that they restrict it even more than that. There’s a good case to be made that beyond the first three years in the majors, the results are fairly randomized and irrelevant from a drafting perspective.
by Jay on Sep 7, 2010 5:38 PM EDT up reply actions
Because what you’re trying to divine here is whether a player is good enough to make it to the majors and stick. That is the basic problem of the draft. At the point when you’re drafting a player, just how much of an impact that player eventually makes is a secondary concern.
Think about LaPorta. The issue with him, when you’re drafting him, is really whether he’s got flaws that will keep him from eventually being a mainstay in a major league lineup. Whether he’s an All-Star or not, that’s really just a bonus, and frankly, it’s unknowable even by the draft’s low standards of knowability.
The other thing is the clumsiness of totaling up WAR. You get three hits out of ten, that’s what you want to know. But if another slot (or slot or whatever) gets Mike Schmidt and nobody else, then that slot is going to come out “ahead” according to WAR, even if you stick to seven years. Fact is, though, as an overall drafting strategy, you’d rather have three hits out of ten than one Mike Schmidt.
On thinking about this some more, what we need here is a standard of what a “Quality Season” is … meaning, a season where a player was a a full-time player for most of the season at a solid level of performance. For position players, you could do something like PA/100 + WAR ≥ 5, then something else for starting pitchers, maybe a very high standard that would count high-performance relievers.
So with that metric, one question would be, how many players were produced that had even one Quality Season? How many produced three? And how many total Quality Seasons were produced in the first seven years?
This would re-focus the study on the real question we’re trying to get at here.
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