OPS is better. OBP is better than BA but OPS is better than both. The correlation between team Runs Scored and BA is 0.82. For OBP it is 0.88 and 0.95 for OPS (The Sabermetric Revolution by Baumer and Zimbalist).

On another point, which has already been made, there is no doubt that OPS, WRC+ and WAR are vastly better stats than the old standards of BA, HR, RBI etc. The new stats are more complicated to explain easily and thus rejected by some but they are just plain better because they are directly based on run scoring value and winning.

I understand Trout is a phenomenal player. But when I compare players side by side, and I see such an enormous difference in something like oWAR, I don't get it.

Compare Mike Trout and Ryan Braun...just their offense, this season.

oWAR (offensive WAR)

Mike Trout 7.8
Ryan Braun 3.5

Ok, Braun is a right fielder. Trout's a center fielder. Obviously, Trout is worth more putting up the numbers he is as a center fielder, a premium position. But is he worth more than double Braun's season with the bat? 4.3 more wins?

Here are their numbers:

Trout .314 AVG, 541 PAs, 27 2B, 3 3B, 24 HR, 21 SB, 4 CS (84%), 99 BB, 109 K, slash line of .431/.551/.981. 244 TB, 170 OPS +
Braun .318 AVG, 449 PAs, 21 2B, 2 3B, 24 HR, 14 SB, 3 CS (82%), 38 BB, 74 K, slash line of .379/.557/.935. 226 TB, 145 OPS +

Their SLG is comparable; Braun is ahead by 6 points. The main difference is Trout walks more, so his OBP is 52 points higher. But he also strikes out more (25% vs 18%).

Trout should have a higher oWAR, absolutely. But show me where he's worth double what Ryan Braun is at the plate? That makes absolutely no sense to me. Braun came into the night 4th in the National League in batting, seventh in SLG, and 5th in OPS.

Trout has a career .960 OPS right now. At the same point in his career, Braun had a .943 OPS.

Compare Trout's 2013 season, where he had a 10.0 oWAR, to Ryan Braun's 2011 MVP season:

Trout: .323 AVG, 39 2B, 9 3B, 27 HR, 33 SB, 7 CS (82.5%), 110 BB, 136 K, slash line of .432/.557/.988. 328 TB, 179 OPS +.
Braun: .332 AVG, 38 2B, 6 3B, 33 HR, 33 SB, 6 CS (84.6%), 58 BB, 93 K, slash line of .397/.597/.994. 336 TB, 166 OPS +.

Braun's oWAR in 2011? 7.4. Again, Trout has a higher OBP (35 points), but Braun's SLG is 40 points higher, and his OPS is 6 points higher. They have the same number of stolen bases (Braun with a slightly better percentage). Since this doesn't account for defense, show me where Mike Trout, as an offensive player, was a better offensive performer....by 35%?? Again, he's providing offense as a center fielder, where Braun is a left fielder in 2011. But Trout's contribution as a center fielder is 33% more valuable? Celoknob referenced that OPS is more predictive of wins added than other metrics like OBP alone. Braun had a higher OPS in his MVP season than Trout did in 2013, yet, after positional adjustments, Trout's a 35% more valuable offensive performer? I do think there should be bonuses given to center fielders, catchers, second basemen and shortstops. But the idea that, left fielders, right fielders, first basemen and third basemen should then also be penalized for the positions they play seems incongruous to me. You've already rewarded a guy playing a premium position for the offense they provide. Why, then, penalize a player for filling one of the other positions?

all numbers from Fangraphs- (btw, most of Braun's time has been in LF this year)

2016 Mike Trout has a slash line of .432/.548/ .980 a wOBA of .413 and a wRC+ of 167 (best in MLB) his base running is an elite 8.0 and his defense a -0.4 (but will still add value due to positional adjustment as he plays CF)


2016 Braun has a slash of .377/.551/.928, a wOBA of .388 and a wRC+ of 139, his base running is a pedestrian 0.8 and his defense -7.3 at a position that does not have value added.

OPS is valuable, but it's not as good of a gauge as wRC+ or wOBA as it values OBP and SLG equally (and OBP is nearly twice as valuable as slugging is).

Remember, players all go through the same formula, the only change is based on defense, just by playing CF Trout gets a boost, by playing it well enough not to lose his positional adjustment the boost is larger. Being an elite baserunner adds value too. When you combine this with 28 pts of wRC+ you end up with one player being worth 7.1 fWAR and the other 3.0 fWAR.


to clarify, much of the difference comes from defense. Of 12 qualified LF'ers Braun is 8th in defense (of the 20 with at least 500 inn at LF this seasons, he is 13th) Of the 29 CF players Trout is 18th in defense (which makes them both in that avgish range at their position) But the difference is CF get's a defensive weighting boost because it is much harder to play. Trout gains 1 win just from that even with his -0.4 DEF rating.

If you removed defense and baserunning, it would pretty much be Trout with around 5.5 WAR and Braun with around 3.8ish- 4 WAR (which now appears much more reasonable considering Trout's fairly large OBP edge)

Centerfield is harder???

I guess watching so many games in Fenway has skewed my perception of fields being harder or easier. Center there is pretty easy, there's only a couple odd spots and not many balls get hit there, plus it's pretty small. Right isn't horrible for odd corners, but when it goes bad...... I've seen a couple outfielders chase what should be singles around the curve until it's a triple. Left must be hellish for a fielder as it's somewhat short, and there's a load of weird places for the ball to hit even after some fixing of the wall.

What makes center harder in a normal park? The size?

Steve B

Too much Saber metrics. Trout is a fine player, but until the Angels get arms they are not going to win like they should.

Point well made Bill. Baseball's a team sport, and each position has value.

Jason said his numbers showing Trout second were offensive only. In any event call me stubborn but I just cannot believe Trout legitimately ranks anywhere near second by any measure.

There are no offensive numbers that show Trout 2nd all time. IDK where he got that from, but right now his wOBA is top10 wRC+ is top 10...etc WAR he's not close because of the length of his career. BUT, when you consider he is in his prime right now and yet to decline, it really isn't right to even put him in the discussion of "all time" players need to start declining before we can really get a glimpse of A- what their peak was and B- how long their career lasts. Some guys have a steep decline, others a long shallow one.

edit to add: Trout has had the 2nd best start to his career all time, but that doesn't mean he will end that way, using WAR ratio to games played or PA's says 2nd, but.... the guy is like 25, let's wait until he's 35 before making these claims as truths

yes, the range required to cover in CF is generally between 20 and 30% greater than either corner spot thus it requires a much greater range and ability to play at even a league avg level.

Here's a link to fangraphs and how they weigh positional adjustments:

http://www.fangraphs.com/library/mis...al-adjustment/



tldr:
C+12.5 runs
1b -12.5 runs
2b +2.5 runs
SS +7.5 runs
3b +2.5 runs
LF -7.5 runs
CF +2.5 runs
RF -7.5 runs
DH -17.5 runs

Well, as of right now it's true, but it's obviously a little skewed since Trout only has 3,427 PAs compared to Babe Ruth's 10,623.

Like I said before, WAR is a counting stat just like Home Runs or RBI. So using WAR to compare which players are "better" can only be used when the length of time is similar. Mike Trout's average plate appearance brought as much value as every TWO plate appearances by Carl Yastrzemski (if you believe in WAR). This isn't even including external adjustments for time period.

Trout is great, but Babe Ruth player at an even more dominant level on average through his entire career. Pretty amazing.

absolutely. Though, we must put a little * on WAR before the advent of UZR and DRS, range factor and total zone stats just aren't very good and thus it's pretty well agreed that the defensive value of players before the 90's is harder to determine (and the more you go back, the harder it gets).

But WAR, isn't meant to be perfect, it's there to be a handy number of comparison. Think of it as the difference between looking something up on google maps and buying a geographical survey map. The latter is the peripheral stats that give you the more accurate picture (but requires deeper digging and effort) and the former is the convenience of WAR.

Agree with the bolded part completely. I see that Roberto Clemente's defense in right was worth only 12.1 wins over 17 seasons, and I laugh myself silly. Then I look at somebody like Andruw Jones, who was a fine center fielder, no doubt. But you'll never convince me that, for his career, his defensive contribution was twice as good as Clemente's. Jones had 24.1 dWAR to Clemente's 12.1. The argument has always been "Clemente made 140 errors in 17 seasons". How many of those errors came on balls that no other right fielder in baseball could have even gotten to? If you get a glove on the ball, but don't catch it, the official scorer is going to give the fielder an error. The point being that any other fielder in right is going to let the ball drop in for a double. Clemente's range in right was unrivaled, and his gun might be the best the game has ever seen. Of course, he's going to have more errors, because he's going to also attempt to throw out more runners than the average outfielder. When you're throwing the ball from the warning track in right field all the way to third base, some balls are going to skip away because the third baseman can't handle it, or it hits the runner.

Please. I've watched a ton of footage from Clemente's defense over the years. The man was a god in the outfield, and some stupid metric trying to convince us that his defense didn't even net 1 win in 162 games a season is utter bullcrap.

An OF's arm has been historically overrated in defensive value. If Clemente had played CF then he may have rivaled Jones in dWAR. Errors cost bases and I doubt Clemente's OF assists overcome the bases lost to errors.

playing Cf gives you more value because it's a more difficult position. Andruw is not only the best fielding CF'er of all time, but it's not even close and Clemente had a great arm, but his range wasn't as good as old timey memory may make us believe. Confirmation bias skews things (which is why we have stats) (and man alive quit using baseball reference, it's old, antiquated and behind the times)

Clemente was a great OF'er, but by playing RF he is always going to be worth less than an equally great fielder who plays CF because of the range required.

oh, and Fangraphs has him worth 1+ win a year for his fielding :-)


edited to add: errors are not included in metrics, they are based on plays made relative to avg, in zone and out of zone as well as arm, distance covered...etc and yelling at math because it disagrees with your opinion is not really very scientific, it's the reason we needed metrics, confirmation bias skews things far too much for things like fielding% or errors made to have much value

Don't listen to Nick about B-R, it's a very useful site. Philosophically divergent from Fangraphs on a few issues, but that's all. bWAR (the one on baseball-reference) and fWAR (the one on fangraphs) are useful for different things and in different ways (pretty much as with any two stats).

We know that fielding is the roughest part of the WAR formulae (and the hardest thing to measure in any case). Nick is right that it gets less accurate the further back in time that you go. The folks who put the various WARs together decided to use the best defensive measurements available for each season. Since our measurements improve over time, this means that the numbers that go into the WAR formula for a player in 2016 aren't quite the same as those that go in for someone who played in 1966. They could have used the same measurements all the way through, but at the cost of making evaluations of modern players less accurate.

This means that we know that there are some errors in our evaluations of older players, we just don't know who is being affected by the error, nor precisely how significant the error is. People in 1966 just weren't recording enough data for us to be able to tell these things. Clemente may have been better than dWAR gives him credit for, but there's no way to tell, and there's REALLY no way to tell how much better.

I'm just giving him guff about BR dating back to that Jim Kaat argument. :p

It is useful, I just don't think much of their version of WAR.

you bring up a good point about older (and even present day) defensive numbers, they could equally overestimate as underestimate defensive value, people tend to lean towards their perception of a player, but that's usually not a good idea.

overrated???
 

"tonight's attendance is..."

yeah, I KNOW it's PAID attendance, but when the announcers are trumpeting a "full-house" or "standing room only" crowd and it's obvious there's sh!tloads of empty seats, my reply is always "WTF???"

JMO, of course - whether or not the above is actually considered a 'stat' or not, I gotta laugh..

DS

I don't entirely agree.

An outfielders throwing ability - at least for the ones with really good arms - leads into the sort of thing that isn't covered by stats. (I don't think, there might be something very recent)
The players with really good arms, -Ichiro, Dwight Evans, probably Clemente, although I haven't watched much video of him. At least those two after a fairly short time didn't get as many outfield assists, but did have a fair number of times when a player might have tried for a double or triple but decided against trying. You can see it happen watching the game, but there's not many easy ways to put a number to something that didn't happen. Especially if why it didn't happen is open to interpretation. Would the player have run against a different outfielder say Johnny Damon? Or was the extra base not taken because it wasn't likely against anyone?

Other players have more outfield assists and they're either ones with above average arms or quick releases. Manny Ramirez had a lot of OF assists, and while I never heard it discussed, watching a lot of games I began to think it was because he had this lazy looking approach to a routine single that encouraged people to try for second more often. Same thing for wall singles, meanders to the ball, looks like he's not paying much attention, then a quick catch and throw to second.

Again, hard to put numbers to, aside from the assists.

Errors today totally baffle me. Shortstop drops a fairly easily reached ball, and sometimes, maybe even usually it's scored a hit. Maybe the guys have better range so it would have been a nearly unreachable ball 30 years ago, but a drop on a ball in your own range should be an error.

Steve B

As I recall in his discussion of Clemente, Bill James takes on the value of the great outfield arm.

modern metrics don't use OF assists alone as a measure of arm, they take into account extra bases taken by base runners (or lack thereof) . But, in the grand scheme of things, just like first base scoops, OF arms just don't make that great of an impact over the course of a season or a career. The difference between an avg arm and a great one isn't large enough to make a huge difference.


ETA: on one play, sure the difference can be huge, but if a great arm prevents say 20 extra bases during a season, that only adds up to maybe 3 or 4 runs and that's not even half a WAR.

Are you actually comparing Andruw Jones to Roberto Clemente?? Holy s****. Also, you need to get off this WAR shit. Look at the players and not these bullshit statistics. You are also the one the said Ed Reulbach was not even close to a HOFer. His record was 182-106 with an ERA of 2.24....What the Hell is his WAR?

This Nick Barnes guy is too much. Andruw Jones or Clemente? Hmmmmm, let me think...Andruw Jones was a joke as a hitter...To even hold him in the same breath as Clemente is beyond ridiculous, and I grew up in Atlanta as a Braves fan...And by the way, Clemente had the best arm I have ever seen....Vlad Guerrero is a close second

Andruw Jones isn't nearly the player that Clemente was (and this is also what WAR says, Clemente leads Jones 94 to 62, so it's not even close). Clemente was a much better hitter (and had a longer career, even given, you know). Clemente did a much better job getting on base, even though he played in an offensive environment that was friendlier to pitchers than Jones did.

However, according to the data that we have, Andruw Jones was the greatest defensive outfielder of all time. He's 20th all-time in the defensive component of WAR (behind Brooks and a bunch of short stops, basically). Clemente is 160th in the defensive component of WAR.

Basically, the defensive component of WAR looks at every defensive thing that a player did on the field, asks how likely other players would have been to make the same play, and looks at, historically, what has happened if the play wouldn't have been made. So if player A makes a play that a run-of-the-mill fielder would have made only 80% of the time, and if a ball hit to this part of the ball park has historically led to 0.7 runs scoring, player A gets credit for (0.2 * 0.7) = 0.14 runs saved. And then you do this for each defensive play that he made, and add them all up. There are limitations to the defensive part of WAR (which I mentioned in a previous post in this thread). We now have very finely grained defensive data: we know exactly where each ball was hit, how hard it was hit, etc. We use that data when calculating modern players' WAR. We use less fine-grained data when calculating older players' WAR (because they didn't keep track of this information back then). There is, consequently, more room for error in older players' fielding records. Clemente may have been better than the data indicates - we just don't have any evidence that he was. And no, subjective impressions from watching him play don't count as evidence. Lots of people who saw Jeter play thought that he was a great defensive player, even though we have very detailed records of the plays that he made, and they were not, in fact, very impressive. He just looked impressive making mostly routine plays.

We've got lots of really bright people working really hard to figure out how to measure baseball performance. Let's help them. If you think that there's something wrong with WAR (and I do, as noted up-thread), let's figure out what's wrong with it, and how to fix it, so that it can become more accurate.

times change, more information becomes available, either you learn to evolve or you fade away.

I don't see how cursing at me is improving your argument.....

Andruw Jones is the greatest outfielder defensively of all time and it isn't even close, I can present all the information to back up my claim (and none of it revolves around what I claim to have seen but rather with the scientific way: using statistics and data)


A jones- total zone runs 243

Clemente- 205

A-Jones- baseball references d-war (which I don't like particularly) 24.1

Clemente- 12.1


fangraphs DEF ranking (a conglomerate of several stats)

A-Jones - 281.3

Clemente- 84.4


Clemente was a much better hitter (hence his 80+ fWAR vs AJ's 67.1) but Andruw was a better fielder not only because of his range, and skill but also because he played the much more difficult position of CF for most of his career.

sorry, I just happen to know and understand more about baseball than you do. You are stuck in flat earth land. I have moved into the 21st century.

I hate to be like this, but your attitude, cursing and hand waving really leave me no choice. It's time to grow up, evolve with the times or GTFO the way.