tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699407593613203829.post4773812204838729192..comments2024-01-31T17:27:02.471-08:00Comments on Baseball Greatness: The Runs Saved Controversy at BillJames.comDavid Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699407593613203829.post-91463813609310735892023-09-02T15:12:16.627-07:002023-09-02T15:12:16.627-07:00I think the best explanation of why Bill's &qu...I think the best explanation of why Bill's "runs scored = runs prevented" thing can't be true came in a comment made by dfan on the article where he first made the argument. Imagine a league that scores X runs in a season, so we're going to say that they prevented X runs. Now imagine an alternate reality where everything happens the exact same way in that league, with the only difference being that in one game an outfielder muffs a fly ball with 2 outs and the bases loaded. In the original timeline it was the 3rd out, inning over. In the alternate timeline, 3 extra runs scored. So we're saying that in the alternate timeline league, where the only difference was that one error, there were also 3 extra runs prevented? Taking the delta, that means the value of that error is that the league defense collectively prevented 3 more runs???<br /><br />Also, as a somewhat younger person who came to Bill's writings later that many others, I have been "catching up" on his books and online articles over the past few years, and I have been shocked several times by his intolerance for anyone questioning him. I knew from his old books that he could be an ornery cuss, and I honestly found it kind of amusing. But enter the online realm where people can talk back at him and he just can't seem to handle criticism at all. Oh well, none of us are perfect.Robert Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699407593613203829.post-70497374230043991282020-03-28T13:14:55.162-07:002020-03-28T13:14:55.162-07:005. But THAT is where we get to the heart of the pr...5. But THAT is where we get to the heart of the problem with Bill's reasoning. He hates average; he says average is bad. But literally this ENTIRE EXPERIMENT is based on the idea of average. How do you get expected runs? You first find average! How do you get the "zero point"? You double average! The fact of the matter is, you NEED average in order to find the "zero." So Bill thinks he's avoiding average, but he's just unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. He could just compare the whole thing to average. And then replacement. It would work <i>fine</i>. You can actually use average (or replacement) to find "zero," too... but Bill wants to do it this weird way. And you know what? It will probably work just fine. But I think Bill is fooling himself when he says he's avoiding "average," because literally all he's doing IS using average.<br /><br />6. This is a nitpick, but Bill also doesn't always convert things the way he should. In a number of these examples so far, he's talked about who saved the "most runs" or "least runs"... but the problem with that is that, while he tries to normalize a lot of things for era, he doesn't got back and normalize RUNS for the era. In yesterday's (3/27) article all but three of the top ten teams in runs saved are from very high-scoring leagues. He says we'll take that all out at the end... but that means that, so far, that article told us literally <i>nothing</i>. Let's put it this way: it's not how I'd present my findings at this point in the process. And it's why WINS is a better currency than RUNS. (Actually runs <i>is</i> the better currency, but you'd have to convert runs to wins, and then convert those back to a historically-normalized number of runs... but that's a whole different discussion.)<br /><br />End of the day, I think Bill's probably not going to do anything that's going to rock our collective world here when it's all said and done. It's probably not going to be all that different than the information we already get from WAR. But Bill insists on blazing his own trail, even when there's already a better trail somewhere else. It's what makes him lovable, and what makes him so intolerable. So for my part, I'm going to mostly just sit on my hands until the end, wait to see what we get, and then decide whether this new information is worth anything or not.<br /><br />Thanks for creating this thread. To say that my wife would have no interest in listening to me talk about these things is the understatement of all-time. So I appreciate the forum in which to share my thoughts.Dr. Doomnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699407593613203829.post-87388410707944199202020-03-28T13:14:29.062-07:002020-03-28T13:14:29.062-07:00David,
Thanks for this post. I have one million t...David,<br /><br />Thanks for this post. I have one million thoughts on this topic... so I'm going to try to stay organized here. I agree with you on this topic, particularly the following: "Runs allowed are not equal to runs prevented. Runs allowed are equal to RUNS NOT PREVENTED." That was my gut instinct. With that said, I will talk about a few other things.<br /><br />1. I'm willing to give Bill the benefit of the doubt, and see what the research says in the end. So I'm not really complaining about what he's done so far; at this point, he's just taking us through his thought process, which I'm fine with.<br /><br />2. I think that what he's done here is <i>so similar</i> to what he did with the idea of "marginal runs" in <i>Win Shares</i> that I'm not actually sure why there are people who defend Win Shares on his site who suddenly disagree with this approach. It's very, very similar... identical, one could say.<br /><br />3. The real fault of Win Shares is in its analysis of defense. The "worst" a defensive player could be was 0... that's obviously untrue. Defensive players can be FAR worse than 0, which leads to a systemic overrating of big-bat-no-glove players by that system. Bill sees that, I think, as a function of comparing things to average. The problem was not comparing to average; the problem was that anything below 0, Bill counted as a 0. You can actually SEE this problem all over his explanation of Win Shares, and it shows up in everything he's done with it. (It's the corollary to not publishing Loss Shares, which would completely fix the Win Shares methodology - because then you could compare players to replacement and/or average.)<br /><br />4. You point out, with that 2018 Astros example, that Bill has made a new fallacy - with the 840 and 1680 runs. Actually... that's not new. That's the same thing he's been talking about the whole time. First, you calculate average runs, given ballpark. Actual runs minus expected runs gives you runs scored (duh); 2 times expected runs is the "zero" for runs allowed, and you count DOWN from that one. Of course this doesn't really work for a million reasons (play around with the Pythagorean theorem at the extremes of runs scored and runs allowed, and you'll find it's true with those, too). But it probably WILL work in the end, because, for like 95% of teams in history, a run scored and a run saved are basically the same thing.Dr. Doomnoreply@blogger.com