Holliday Hauls Deathmatch

1. How do you know he isn’t? Is there UZR for minor leaguers?

2. And Wallace shouldn’t make up for it? And hit even better?

A worse 3rd baseman at 26 than he is at 23?

Reading DiegoAsFan’s reply below, now I see what my confusion is. The 80% refers to the player, not the win. I thought you were saying each non-leveraged win is worth only 50% or 80% as much as … I’m not sure what. I was totally misreading the sentence. My bad.

So if I’m reading you right, the win is still the basic unit of currency and they’re still of constant value, you’re just saying that in terms of a player’s value translating to wins, being on a contending team is a more highly leveraged situation than being on a non-contending team. Is that right?

That makes a lot more sense, but now I’m in the same boat as DiegoAsFan: I understand what you’re saying now, but how do you figure?

At the end you mention “observed behavior”. Is that what this is about? To better understand why GMs do what they do?

One thing I’ll say for the socratic method is that it eventually gets to the real core of any question, and often it boils down to “why do we care?” No doubt we each have our own reasons and they vary a lot, not even counting the larger mass of fans who don’t care about sabermetrics at all. Among those of us who do (and I’m at least marginally part of the group), why do we invent all these complicated tools for evaluating players? What is it we want to do with those tools?

The deeper we dig into this, the more you seem to be falling back on simply trying to understand why GMs do what they do. Perhaps that’s what most interests you, but I don’t think that’s the answer for most sabermetrically inclined fans.

The question posed in this thread is: which package do you prefer, Gonzalez-Street-Smith or Wallace-Mortensen-Peterson? Many fans (who probably aren’t in this thread) might have some intuitive preference. Those who are sabermetrically inclined will likely try to objectively evaluate the player’s actual talent and its likelihood to translate into good results for our favorite team. We know what it is we want from a team, and we use the sabermetric tools available to us to try to determine which players best achieve it. For me, the standard might be most total wins. For someone else, it might be playoff wins, or World Series titles. For us, the road ends there. For you, it keeps going. You want to evaluate the wins in terms of how much money they will make for the owner.

We’re all role-playing in this game. Unless one happens to be among the few who is actually employed as an advisor to a baseball team, one doesn’t have any actual decisions to make. We’re all just playing make-believe, saying, “I want the team to do this.” What we want for the team is up to us. I want more wins, someone else wants more pennants, you want to earn more money. That’s fine. Maybe for you the part of the role playing that is most fun is imagining you’re the GM trying to do a good job for his owner.

In another sub-thread I brought up subjectivity, and you attempted to squash it. I may personally care more about total wins, you said, but I can’t impose my personal standard; I have to do what’s going to boost revenues whether I like it or not. Well, no, I don’t. Because I’m not actually a real GM, and neither are you. Each of us is answering questions, like the one at the top of this thread, that ask “which do you prefer?” We may seek tools which are rational and objective to best evaluate the offered packages against our chosen standards, but the standards themselves remain subjective.

I think in our passion for objectivity in our tools, we lose sight of that. By habit, we try to stamp out subjectivity whenever we see it, but that just leads to a never-ending chase after an ever-receding horizon. We evaluate players to see who is better, and we measure them in wins. But wins must then be evaluated to see which are better, and we measure them in money. But money must then be evaluate to see which is better, and we measure them in … what? GM’s job security? Owner’s personal satisfaction? and then how to we evaluate those?

My sense is that most fans are closer to me than to you on this question.

I wonder if your perception is affected by availability bias, leading you to think of “fans” as the sort of fans who register on SB Nation blogs, follow all the teams, watch Baseball Tonight on ESPN, and know which teams are leading in each division. I’m more inclined to think of the people whose main contact with the game is loading up the kids in the minivan and taking them to the ballpark three or four times a year. These are the people I encounter at the stadium and in real life, and I think there are more of them than the sort of fans we see on the Internet. Many of these regular fans couldn’t tell you what the team’s W-L record is. Knowing the team is in a playoff race makes no difference to them, but it does add to their memory of how much fun the semi-regular baseball trip is if they remember more wins than losses.

On the other hand, I may have my own bias, among other things from being most familiar with the Seattle Mariners market, which I sometimes suspect is atypical in its mellowness (possibly a lingering result of the company having adapted itself to two decades of unremitting suck).

I don’t consider my mind made up on this, so if you or anyone has evidence I’m happy to see it. As of now, I’m not taking it for granted that “most fans” care more about the playoffs. I don’t think they do.

I didn’t know Curt was interested in a political career. Right now, I think it’s kind of funny, because I assume he’ll be squashed like a bug.

If he really does succeed in becoming a real politician — as a few former pro athletes have succeeded in doing — then we should all judge him on his actual political views. And AN won’t be the place to do it.