Tuesday, December 17, 2013
LF v RF
Patriot made this rather ambiguous point, where he notes that RF generated about 5% more runs than LF in 2013, and 2% historically:
Right fielders went back to their recent trend of solidly outhitting their left field cousins (one of the quirks that one must be cognizant of when attempting to use offensive data to craft positional adjustments).?
I'm not sure exactly what he's proposing, or asking us to consider. Typically, our expectation is that the worse fielders you find at a position, the better the hitters. It's why you find the best hitters at 1B and the worst ones at SS or C. So, when we try to evaluate a player's performance, we have to be aware that the peer groups are not the same.
For LF and RF, this is the quirk that Patriot is probably pointing out, that it's almost certain that the fielders in RF are better fielders than those you find in LF, and at the same time, they are also the better hitters. This kind of imbalance exists most obviously in high school, where your best hitter and best fielder might be playing SS. Therefore, we would not compare one SS to another SS, and one 2B to another 2B, since that will allow a whole host of 2B to be considered to be better than a whole host of SS. If you were to pool all the SS+2B from high school together, probably 90% of the better players are at SS. This is best evidenced by how MLB teams draft.
The theory is that by the time you get to MLB, you would get an equilibrium, so that, overall, at each position, you have equal talent, that the off+def at each position is the same. If your path to SS is blocked because you are not a good enough fielder, you move to 3B or 2B or CF because your hitting can help you overcome whatever shortcoming you may have with your fielding. And so on in terms of being blocked at CF so you move to LF or RF, etc.
Unfortunately, this theory is only something that is a figment of our imagination. It's certainly not true in other sports. In the NHL, likely half the best forwards are centres, while the other half are split between LW and RW. And we don't even bother distinguishing between left D and right D. It's just D. It's not even clear that the average D is equal to the average forward. And since goalies are as unique to hockey as pitchers are to baseball, we wouldn't try to match on the average all being equal.
So, we then get to the "replacement level" to try to justify the theory. Which works well enough when trying to compare pitchers to non-pitchers or goalies to non-goalies, and so on. But, it doesn't work when comparing CF to LF. After all, it's not like the replacement level LF is from a distinct pool from the replacement level CF. They are all chosen from the same pool. So, even trying to compartmentalize players to the point that we have two distinct groups, and we'd compare players to those groups doesn't work, because reality says otherwise.
Getting back to the LF v RF, there are two things that we know to be true, or highly suspect to be true: the average RF is a better hitter than the average LF and the average RF is a better fielder than the average LF. And so, we have to conclude that the average RF is a better player than the average LF, and the average RF will get paid more than the average LF (all other things equal, like service time).
If Patriot's point is that since RF are obviously better fielders, or at worst as good fielders as LF, then we shouldn't use the offensive positional results to infer that RF are WORSE fielders than LF, then I concur. If his point is something else, then I would dispute the notion.
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