Author Archive
FanGraphs Staff Awards
This week, we asked our writers to cast their vote for who they believe should win each of the major post-season awards. The results of those votes are below. We did not cast full ballots and use a points system as the BBWAA will – we just asked everyone to select the player they would cast a first place vote for. As you’ll see, a few of the awards had general consensus, but there was also quite a spread of opinions at some of the more open races.
American League MVP: Jose Bautista (16), Jacoby Ellsbury (9)
A Discussion About Evaluating Pitchers
Eric Seidman and I had a conversation about pitchers, pitching metrics, and the end of season awards last night. The fruits of that conversation are below.
Dave: So, I took a sneak peak at the FanGraphs author awards ballot, and you’re kind of a traitor. You can make a strong case for Roy Halladay or Cliff Lee, but instead, you pick Clayton Kershaw, even though he has a WAR of 6.8 compared to Halladay’s 8.0. You’re from Philadelphia, you write for FanGraphs, and you pick the pitcher with a lower WAR who doesn’t play for the Phillies? Don’t you know that you’re supposed to be a slave to the stats, and our most recognizable stat says Halladay has been better? You’ve got some explaining to do.
In Retrospect…
Some things work a lot better in your mind than they do in the real world, and after a couple of days, I think we’ve learned that the idea of taking “official positions” was one of these things. Our intention for the series was to try and use the awards voting to help clarify some misconceptions about our metrics and how they should be used to evaluate player seasons, but in practice, the titles of the post – and the fact that we’re really a big conglomerate of individuals with their own take on things – probably created more confusion than anything else.
Life is full of lessons, and hopefully we’ve learned from this one. We’ll be publishing some thoughts on how our metrics pertain to awards voting, but you won’t be seeing any more “official positions”, and we’ll try to do a better job focusing on the validity of multiple viewpoints. In almost every case, there are legitimate disagreements that can be had, and we value the different voices that make valid points from different angles. We’ll try to make that more clear going forward.
Just like our metrics, we’re not perfect. When we do something that doesn’t work, we’ll try to correct it. The “official position” series didn’t work as intended, and so we’ll make some steps to correct that.
FanGraphs Official Position On…
With just a week and a half left in the regular season and most of the playoff races offering little in the way of end-of-season excitement, a lot of attention has been paid to the postseason awards. The rise in popularity of a lot of the metrics we host here on FanGraphs – especially WAR – has led to a lot of discussion about how those numbers should play into a voter’s decision making process. In many cases, those writing pieces about advanced metrics and awards voting have assumed that the statistical crowd is in lockstep agreement on the rigidity of how these metrics should be interpreted, and in most cases, the assumption is that we trust the numbers over all else.
That’s not really true, of course. The statistical community has a broad base of opinions, and in general, few if any serious analysts believe that awards voting should be done according to an ordinal ranking of WAR. We don’t believe that the numbers that we look at regularly are infallible – we just happen to think that they usually do a better job of accurately answering questions than any other statistic does at answering the same question. As Joe Posanski put it last week:
And this gets at exactly why I love WAR. It makes things more fun. Should we be a slave to it? Of course not. But, is that even necessary to say? I mean: should we be a slave to anything?
It’s Still Not Time to Panic in Boston
The Red Sox are reeling. Over the last month, they’ve seen a 10-game lead over Tampa Bay shrink down to just three games. They’ve seen their rotation suffer from injuries and poor performances, and lately, even the normally reliable Daniel Bard has been blowing up at inopportune times. As hard as it would have been to believe even just a few weeks ago, the Rays could pull into a tie in the Wild Card race if they can complete the weekend sweep in Boston.
And yet, despite all the injuries, the poor performances, and the threatening kids from down south, I still don’t think the Red Sox really have all that much to worry about. Even if we presume that the Red Sox and Rays are of somewhat equal talent levels for the remainder of the season, the Sox still have a lot of advantages in this race for the final playoff spot.
Giving Mike Cameron His Due
Not long after Mike Cameron hinted at retirement, the Marlins gave him his walking papers, letting him begin his post-baseball life a few weeks early. At 38-years-old, this is probably the end of the line for Cameron, who has spent most of his career as one of the game’s most consistently underrated players. It’s time he got his due.
He’s not going to make the Hall Of Fame. He probably won’t even get more than a handful of votes, and he’ll be off the ballot after his first year of eligibility. But if there was a Hall Of Very Good, Cameron would a charter member. While he’s probably not going to remembered as fondly, he was basically this generation’s Devon White.
