Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 8/6/18
August 6, 2018
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
I get the point about teams and awards. But awards in general aren’t about who the best player is. Awards are about who has had the better season. That can be 2 totally different animals. Often times is. I think too often folks just focus on who is the best player. Someone can be a worse player but have a better season. 2015 prime example pitching with Arrieta/Greinke/Kershaw NL Cy Young. Kershaw the best of those 3 by far, but Arrieta and Greinke had better seasons.
No they didn’t – other players on their team had better seasons than other players on Kershaw’s team.
By your method, the award doesn’t really mean anything, it’s a bizarre hybrid award, arbitrarily mixed between a player and his 24 rotating teammates (and again, the award itself defines value in a way that none of this makes sense).
If you want to say that Drew Pomeranz deserves an award more than Mike Trout, well, everyone’s got a right to hold an opinion, but that’s an award I find absolutely meaningless; there’s no point in giving out an award that doesn’t represent something worth caring about.
I just cannot possibly believe that Mike Trout has a higher WAR than Mookie Betts. Mookie is leading or tied with Mike Trout in almost every category besides Home Runs and hes a defensive monster with mind blowing versatility. Is it just because he’s Mike Trout?
That’s an easy one. A large part of that is that Trout has 57 more PA’s than Betts does.
Also a lot of it is 2nd half.
Betts is at 0.4 WAR due to a 111 wRC+
Trout is at 1.2 WAR due to a 229 wRC+
Betts with 3 more games or the gap would be even larger….
that 0.8 difference is most of the WAR difference.
Yes. The WAR formula has a clause that if the player is Mike Trout then you automatically add 1.
Less sarcastically, Mike Trout has 40 points of OBP on Mookie and something like 60 more plate appearances. Don’t let your biases get in the way that Mike Trout is having a better season even though Mookie is the second best player in baseball. There is nothing wrong with being the second best player in the world (and yes they are both better than Jose Ramirez).
It’s actually .031 OBP points but that’s made up by the 0.028 sluggling. The real difference is the plate appearances. Oh and 2nd half of July Betts had only a 55 wRC+. With 8 of 12 games being negative games. Trout didn’t have that.
1 point of obp is worth more than 1 point of slugging.
The real difference is one thing and one thing only. The plate appearances. I mean yesterday it was a 0.7 lead for Trout due to 57 more PA’s. Now today it’s a 0.6 lead for Trout due to 52 more PA’s. He catches up in the PA’s he’s going to catch up in WAR. It’s really that simple.
I think what you are saying is it just should go to who is viewed as being the best player. I just totally disagree(as do the voters). You can be the better player, but because of the numbers didn’t have the better season. the 2015 NL Cy Young IMO was a prime example of that. Kershaw didn’t have as good of a season as Arrieta and Greinke to the voters. ERA to the voters is what actually did happen, and Kershaw was far behind those other 2. 1 of them being a teammate of his, so it takes that defense arguement out of things.
So Jake DeGrom has the same offensive support as Thor this year because his teammates were the same?
In 2015- Kershaw got more run support than Greinke did.
Not my point. My point was on overall support and how there are variances in performance including defensive performance. If the defense played better for Greinke, that wouldn’t make up for the fact that the offense played better for Kershaw unless you are looking at pitcher wins. Offense and defense both vary.