Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 9/26/11

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September 26, 2011





 

Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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TylerTheCreator
12 years ago

Dan Szymborski completely misunderstands what the MVP is…it is a one year award based on past performance, not an award based on future projection. Completely dismissing defense for this award (as if defense doesn’t have value, you know, the name of the award), and asking for a three year sample for a one year award, is as bad as anything the BBWAA does with their voting. Yeah defensive stats are volatile..but can you say with a straight face that Ellsbury hasn’t been significantly more valuable defensively than Miguel Cabrera or Jose Bautista? Exactly.

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Earl Sweatshirt
12 years ago
Reply to  TylerTheCreator

How is choosing to leave out defense because the metrics aren’t 100% any better than the traditionalists that prefer counting stats over the less precise advanced numbers?

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Dan Szymborski
12 years ago
Reply to  TylerTheCreator

I’m not dismissing defense, I’m taking into account the volatility of defensive statistics – we have far better ways of evaluating defense than we used to, but they are also estimated statistics rather than countable statistics.

Given that a year of defensive stats is as volatile as two months of offensive stats, if we can only evaluate defensive value within the year, then our other choice is to regress heavily, to the extent of regressing everyone’s defensive stats 2/3 of the way towards zero. That’s a more aggressive approach than I take.

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