Player of the Year Award: Paul Swydan’s Process

The other day Dave announced our fabulous new FanGraphs Player of the Year Award. He also said the 11 voters would be encouraged to write about their process. And so I thought I’d kick things off today by talking about mine.

In case you don’t want to click on the link, the criteria for the award is as follows:

The criteria for the award will be rather simple: which player, through his on-the-field performance, most deserves to be recognized for his outstanding play within the given season? It is an attempt to honor outstanding performances, and to consider the relative merit of all players who contributed within that season, regardless of position or quality of his teammates.

Since we need to vote on 10 players, the award — for me — is going to be more about who those 10 people are then it will be about who wins. I think that if you spend some time combing through awards votes, the top of the ballot is right more often than not, but from there it can get messy. And rightly so. Boiling a season with 250 or qualified players down to the 10 best is tricky, and that’s before you consider personal biases or the politics that some writers undoubtedly have to play. Even for an outsider such as myself, this process is going to be much more difficult than just ranking by WAR. I will look at WAR, but I can already see that I have about 30 or so players that I’ll be considering, and that list will probably get bigger before it gets smaller. I won’t be able to separate those out by just using WAR. So, in deciding who to put on my ballot, there are a few questions that I want to answer.

Before I do that though, the very first thing I’m going to do is head over to our Library and brush up on my definitions and contexts. When each new statistic is introduced, I read about it and then mentally file it under “helpful” or “not helpful.” But over time, some of the specifics of those stats may filter to the deeper recesses of my brain. And since I’m going to be looking at a bevy of different advanced stats, be they batted ball, run value, win probability or rate stats, the beginning of this process will be a great time for me to bone up on their meanings. Fortunately, Neil Weinberg has been doing a great job lately of refreshing our Library, so that task will be all the easier for me.

From there, I will dig in on the specific questions.

1. How well-rounded are you?
I tend to favor players that are adept in all facets of the game. Or, perhaps stated better — I would prefer to vote for players who aren’t cringe-worthy half the time. I don’t need my 10 players to be “Gold Glovers” and “Silver Sluggers,” but if they are deeply flawed on one side or another, it’s going to make it tougher for me to vote for them.

This is where Off and Def are going to come in handy. If there’s someone who’s in the negative double digits in one category or the other, that will give me pause. Spare me the sermons on the credibility of our defensive metrics. We use the defensive metrics that we use because they are the best that are publicly available. If there were better defensive metrics available to us, or at least to me, we/I would be using them. I won’t limit myself to UZR however, I will also look at DRS, our Inside Edge data and the Fans Scouting Report, as the latter is one of my favorite things.

I’ll also be looking at how well pitchers hit. Being an awful hitting pitcher probably won’t be as much of a demerit as being a good hitting pitcher will be a boon, but if the pitcher in question is really, really bad at hitting, that is going to affect his standing in my mind.

This absolutely applies to designated hitters as well. I have always loved David Ortiz, but I thought it was pretty ridiculous that he finished in the top three in the MVP balloting in consecutive seasons. It would need to be a historically great DH season to catch my attention. The 2005 and 2006 seasons weren’t it for Ortiz, and as you can see here, the bar is actually pretty high for such seasons. This leads me to my next question.

2. How much better were you?
Index stats are among my favorites. I like the simplicity of saying player X was Y percent better than the league average. I think that’s easy to understand, and helps give needed context. So as I comb my list, and look to not only rank players, but also assign letter grades to each, I want to see how much better they were than others. And it’s here where index stats like wRC+ and FIP- will be helpful. In looking at them, I can kind of figure out where the tiers are.

I can also use it to compare to other seasons and compare pitchers to hitters, as we don’t have luxury of an Off and Def for pitchers. Because I’m not going to be excluding starting pitchers from my ballot, it’s essential that I be able to put them on the same scale, and the index stats help out tremendously in that regard.

Of course, just having good index stats isn’t the path to my ballot, so I’ll still circle back to my next question.

3. How much did you play?
Exceptional performances are exceptional no matter what. Think Barry Bonds in 2002, or Josh Hamilton in 2010. But if there isn’t that sort of performance that really stands out from the pack, then how much you played will likely be a separator. Going back to the beginning of the Wild Card era (1995), I find that the average position player MVP played 151.5 games, and that has gone up as time has gone by. Since 2000, there have been just five MVPs to suit up in 147 games or fewer, and three of those belonged to Bonds. There are many things that go into being great at baseball, but high on the list is the ability to punch the clock. Health is a skill.

How much you play is also the main question when it comes to relief pitchers. There hasn’t been a pitcher who compiled 100 innings in a season while starting three or fewer games since 1997. Up the games started limit to 10, which is really getting you more into swingman territory, and the last such season was in 2001. We know this. Relievers don’t throw a ton of innings.

The other problem is that relievers, as Mike pointed out the other day, are rarely used in optimal fashion. So, you have a subset of players who don’t play a lot and aren’t used in the best manner when they do play. So it’d be pretty difficult to consider them one of the 10 best players in the game in any one season. Never say never and all that, but I doubt relievers are going to factor in my voting.

4. What external resources should come into play? What else isn’t captured in stats?
Yes, this is the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, but that doesn’t mean I’m limited exclusively to the FanGraphs world. Pitch framing is chief among the things our stats here at FanGraphs don’t capture, and so I’ll be heading over to Stat Corner to look at Matthew’s Catcher Framing Report. I’m not sure that pitch framing is a mighty hammer that vaults catchers ahead of everyone else, but it is definitely an aspect of the game that merits consideration.

I’ll also probably be perusing the Baseball Heat Maps, Baseball Savant and Brooks Baseball leaderboards, and if I still have a specific question about a player, I will reach out to contacts that watch the player in question more frequently than I do.

There are also questions that aren’t necessarily captured in the data. Questions of positional versatility, or how the timing of a player’s contributions helped affect his team’s season, or even how much easier a player makes things on his teammates. I’ll definitely be pondering those as well.

Figuring out my ballot for the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award is going to take some time. Part of that is because I am just as interested in who finishes in 10th place as I am in who finishes first. In fact, in some years, deciding on first place will be the easiest part of the ballot. The rest of the ballot probably won’t be as easy though, and that’s why it’ll be helpful to have this process to guide me. If you have constructive suggestions for me on other things I should or should not be considering, please let me know in the comments.