Jim
Albright /
the japanese insider
Jim Albright on Updates to the NPB Player
Projections to MLB
I think the
biggest change related to these projections is how the spread of
analytics
changes the landscape. I think there's greater willingness to
listen to
this kind of stuff, but there's a lot of lousy analysis which doesn't
understand the concepts behind it but tries to horn into the
marketplace by
using lots of numbers to contend with. I'm sure people are
getting more
sophisticated in sorting the wheat-like analysis from the chaff-like
stuff, but
since it's a fairly new phenomenon, I think it's still a work in
progress.
I didn't do much with the
gold standard
of uber-stats fifteen years ago, win shares, in the Oh article because
that
information existed only in Bill James' book on the topic and a little
later on
his for pay website-and even then it wasn't updated anything like we're
used to
seeing today with Baseball-reference.com or its rivals in WAR.
WAR's free
availability for years is a large part of why it supplanted win shares,
and it
has led to WAR being a common part of the baseball lexicon in a way win
shares
never was. There's a lot more understanding of what a 5 WAR
season or a 7
WAR season, etc means than there ever was of 15 or 20 win share
seasons.
That level of acceptance and acceptance of WAR and WAA today means that
when I
add such an analysis to the article, it gives the large mass of people
who are
familiar and comfortable with WAR and WAA a better sense of what the
projection
means. Hey, even though I was intimately familiar with the
projection, I
wasn't able to process how size of the effect that doing so much of
this in the
60s as Oh did would affect how Oh compares to the greatest in the
game. I
imagine others will have a similar reaction.