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Friday, July 25, 2003
in your face, flanders!
jay jaffe of futility infielder wrote a highly positive review of my wal con pow system. jay you are the best!
this is very exciting. when i started this blog (just a month ago!) i had no idea anyone would wanna read it. now i feel like i have people i can exchange ideas with. together we can make baseball better for everyone.
also seeing my words on someone else's page has encouraged me to go back and do a tighter edit.
jay had some questions, which i'll answer here:
1. Where is the evidence that those numbers WAL, CON, and POW have meaning in small sample sizes, that, as you say "walks, strikeouts, and home runs quickly normalize to a level representative of players' abilities"?
2. Those "major-league averages" for referred for WAL, CON, and POW -- do they refer to 2003, the last few years, or a longer-range time period?
3. As far as the predictive value of this suite, can we see some comparisons based on prior seasons to see where these formulae worked and where they did not?
1. the evidence right now is at the level of "strong suspicion". what happened was i started paying attention to these numbers over the past few years in an attempt to predict performance for my fantasy team. what i noticed was that after about 100 ab for wal & con, 300 ab for pow, the numbers don't change.
i need to build a database. once that happens i'll have rigorous answers to all kinds of things. the problem right now is i don't have a computer! i've been blogging mostly at a university computer lab or at friends' houses.
2. major league averages came from 2002 data. i should note that on the site.
3. yes. that and more. all kinds of things will follow from the building of the database. for example, it's clear that there are players who consistently outperform their predicted average. all who do are slap-and-run speedsters. i've got ideas for a speed factor that i think will correct the predictions for speedsters. also i plan to tighten pow up a little bit, using recent years to dampen the variance. and i want to do a historical study to see at what age each each of the various skills peaks. right now it seems that con peaks early, around 23, pow peaks around 28 (although some players (bonds) can still increase at late ages. typically they are power/speed types (like bonds)), and wal increases throughout the career. with that data it will be possible to determine a player's future career path with quite a bit of precision.
. . . should i have said "those data"? i know data is plural, but it sounds so weird.
i'm a little giddy right now. i'll write more when i calm down.
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