JORR for the win !!!!!

I think his simple argument works if you aren't a baseball fan or watch baseball. His absolutes make you want to bang your head against the wall. Considering his knowledge of the history of the game I would like to believe he knows it isn't as simple as he makes it. That being said I will still have some form of the same debate with him every year. I know there is nothing that I post that will change his mind.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

You guys should have really hashed this out before taking over.

Entertainment

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

I would suggest that you're the one with the simplistic view. Overall runs limited = great pitcher. All the fielding independent numbers measure "stuff" rather than the ability to pitch a big league ballgame. Do you think it's luck that Buerhle got so many ground balls and rolled so many guys into double plays? JLN thinks it is. But it's a skill just like the ability to strike guys out. The missing link is knowing how to use the stuff you have to pitch a ballgame. The modern fan simply does not want to acknowledge such.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

according to you Saberdicks wins don't mean shit.....you assholes would have Jose DeLeon in the HOF

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

You're all over the place. Limiting runs scored is very important. Quintana gives up fewer than the AL average in 90% of his starts and gives up 2 runs or fewer in 60% of his starts. He got the limiting runs thing down. He can't get run support. He has lost everything game he gave up more than 1 run in.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

You misunderstood me. I meant you believe that a guy who limits runs overall is great. There's a hell of a lot more to being a good big league pitcher than that.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

That would be true, if pitching and defense (not to mention luck, park effects, etc.) weren't so heavily intertwined. The real equation is: Overall runs limited = pitching + defense + park +luck.

Now, you can further define "great pitcher" as "great stuff + pitching luck".

The equation then becomes: Overall runs limited = great stuff + pitching luck + defense + park + luck.

Crediting a pitcher with the success or failure of "overall runs limited" is, at best, dubious in its descriptive and predictive capabilities.



They strip luck further from the equation of what makes a "great pitcher". Pitching to contact with a superb defense at your back will be valued less, but it actually should be, contrary to popular belief, because pitchers throughout history have not been able to influence the result of a play once the ball is put into play. The value derived from being a groundball pitcher is more dependent on things that cannot (at present) be quantified and accounted for (including random chance) than is being a strikeout or "stuff" pitcher. The expected value is lowered when "success" is more heavily reliant on luck.



No, players have shown an ability to induce certain types of batted balls, particularly pitchers that employ sinkers and sliders. The luck part is introduced the moment bat is put to ball (except for when the ball is batted to the pitcher, which is quite infrequent, even for Buehrle). What is really going to cook your noodle is that Vazquez and Buehrle differed in their groundball rates by less than 7%.

Even if a defense has a high probability of turning a ground ball into an out, I'll take the 64% increase in strikeout rate over the 6% increase in ground ball rate (and similar walk and HR-rates) all day long.



This trope has been used to death. Can you define that in any meaningful way without self-referencing the words "pitch", "throw", or "ballgame"?

That's wrong. You're just regurgitating Voros McCracken who hadn't actually done enough comprehensive research at the time. Believe me, Mark Buehrle isn't just the luckiest man in the world with balls happening to result in 6-4-3 at an inordinate rate.




Again, wrong. Pitchers can certainly influence where a ball is hit by where it's located.



Of course a guy with the ability to strike batters out at a high rate starts the ballgame with a huge advantage. That's what makes someone like Vazquez such an abject failure in his ultimate results.



You're the guy spouting the tropes. It's like reading a paper by Tango Tiger circa 2001. What words do you want me to use when describing a pitcher? Don't be ridiculous.

Maybe next you can explain to all of us how Jose DeLeon was really better than Jack McDowell or how Joel Horlen was really better than Catfish Hunter.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I think JORRs biggest mistake in his arguments is his claim that a pitcher is pitching against the other pitcher. Pitchers pitch against the other teams hitters.
I don't think he believes that the team behind the pitcher matters. He never seems to believe in the concept of an offense behind a pitcher being meaningful towards a pitchers success.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Of course it matters. But nobody has a terrible offense over his entire career. And even if he does, if he's really a great pitcher, the offense he's facing on the days he's pitching isn't better than his own facing a lesser guy. See Walter Johnson.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

There is but I would argue that may be the most important thing. I love Mark Buehrle but I don't think he would have had the same success if he had to pitch with the same offensive support as Quintana or Sale (Sale has gotten good support this season).

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Jose Quintana has, so far.



What?

First of all, let's stop using the term great. I don't know who introduced that, but I don't believe it was Nas or myself. Quintana is good. Maybe very good. But great? We're not overselling Quintana here; you're underselling him.

Secondly, how are you guaranteeing the last of your sentence? The Nationals offense against a good pitcher has a better chance of scoring runs than the White Sox do against (name your pitcher). Because the White Sox haven't been scoring against anyone. The entire NL, and the Nationals a couple times already, have beaten the hell out of Matt Harvey. Yet he goes 7 IP against the White Sox with only 2 hits given up.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Nas definitely called him "great". And think about your last sentence for a minute. If a pitcher is really good, shouldn't the offense facing him be worse on the days when he faces it than a lesser offense (usually by a fraction of a run on average) against a guy who is supposedly not as good?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

In 90% of his starts the opposing offense is worse than normal.

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

This is from "Solving DIPS":



At 700 Balls In Play, a pitcher has influence over about 28% of the outcome. From season-to-season, BABIP still has a wide variance, which introduces more luck into a pitcher's value in any given season. Buehrle's 28% was certainly brilliant, but it was still only 28% for any given sampling.

The only point you could make is that Buehrle's career BABIP is indicative of a superior skill, as the stats guys show that as the sample size increase, the "true" standard deviation of BABIP goes to zero. OK, but Buehrle's career BABIP is .298, which is...right in line with what has been considered league average since the SABR takeover in baseball.



Which is an interesting notion with the pervasiveness of defensive shifting in the modern game, and I'm interested to see how stats guys handle it, but the fact remains that a large, large portion of what happens after a ball is contacted with the bat is out of a pitcher's hands.



Thank you.



A career WAR better than Buehrle in two fewer seasons, yep.



Hurr durr pitching not throwing. Yawn.

JORR has me pretty much convinced....but that, my friend, is one hell of an analogy.

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That's absolute claptrap. Don't just read some crap somebody put out there like it's an absolute fact. if you thought about it for more than a single moment you would see how ridiculous the idea that a pitcher's influence over a batted ball could be nailed down to an exact percentage actually is.




I've never said anything about "pitching not throwing". You must be thinking of someone else. Yawn. Everyone pitches. Some guys are just better at it than others. Like Buehrle was better, and not just better, but exponentially better than Vazquez. And if you disagree and are poring over numbers to support that, dare I say, you really doon't know much about the game and you're just trying to effect an outre opinion.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I think your problem is that you've only thought about this for a minute before you took a hardline stance.

The good offense will be challenged, yes. That doesn't mean that they can't do better than a piss poor offense facing a below average pitcher.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Alright, big stroker. Either shit or get off the pot. You've done no research, posted no facts, done nothing but just bristle at things that offend your archaic sensibilities. I've substantiated every one of my claims, you've spouted superlatives.



Ohh, there's the "you don't understand the game" routine. What is this, 2006? You've already made a comment about a beard, do I smell a "mom's basement" or "in your underwear" reference next? From someone that comes off as so intellectually polished elsewhere on the board, I must say I'm taken aback by your remedial baseball takes.

See, that's where you're wrong. I've read everything you have and probably more. I just don't swallow everything I read without questioning it. All of the stuff you're spouting started off in a different form until the guys that "researched" it said, "Oh wait, we were wrong, now it's this", and next month it will be that. You've substantiated nothing. You've grabbed screen caps from websites.



if you're really arguing that Javy Vazquez was a better pitcher than Mark Buehrle, it's eminently clear that you don't. I'm taken aback by your misunderstanding and inability to interpret the websites you so obviously love.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

JORR is smarter than rick hahn.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Buerhle was a good pitcher, never really thought of him as an ace..if Greg Maddux spent his whole career on the cubs..is he in the HOF? ... I don't think so, he's probably got 100 less wins.

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Well, we obviously disagree about what a "piss poor" offense is and exactly how different it is from an average to good one within the small space of a single game, but I will grant that you are correct and if in fact they do do better with regularity, that simply supports my point that the man in question is a less than great pitcher.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Are you serious? The Cubs scored more runs than the Braves in many years anyway.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Good, then you'll know that chalking up all of BABIP's variance to defense was a misstep by McCracken, but it wasn't "wrong" insofar as it denied that a pitcher has a demonstrable ability (or "skill") to influence BABIP from sample to sample. It's not that "Solving DIPS" completely broke down the central tenet of BABIP as applied to pitchers, it simply provided texture to what was previously a big nebulous chunk labeled "Defense does dis".



That's generally how science works, yes. But advances in meteorology tearing down older extrapolations aren't a reason to go back to a wet finger stuck in the air.



Read: "I don't agree with what I read because I don't want to, for no articulable reason." x Infinity



You know, maybe we're arguing two different things, and won't ever meet. So let me ask you, what do you mean by "better"?

Who has accomplished more? Buehrle

Who was more valuable in total terms of entertainment, winning, dollars, etc., to their team/organization? Buehrle

Who was more valuable in a context-neutral and comparable metric? Vazquez

With whom would one rather build a rotation for a nameless, faceless organization of yet-undecided roster composition? Vazquez

You know, I don't think we're really arguing two different things, but I think the core of our disagreement is philosophical. I simply don't believe that there is any such thing as a context-neutral environment. It just doesn't exist and so, it doesn't matter. The numbers only exist within the games in which they were established.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

You call him a loser so that means that you thinks he is bad.

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Impressed with the rhetorical analysis here. This is good stuff.

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