THE BEST CUBS

Player	Position	WPA
Derrek Lee	1B	3.57
Angel Guzman	P	2.15
Ted Lilly	P	1.86

THE WORST CUBS

Player	Position	WPA
Geovany Soto	C	-0.95
Ryan Theriot	SS	-1.19
Mike Fontenot	2B/3B	-1.82

THE BEST SOX

Player	Position	WPA
Matt Thorntnon	P	2.85
Gavin Floyd	P	2
Jim Thome	DH	1.9

THE WORST SOX

Player	Position	WPA
Alex Rios	OF	-1.81
Carlos Quentin	OF	-2.45
Jermaine Dye	OF	-3.14

Quick note: No Milton Bradley. But more importantly, Theriot’s value may be far lower than we thought. His light-hitting, shaky patience at the plate, and terrible baserunning may be actually costing the team. And give Angel Guzman credit for a great season.

As for the Sox, the three worst players on the team might be there starting outfield next season. Ouch. A strange thing on both is how much of a factor middle-relievers seem to be on both sides of town. Both Thornton and Guzman were excellent this season, but interestingly enough they were extremely value.

Each individual situation or game has little meaning in the scheme of things, but over the course of a season or more, a decision to be more conservative on the basepaths or to bat A-Rod 9th instead of 4th may (or may not) have serious consequences.

I won’t bore you with my uneducated rantings on the subject, however.  Let me direct you to a New York Times article on the subject.  Using high-tech computers and advanced algorithms that take into account anything from OPS to wind speed, nerds ran millions of simulations of games and here are some of the things they discovered.

On Batting Order:

Luke Kraemer of Imagine Sports, which owns Diamond Mind, programmed the simulator to force the 2008 Yankees to bat their best hitter and cleanup man, Alex Rodriguez, ninth — to see how scoring was affected. Mr. Kraemer got the run total not for just one season, which can fluctuate as much as 80 runs in each direction from simple randomness, but for 100 seasons — more than 16,000 Yankees games in all.

The result? The Yankees scored 747 runs per season, 40 fewer than their real-life 787. (Diamond Mind was so accurate that 100 seasons with A-Rod batting fourth averaged 789, almost dead-on.) Most research suggests that those 40 runs would mean only about four fewer victories, for a strategy no manager would ever consider; so the difference with Rodriguez batting third or fifth would be insignificant, and nowhere near worth the forests of trees that would give their lives to the ensuing sports-page debate.

On Intentional Walks:

The intentional walk. This frequently used defensive strategy avoids dangerous hitters and can set up a double play, but it also awards a free base, and even the best hitters usually make an out. So is it smart in the long run? Diamond Mind found that it was not, though the difference was only about five runs per team per season.

On Stolen Bases

The stolen base. Advancing from first to second puts the runner in scoring position, but he — and the rest of your hitters — will have a hard time scoring if he gets thrown out. Mr. Kraemer looked at a recent team that ran wild (the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays) and one that barely stole at all (the 2005 Oakland A’s) and switched their mind-sets to see what happened. The A’s scored 20 runs fewer, which probably says more about their players’ inability to run in the first place. But when the speedy Rays stole sparingly, they increased their scoring by 47 runs per season — suggesting that perhaps the Rays were running too often in real life.

On Sacrifice Bunts:

The sacrifice bunt. Is it worth making an out intentionally to move a runner from first to second? Forcing a team that hated that maneuver (the 2005 Boston Red Sox) to do it a lot cost them 19 runs per season. But making a bunting team (the 2008 New York Mets) avoid it also cost them — by 15 runs on average — suggesting that the Mets’ managers, Willie Randolph and Jerry Manuel, used it quite intelligently.

This is not the first study to say a lot of these things, but there are some interesting ideas here.  The fact that batting order does not matter is extremely counter-intuitive.  Also it surprises me to hear that sacrifice bunts can be beneficial, even though it is sacrificing an out (almost always bad to sacrifice one of those, you only get 27 in a game).  What was no surprise was that stealing hurts a team more than it helps.  That is something that anyone who has studied the game of baseball has figured out (unless they refuse to see what all the evidence proves).

The problem with all these numbers is that they are meant to be applied to the course of an entire season, not just one game.  There are certain isolated, individual circumstances where an intentional walk may make sense or batting someone in a different spot in the order may change their approach at the plate.  Statistics cannot completely take into account the pressure of “clutch” situations.  In the long run, however, if a manager applies these concepts (like not stealing) for a whole season, his team is almost guaranteed to score more runs, and thus win more games.

h/t: Rod Beck’s Mullet

Many of you probably subscribe to the theory that statistics can only tell part of the story and things like “clubhouse presence”, “clutch-hitting”, “RBIs”, and “ability to close out games in the 9th” are a crucial if not the most important factor in judging a player’s value (StevieY and all the other jocks are included in this category).  Although I joke that there is no such thing as clutch-hitting, I don’t believe that completely.  There is overwhelming evidence, however, that things like clutch-hitting do not even exist given a large enough sample size.

Whether you fall on the side of the jocks or the stat nerds, everyone can agree that the variables in baseball are limited enough to such things as defense and ballpark (both of which can be accounted for pretty easily).  Statistical analysis, therefore, is a great way of determining a player’s value, though obviously StevieY and others think it is less important than intelligent people like myself, Bill James, Bill Simmons, Rob Neyer, and the guys over at Baseball Prospectus.

Which brings me to basketball.  In the last few years, John Hollinger has spurred a mainstream effort to utilize statistics in basketball in a similar way to how they have been used in baseball.  The problem is basketball is a game of variables above all else.  As any statistician knows, the more variables there are, the harder it is to control for all of them in a statistical analysis.  Where baseball is limited to a one-on-one at-bat, every single play in basketball is affected by the other players around, the offensive philosophy, the defense, the pace, and many other factors.  Bill Simmons explained the problem with trying to use stats as a predominant factor in assessing value in basketball:

In my mind, basketball lends itself to the perfect blend of objectivity and subjectivity. Statistics help only so much; we still have to interpret what we see. Take Jason Kidd. Why has he suddenly become a deadly three-point shooter at his advanced age? Because he isn’t carrying an offense or taking contested shots with the shot clock winding down like he had to in Jersey, that’s why. In Dallas, all he has to do is distribute the ball and shoot … when he’s open. Now look at poor Dwyane Wade. He misses 70% of his threes — the only blemish on his MVP résumé — because his teammates stink, which means he has to hoist one or two contested, beat-the-clock bombs each game.

While the recent use of statistics by teams such as the Rockets and players like Shane Battier, along with John Hollinger’s PER and others, have pushed the use of stats to the forefront of basketball analysis, we have to be careful not to rely on those stats like we do (and should do!) in baseball.

The point here is that as much as I have utilized statistics to illustrate players values and how good teams are in my coverage of the Bulls and the NBA (using stats ranging from points per game and fg% to +/- and PER), I never truly believed those statistics could be used exclusive of other types of analysis to determine a player’s value.  In the upcoming baseball season, that will change drastically.  Statistics like walks and slugging %, as well as almost completely spurning things like RBIs and steals (useless and harmful respectively) are extremely important to proving what a player brings to the team.  I get excited as much as anyone about a walk-off homerun. a crucial late-season save, or a great clubhouse presence (DeRosa’s value in the clubhouse cannot be downplayed) but those kinds of things alone are not determinative of how good a player is over the course of a season (in my opinion).

Oh and StevieY and you other jocks that hate statistics?  Stop saying us stat geeks are ruining the game and making it less fun.  Just because we would rather value a stat like OPS and want our players to draw walks instead of attempt steals (which, by the way, means we want our team to win since it is PROVEN that walking more and stealing less leads to more runs and thus more wins), doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a hot dog and a beer at Wrigley Field while watching Aramis Ramirez hit a bomb in the bottom of the 9th to win the game.