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DIPS, Defense, and 1974: A Case Study
Taking this outside as suggested by Steve P. I think the issues pstrickert and others are discussing are important. Let me theorize for a moment and see whether there's general agreement.
1. OOTP is very good at modeling the attributes it is designed to model, provided the correct totals modifiers are being used. Garlon has convinced me of that multiple times. 2. Nonetheless, OOTP is not very good at recreating the dynamics of a pennant race replay. If accuracy means the results will be close to real life, it's not terribly accurate, at least as far as runs allowed are concerned. 3. The key stat driving that differential is hits allowed, both for individual pitchers and for teams as a whole. DIPs takes that stat away from the indiviual pitchers. 4. The available stats in Lahman are limited as far as defense is concerned. 5. Unless we're going to pretend that the original results were mostly luck and that there's no problem, the task for historical OOTP has to be improving the importing or modifying of defensive ability. Everyone with me so far? |
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In other words, defensive ratings do seem to be a big problem, but how to fix? Does anyone aside from Markus even know how the ratings are calculated upon importing? If we had direct access to the game database, we could make a utility that could modify the ratings based on our own algorithm. I don't think he's going to give us such access, however. So short of asking Markus to improve his algorithm and hoping he looks at it, is there anything practical that we can do that would help him improve the defensive ratings? |
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It's also possible that the way to go, which would be doable within the Lahman database, is to develop a "team defense" metric, within which all of the defensive ratings would be modified by a set percentage according to team runs allowed. Or, if you've read the Bill James book on Win Shares, you'll remember his efforts to break those down between pitching and fielding. He has multiple formulae that he used to do that. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I suspect we could find a place on the net that broke those down for every team in baseball history. We could correlate those with the existing defensive ratings. I'm open to suggestions from interested parties. As I said, the first test would be to see whether we could use objective criteria to get 1974 right. |
Putting on my future cap, I suspect big changes in attitude are coming at BABIP.
TOT/YR is a stat that works poorly in conjunction with BABIP. Bill James, in a 2006, article admitted scratching his head over defensive stats that had strange variance. We "missing" something, he said. If you examine the TOT/YR, you'll see strange fluctuations that leave only a few inferences regarding the cause of those wide and sudden variances in good fielders: 1. Injury 2. Chance Or the 3rd inference, which challenges current BABIP philosophy-- the pitchers are exerting much more influence than currently believed on balls in play. |
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STRAT-O-MATIC has had an excellent rep with professional baseball players over the decades. They dig into stats, but temper that with scouts, or tv commentators on their pay-roll. I think that's important. Bill James writes about the shadow of the monster, how much is missing from the fielding math that we currently have. He says what's missing is important. In other words, Math without Eyes may be as bad as Eyes without Math. :) |
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Individualized season quickstarts might be fun, and they'd probably be easier to do than what I have in mind, but you'd lose the career play. Still, I can see the advantages in the approach. Do you have a quickstart that works for 1974? |
Markus said (as of today) that he'll work on the fielding problem for Patch #2. It would definitely help if we had some specific, detailed recommendations for him. :)
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To support historicals the way many want to play them, OOTP really needs a season-by-season set of rosters that sets defensive ratings. Someone could do that in their "spare time" by loading up the game, then doing a roster export/import (I think defense can be adjusted that way, anyway ... it works in v9, so I assume it works in X). Then save the game as a quickstart asnd post that.
It's a lot of effort, but could be worth it to the community if a few folks were to undertake it. |
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Hey Oldtimer, I'm curious as to which '74 Dodgers players you tweaked. I'm guessing Russell and Garvey were two... Also, did you find that you needed to do anything to the bullpen since Marshall was used far more often (and for more innings) than any AI would be likely to use him?
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It just occurred to me that a program could be made to experiment with defensive ratings. If you export the team rosters as a text file, the program could then read the Lahman database that comes with the game, come up with the new ratings and then modify the roster file for reimportation. That would remove the tedium of hand inputting the ratings.
Of course, the hard part would then be coming up with an algorithm for using the Lahman stats to come up with ratings that are consistently superior to what the game comes up with. |
I could write such a program, but probably not the algorithm for deriving the superior ratings. In other words, I could do the easy part. :)
If someone without programming skills can figure out the hard part, I could program it. Of course, if someone can program and has ideas on how to better rate the players, that would be even better. |
I'm still testing things out in game to get a feel for how changes to defensive ratings can impact a team and I thought I'd share the results.
I made changes (upward) to Campaneris' range and arm ratings and to Green's as well. In RL, Green didn't even play full time that year, but the AI uses him as the starter all year. Even changing just Green's or Campaneris' defensive ratings, but not both, made a noticeable improvement in the A's pitching outcomes. Those were the only changes made in the whole league. The A's team pitching stats more closely resemble RL and the team consistently wins the division (all 6 times - small sample size, I know). Except for usage, the individual pitchers (on the A's) also performed closer to RL. However, I'm not suggesting these are the changes needed to make the A's play more like RL. I was merely interested in how "little" changes could affect certain outcomes. I wonder how much better the game can do with rating players. Short of people doing the ratings manually (like roster sets in other games), does anyone believe the in-game ratings can be made much better? |
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I think we should give the upcoming patch a try, since Markus has said he will try to improve defensive imports. Then we can analyze the imports vs. what we know about the players. |
Just wanted to note that I edited my post above regarding GB%. The GB% didn't seem to matter at all (at least I couldn't see any effect) after running many more tests. I should know better than to post results from so few tests. :o
Nevertheless, the two defensive changes did make a big difference and I'm hoping that a few such adjustments on each team (if necessary) will improve the replay. I'm going to see how much improvement can be made in the '74 replay without touching hitting and pitching ratings, but will hopefully resist posting results before sufficient testing has been done. :D |
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