Thread: Moneyball
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Old 07-16-2019, 10:10 AM   #18
stl jason
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sharkn20 View Post
The thing is that historical players were a lot less athletic that mostly nowadays players, therefore you can't rate them as high as contemporary players...

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playing devil's advocate here.... not sure it's really fair to compare players from 100 years ago to modern day players and use that as a basis to downgrade the old timer's defensive ratings.... that's not how it's done with other ratings in the game (example: Ty Cobb only hit 117 home runs in his entire 24 year career and a max single season mark of 12, yet his peak card has a 86 power rating; which is the same rating as Albert Belle-1995 card when he hit 50 home runs)...

I will say the defensive ratings on the pre-ww2 players is greatly improved from v19, so it's a step in the right direction... but it never hurts to revisit how all the ratings are decided to see if it can be tweaked a bit for improvement.

(side note: if we're going to advocate for the re-examination of ratings, I'll be the advocate for the correction of Jack Stivetts offensive ratings... see the post on my dynasty thread for a comparison with two contemporaries of his time)

Quote:
Originally Posted by dkgo View Post
ootp ratings are based on stats not waxing poetically (as much as we have stats from back then). Not saying that they are all perfect but I'm more likely to trust the ootp team's research into real analysis than some 100 year old anecdote people heard in a documentary.

Sisler was a massively negative defender according to baseball reference and fangraphs. Speaker was about average

What sources are you using to show otherwise?
and that's a good point... I can recall watching documentaries / reading accounts from contemporaries regarding players like Tris Speaker (i.e. - he'd play so shallow he'd be almost a 5th infielder, but still could read the pitch/swing of the bat to race back into position in CF to catch the ball, etc).... but when you go to the stats, he had a career fielding pct of .970, which isn't the greatest if you compare to modern day players (like Trout with a career fielding pct of .995).... of course, if you dig deeper there, you can see some big differences in numbers where Speaker shows superior stats... comparing Trout's 9 years of stats in CF to Speaker's first 9 years, Trout blows him away in fielding pct, but Speaker's assists and double play numbers are off the charts... kinda fun to look at the differences

Speaker first 9 years: 1200 games / 3257 chances / 2909 putouts / 230 assists / 118 errors / 76 dp / .964 pct

Trout 9 years: 1003 games / 2510 chances / 2462 putouts / 35 assists / 13 errors / 9 dp / .995 pct
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