Quote:
Originally Posted by Garlon
Well the top of the list you have teams apparently with over 140. We really need double plays and double play opportunities to evaluate this better. For example, consider all those errors by those players out of position. They just gave themselves a bunch more opportunities to turn a double play by allowing more players to reach base.
The 1906 Cubs turned 100 double plays and the Boston Beaneaters turned 102 double plays. The Cubs had the best Defensive Efficiency in baseball with .735 and the Beaneaters had the worst with 0.669. The Beaneaters also struck out 140 fewer batters than the Cubs. When you account for these things the Beaneaters turned about 4 more double plays than expected, while the Cubs turned 23 more double plays than expected for the season. That puts the Cubs at 30% more double plays turned than expected and the Beaneaters at 4% more turned than expected for the season despite the fact that the Cubs turned 2 fewer double plays than the Beaneaters.
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I get your point about opportunities and am aware that opportunities ae an issue. You'll also have to explain to me how you're getting expected double plays from your numbers because it's not clear to me. I could reverse engineer that here, since those numbers are available in OOTP.
But for me, I don't actually need more data at this point. I mean, how many more opportunities would you want to assume that Paz had, in the above scenarios to make Paz turning over 100 DPs acceptable? For me, the number would be something in the 500 range of double play opportunities (with him converting then about 20%). Besides, Furious's study already looked at that by leveling almost the entire playing field as best he could, which would include several seasons and even out opportunities to a large extent with the teams being exactly the same except for DP ability of their first basemen.
I will give you some numbers, just comparing Paz's team, Chicago, to Memphis, which is where Mata, the player with the most double plays played and had the most in the league
Paz's team gave up 444 more hits than Memphis but Memphis actually walked 52 more players. If we assume all 444 hits were singles (I don't think anyone thinks that would be true, but let's do it) and take away the 52 extra walks we're at 392 extra runners at 1B. We should probably cut that into 1/3 though, because we know that you can't turn a double play with 2 outs. That cuts it down to 261 runners on first base more than Memphis had with less than 2 outs. Paz had 21 more errors than Mata. That's bad, but it doesn't result in a lot of extra actual double play opportunities, so I will bump the 261 back up to 282 (and that's assuming they all happened with less than two outs).
We know not all of these situations then involved a possible double play result but I'm not super comfortable going beyond that because it involves a ton of estimating (look at the number of hits +walks and then the resulting double plays - you'll see that for normal teams double plays are consistently between 5-10% of that number and lower when you toss in errors). Either way, we're looking at something like 40-60 double play opportunities extra (conservatively high, imo since it's assuming that every extra hit = a single). Even 100 DP player wouldn't convert all those, since lots of other factors apply. Before anyone asks, Chicago pitchers (DP 1 1B at 2B), had a worse slugging than Memphis (DP 93 2B), so it's likely the difference of runners sitting at 1B is even smaller.
Maybe that's too much estimation, but we're nowhere near the number of expected opportunities where'd I'd expect a 1/100 double play rating to get 100+ double plays. Also, I don't yet see anyone giving any hard data that shows that double play rating is having a significant impact or where I would expect a double play rating of 1 to be. I just keep seeing questions that some of us are trying to answer. I'd love to see a sim that proves it wrong and that the double play rating means something significant, the way other ratings do.