Quote:
Originally Posted by kriscolic
It makes perfect sense that the DP rating should have an insignificant impact on a player's ability to turn a DP because we don't really have any idea who is good or bad at it in real life.
We can say that Bill Mazeroski was great at turning two, but we don't really know for sure and any attempt to place a number on it is guesswork
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Well, I respectfully disagree. Every statistical measurement depends on “so, so many factors”. Using your argument one could state that “we really have no idea” if one pitcher is better than another, since so many pitching statistics are heavily dependent on team defense.
The fact that fielding statistics are more difficult to measure and less exact than hitting statistics doesn’t mean you can just throw them out and say they mean nothing. We may not have a perfect understanding of how much better (or worse) Bill Mazeroski was at turning double plays than some other player, but it’s not true that we have no idea.
If I were in a historical league and Bill Mazeroski was in it I would want the game to simulate his skills as accurately as possible, but frankly that is completely irrelevant to what we’ve been talking about. Trying to determine how best to simulate historical players’ abilities is a separate problem from the one I addressed in the original post.
Obviously I haven’t looked at every rating OOTP has bestowed on every historical player but I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that there are probably ZERO historical second basemen (except those who only played a few games at second) with Turn DP ratings as low as the ones we’ve been talking about. For real second baseman, the ratings are probably sandwiched into a much narrower range. If you’re using a 20-80 scale, I’m going to guess that there are no 20s or 25s or 30s or 35s among players who played a full season’s worth of games at second base, anytime in history. I’ll bet 40s are very rare too. Probably almost all of the “legitimate” second basemen that have been rated by OOTP have Turn DP ratings in the 45-80 range, or maybe 50-80. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m right, though, it means that the effective range of Turn DP ratings for a real second baseman uses only about half of the spectrum of possible ratings. I don’t have a huge problem with saying that the difference between Bill Mazeroski and an average second baseman is not enormous, and may be somewhat difficult to measure. I DO have a huge problem with saying that the difference between Bill Mazeroski and an inept first baseman who’s never played second base trying to play it isn’t enormous or easy to measure.
I’m in a fictional league. In a fictional league we have to assess players by their ratings (and also by their statistics, but we don’t have statistics until the player has played). An extremely low Turn DP rating should tell us “don’t put this guy at second base, he’s not a second baseman”. But that rating, as it stands right now, doesn’t tell us anything of the sort. Right now the Turn DP rating says “ignore me, I have almost nothing to say.”