Arthur: On regressing defense
From SABR member Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus on August 28, 2014:
We heard the first blows in the nascent MVP debate of 2014 unfold just last week. At the time, Alex Gordon led all players in fWAR (by a narrow margin), largely on the basis of his extraordinary defense in left field (15 fielding runs above average, fifth highest in MLB). In response, Jeff Passan wrote that the idea of Alex Gordon as the best player in baseball was absurd.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. To some of the doubters of sabermetrics, Gordon’s triumph on the leaderboards was yet more proof of the uselessness of WAR(P). To others, arguments against Gordon may have seemed ill-formed.
Fortunately, Gordon no longer leads baseball players in any of the flavors of WAR(P) (whew, argument defused). Even so, Alex Gordon brought to the surface a recurring theme in criticisms of the WAR framework: the weighting of defensive metrics. In theory, a run saved is a run scored. But whereas the relationship between singles, doubles (etc.), and runs produced is easily parsed with linear weights, defense is more difficult to measure. The steps between the events on the field and the runs being saved require more estimation, and that potentially injects more error in the final result.
A natural response to the additional error implicit in defensive measurements is to deem them unreliable and regress them according. ‘Regression’ exists in the sabermetric lexicon as both an abstract concept and a concrete, mathematical transformation. In the abstract sense of the word, to regress a player’s defensive WAR(P), for example, is to mentally adjust his contribution back toward the mean, accounting for the uncertainty in the estimate—exactly what we’d like to do with defense.
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Originally published: August 28, 2014. Last Updated: August 28, 2014.