Judge: The most likely contribution in baseball stats
From SABR member Jonathan Judge at Baseball Prospectus on August 2, 2018:
Here at Baseball Prospectus, we talk a lot about so-called “deserved” runs, hoping to improve upon the raw outcomes traditionally used to evaluate player contributions. We’ve discussed why we think certain metrics do a better job of that— such as Deserved Run Average (DRA) for pitchers or Called Strikes Above Average (CSAA) for catchers—and offered various benchmarks to substantiate those views.
What we haven’t done is to pull together, all in one place, our thinking as to what the concept of credit being “deserved” really means, and how one might go about determining it. We have used the terms “descriptive,” “reliability,” and “predictive” to discuss different types of performance, but not fully elaborated on why those three factors matter to us, or how they compare in importance to each other. Having had a few years to see these concepts in action, it seems like a good time to summarize what we have learned.
Our current views can be condensed into a series of principles. Some may seem obvious, even trivial, but they build upon each other to explain why certain things strike us as very important, while others barely interest us at all. All principles are discussed from the perspective of baseball, but they should apply also to basketball, hockey, and even non-sports contexts.
Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/41748/prospectus-feature-the-most-likely-contribution/
Originally published: August 2, 2018. Last Updated: August 2, 2018.