The Tabularium

Adjusted Sim Scores

2005-12-30T13:02:00.000-05:00

During a Hall of Fame discussion in this thread on Baseball Think Factory, similarity scores were cited as a piece of evidence comparing a few players for worthiness for election to the HOF.

For those of you who aren't familiar with sim scores, they were developed by Bill James as sort of a toy for showing who a player is most comparable too. Sean Forman, who runs baseball-reference.com describes the system here.

The largest problem with sim scores as conceived by James (and generally used) is the lack of adjustments - both for park and for era. I had done some work after the 2002 season to try to include those adjustments and get a more realistic sim score. I posted some of those results on the thread above and one poster asked for more information. Since my data was 4 years old (based on 2001 stats), I offered to re-run the scores with more up-to-date information (stats through 2004). So far, I've only done the work for batters.

Here's a brief overview of my methodology:

To begin with, I worked from the following list of assumptions:

1. Sim scores, as they are calculated today, are accurate beyond era and park concerns.

In other words, the values that James devised are the correct values to measure differences between players. This includes limiting the comparison to offensive productivity. Because defensive measurement is so widely debated, and because the stats needed to calculate a reliable defensive measure tend not to be available throughout the entire history of baseball, I chose to ignore the defensive value a player contributed.

2. Teams played a balanced schedule with no interleague play.

I made this assumption to simplify calculating park adjustments. Assuming a balanced schedule allowed me to calculate a park multiplier using the formula (BPF + LBPF)/200 where BPF equals the batters’ park factor for the home park and LBPF equals the batters’ park factor for the remainder of the league. There are some concerns with using the one-year park factors with no regression, but it seemed that the effects would be rather minimal since I’m interested in actual performance rather than prediction.

3. Park effects are even across all events.

Again, this was a simplifying assumption. It was much simply computationally to apply the single multiplier (discussed above) to all the stats, rather than try to figure out component effects – which probably would not even be possible for most of the older parks.

4. The sample size for any single position’s stats for a single year is too small to be an effective measure of the average performance.

Ideally, I would have liked to add a real positional adjustment to my calculation of the sim scores, rather than maintaining that proposed by James and used on Baseball Reference. Since my methodology is based on normalizing stats against an average player, that would mean creating an average player for each position for every year. I think the sample size for say American League Shortstops in 1964 is too small to use as population to measure against, but that’s really just personal opinion – I could be convinced otherwise. This choice made things easier computationally as well. I was able to ignore multiple positions in a year, rather than having to weight a player’s stats by his time spent at each position.

Taken those four points as givens, I used the following method to calculate my Adjusted Similarity Scores.

1. Park adjusted yearly stats for all major leaguers through 2001

This is pretty self-explanatory. I used the multiplier discussed above (BPF + LBPF)/200 to account for the park effects.

2. Calculated rate stats (occurrence per plate appearance) for all major leagues through 2001

I broke up the rate stats by league. For example, in 1914, I had rates for the major offensive states for the National League, the American League and the Federal League. This was a simple matter of dividing the number of times a particular event occurred by the total number of plate appearances for the league in that season.

3. Determined an average year for each player-season.

I did this by multiplying the rate stats times the actual plate appearances for a player in the season to determine what an average player would have done if he had the same number of chances.

4. Summed real yearly stats (park adjusted) and average player stats to create career stats.

Simply added the stats from each year to create two different careers for each player – the real (park adjusted) one and the “average” career. As part of this step I also figured the career batting average and slugging percentage by using the component stats.

5. Normalized career stats by subtracting “average” from real

Subtracting the “average” stats from the real stats gives us a value for how much a certain player exceeded or fell short of the average for his career. By comparing the actuals to the average (both determined on a yearly basis) we can account for the offensive level of the era – thus providing the era adjustment missing from James’ sim scores.

6. Calculated weighted positional value

I did basically what Sean Foreman does on Baseball Reference. We both calculated a positional value using James’ position scores and a weighted average of the positions played. Where we might differ is that Sean uses “primary position” and I use any appearance at the position in my calculation.

7. Ran the sim scores algorithm.

I used the same numbers as James and Sean so there’s no need to elaborate on this step.

Now let me get to the interesting part, the scores. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to post the entire spreadsheet of all the scores onto Blogger. What I will do is post the scores for the major HOF candidates from this year's ballot. Anyone who wants the full list, just send me an email and I will send it out.

Clicking on the player's names will take you to their baseball-reference page.

Belle, Albert
935 - Manny Ramirez
927 - Juan Gonzalez
926 - Wally Berger
924 - Frank Howard
924 - Chuck Klein
911 - George Foster
910 - Rocky Colavito
909 - Rudy York
906 - Bob Johnson
898 - Duke Snider

Clark, Will
930 - Edgar Martinez
915 - Cecil Cooper
915 - Jack Fournier
913 - Bob Watson
911 - Keith Hernandez
911 - Bill Terry
910 - Jim Bottomley
909 - Ted Kluszewski
905 - Rico Carty
901 - Roger Connor

Concepcion, Dave
912 - Bill Russell
903 - Garry Templeton
901 - Leo Cardenas
899 - Alan Trammell
897 - Johnny Logan
897 - Marty Marion
897 - Cookie Rojas
895 - Bill Mazeroski
893 - Rick Burleson
891 - Rafael Ramirez

Dawson, Andre
899 - Billy Williams
888 - George Foster
884 - Dave Parker
883 - Tony Perez
882 - Goose Goslin
871 - Rafael Palmeiro
871 - Jim Rice
870 - Juan Gonzalez
869 - Ernie Banks
865 - Duke Snider

DiSarcina, Gary
954 - Rey Ordonez
947 - Felix Fermin
947 - Kevin Stocker
946 - Chris Gomez
945 - Pat Meares
945 - Jose Uribe
944 - Gene Michael
939 - Bucky Dent
937 - Tom Veryzer
935 - Buddy Kerr

Gaetti, Gary
922 - Tim Wallach
900 - Robin Ventura
894 - Sal Bando
889 - Doug DeCinces
886 - Larry Parrish
883 - Graig Nettles
875 - Dean Palmer
872 - Frank Thomas
871 - Tom Brunansky
871 - Deron Johnson

Garvey, Steve
909 - Cecil Cooper
901 - Al Oliver
898 - Dave Parker
893 - Jake Beckley
886 - Will Clark
884 - Hal Chase
884 - Bob Watson
882 - Ted Kluszewski
881 - Andres Galarraga
878 - Frank McCormick

Guillen, Ozzie
951 - Alfredo Griffin
924 - Don Kessinger
922 - Larry Bowa
906 - Rey Sanchez
902 - Tim Foli
900 - Omar Vizquel
894 - Bill Russell
892 - Roy McMillan
889 - Jose Vizcaino
888 - Mike Bordick

Jefferies, Gregg
966 - Lee Lacy
952 - Pete Fox
947 - Buddy Lewis
945 - Roberto Kelly
943 - Tony Gonzalez
942 - Lee Maye
940 - Lew Fonseca
939 - Amos Strunk
935 - Cleon Jones
935 - Jerry Mumphrey

Mattingly, Don
941 - George Burns
938 - Cecil Cooper
938 - Frank McCormick
923 - Bob Watson
922 - Hal Chase
916 - Carl Furillo
909 - Hal McRae
904 - Rico Carty
904 - Paul Hines
901 - Harry Davis

McGee, Willie
913 - Sam Rice
912 - Mickey Rivers
907 - Curt Flood
905 - Matty Alou
894 - Lloyd Waner
892 - Enos Cabell
885 - Vic Davalillo
884 - Doc Cramer
882 - Jerry Mumphrey
878 - Jose Cardenal

Morris, Hal
942 - Sean Casey
936 - Joe Start
935 - Danny Cater
935 - David Segui
930 - Dick Hoblitzel
929 - Joe Cunningham
926 - Dick Siebert
924 - Wes Parker
923 - Bob Boyd
922 - Warren Cromartie

Murphy, Dale
924 - Rocky Colavito
923 - Gil Hodges
915 - Jack Clark
914 - George Foster
911 - Darryl Strawberry
906 - Rudy York
901 - Bill Nicholson
899 - Roy Sievers
897 - Jose Canseco
895 - Eric Davis

Parker, Dave
914 - Tony Perez
912 - Goose Goslin
909 - Del Ennis
906 - Jim Rice
898 - Steve Garvey
897 - Andres Galarraga
887 - George Hendrick
886 - Al Kaline
884 - Andre Dawson
884 - Zack Wheat

Rice, Jim
922 - Andres Galarraga
917 - George Foster
914 - Willie Horton
908 - Ellis Burks
906 - Dave Parker
904 - Reggie Smith
903 - Billy Williams
902 - Goose Goslin
901 - Joe Adcock
901 - Frank Howard

Trammell, Alan
921 - Jack Glasscock
918 - Jay Bell
907 - Barry Larkin
903 - Luke Appling
902 - Jim Fregosi
901 - Leo Cardenas
901 - Alvin Dark
900 - Joe Sewell
899 - Dave Concepcion
898 - Dick Bartell

Weiss, Walt
960 - Bud Harrelson
923 - Spike Owen
921 - Ivan DeJesus
921 - Roy McMillan
920 - Mark Belanger
918 - Dick Schofield
917 - Scott Fletcher
916 - Mike Bordick
916 - Rey Sanchez
914 - Roger Metzger

Currently listening to...

2005-02-07T20:33:00.000-05:00

The Shins. Chutes Too Narrow

I've been really into this band since I saw Garden State (quickly becoming one of my favorite movies by the way). They have two songs on the soundtrack
, both off the first album Oh , Inverted World. This album engendered comparisons to early Beach Boys, which I didn't really get. Not that I disliked the music - I just didn't see any similarities to Pet Sounds.

With Chutes Too Narrow, I want to level-jump on the rock-and-roll icon comparison scale. Beatles comparisons are generally over-used, and under-realized, but the feeling I get when I listen to this album is a lot like early Beatles albums. The CD is chock full of 3 minute long poppy songs with a tremendous variety of sound.

Obviously writing about music isn't my forte, so I'll stop trying. It suffices to say that I recommend you pick up this CD at once. Check out the Pitchfork review.

Currently on the night stand

2005-01-31T20:09:00.000-05:00

I'm currently reading The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menard. It's an exploration of the major American intellectual themes from the second half of the 19th Century. The main characters are Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce and John Dewey. So far it's been a very interesting look at the philosophical leanings of America and especially Boston after the Civil War. James, et al, are generally known for espousing the doctrine of pragmatism, but the book also touches on natural selection, legal theory, and the ascension of statistics and the law of errors into popular use. I'd recommend it to any student of intellectual history. Oh, and the Pulitzer people liked it too.

Boringly solid is a bad thing?!?

2005-01-19T18:32:00.000-05:00

IBM announced its 4Q 2004 earnings yesterday afternoon. The earnings were $1.80 per share, solidly beating the Street's projection of $1.76. Yet the stock dropped close to 2 points in the day since the results were reported. The reason? Apparently IBM wasn't exciting enough. Analyst Laura Conigiliaro from Goldman Sachs characterized the outcome as "another boringly solid quarter." Since when was solidity a bad thing in the business world? Generally beating both your revenue (by $.27 billion) and profit expectations is a good thing. But for some reason IBM investors (of which I am one) and executives are being punished by the market because the results weren't flashy enough? And people wonder why executives have incentives to take dangerous risks or act illegally.

For want of profitability

2005-01-18T21:04:00.000-05:00

Pick out the major stories in the business world since the dot-com bubble burst: scandals, layoffs, offshoring, more scandals. All of these are predictable outcomes of a flawed mentality of business. The focus on short-term shareholder value creates incentives for companies and executives to do whatever is necessary to maintain the profit line for this quarter, or fiscal year, and to mortgage the future to keep the stock price up.

Let's consider the short-sighted activities that companies engage in to meet quarterly goals. Profit appears to be the primary metric used to judge the company's achievement, which creates two possible paths to success -- increase revenue or decrease expenses. Creating additional revenue is a less than certain endeavor, because it's based on a lot of outside sources. If you're having a tough quarter, there's a fairly good chance your customers are too (otherwise they'd be buying more of your product). Not only that, but you will likely face increased competition as everyone in the industry scrambles for any dollars left on the table. The obvious answer is to look to cut expenses.

In my limited experience, the first things to go are employee development programs: education, tuition reimbursement, etc. There are two deleterious effects from cutting development. First, you are reducing the skill growth of your employees, which may hurt you in future years, as the industry changes and new skills are needed to compete. Second, and perhaps more damaging, you are creating negative feelings in your best employees. These employees are likely the ones who desire to enrich themselves through education. They are also the employees you least want to lose. Driving away your best employees obviously is going to have a negative impact on performance at some point. If you're lucky, it may just be having to pay more to keep these employees from jumping to another company. If you're not so lucky, you're going to be stuck with a bunch of low performing employees.

I've also heard of examples where companies have cut travel that wasn't projected to lead to immediate revenue. That means that any sales calls or marketing efforts requiring travel were stopped unless the results were going to be realized within 90 days or less. While this is a much more extreme measure, and consequently much less frequently used, its downside is much more obvious and much larger. Is the effect on future revenue really worth the savings that cutting travel costs will bring?

Now let's turn our attention to the executives and the conflict of interest many are faced with. As anyone the least bit familiar with the tech industry in the late 90s knows, stock options are a very common component of compensation for executives. The rationale behind stock options is mostly solid -- it ties compensation to results -- requiring the executive to be more concerned about his or her decisions. This can go too far, however. Options reward stock price growth rather than company growth. And stock prices all too often don't accurately measure a company's long term value. The day-to-day, or month-to-month fluctuations in stock price are driven more by the latest earnings results (or even the projected results) than a full understanding of a company's future possibilities. The fact that earnings results are so influential creates a great deal of pressure for executives to guarantee those earnings are as high as possible, which in turn encourages behavior ranging from short-sighted (see above) to illegal (see Enron, MCI, etc).

So what can be done to rectify the situation? Recent legislation, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, takes some steps -- increasing independent oversight from the Board of Directors among them. However, the root of the problem is outlook, not enforcement. Creating an environment where profits are valued above all else and shareholders are more important than any other stakeholders leads to the decisions described above. The focus for a company should be on long-term revenue growth and should take the views of all stakeholders into account -- employees are too often neglected. The balance of power from the employee to the employer shifted from one extreme to the other as the bubble burst, and it needs to return to an equilibrium. An environment where employees feel appreciated and aren't always looking over their shoulder is an environment more conducive to productivity and profit. That day will not come until companies and executives are rewarded for real growth rather than imagined profitability.

And I'm apparently a dirty stinking liar

2005-01-14T21:33:00.000-05:00

So scratch the whole long post tonight thing. I'm too tired and too worn out from the weak. Just a tease with the full thing to follow Monday afternoon (I promise this time). You can wait with baited breath for my astoundingly insightful treatise on the scintillating topic of the misplaced focus of public companies.

So I'm much more of a weekend blogger

2005-01-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of updates everyone. It's hard for me to find the time to write on weekdays because of work. I've got a post I'm thinking about that I'll try to write tonight and then it's off to Boston for the weekend.

And there goes the future

2005-01-09T20:21:00.000-05:00

I, along with a lot of Yankees fans, have not been that impressed with the offseason wheelings and dealings. I'll leave the majority of the analysis to those better suited, but I'd like to consider another potential long-term problem besides throwing tons of money at overpaid, declining players.

Every offseason in the past 8 years or so, whether they win the World Series or lose it, the Yankees have reloaded through free agency or trades where they take on contracts other teams either couldn't afford or decided weren't worth the risk. In doing so, they've traded away just about every prospect in their frighteningly thin system. Almost none of those prospects (save Mike Lowell and hopefully Nick Johnson) have done that much, so the loss may not be that great. However, the core of the team, home-grown stars like Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and especially Bernie Williams, are getting older and starting to decline. The players they've brought in, like A-Rod, Matsui and Sheffield, have kept the team competitive. Even if they manage to keep finding the players necessary to win 90+ games a year, I wonder if there will be any effect on attendance when the core of the team is no longer primarily home-grown.

I have a theory, although I haven't figured out how to test it, that fans are more likely to root for a home-grown team, all other things being equal. I think tracking players throughout the minor and watching them break in creates more of an interest. Of course, you can't often break in a bunch of young players at once and expect to maintain a chance at a championship. A safer course of action would be to rotate in one or two younger players a season, to revitalize the team (and to strengthen a connection to the fans for another 6 seasons) without risking a pennant run. It makes even more sense if the younger player can be almost as effective as the veteran he'd replace. To apply this rationale to this season's team, this would suggest giving the 2b job to Robinson Cano rather than Tony Womack.

And there goes the season

2005-01-09T19:36:00.000-05:00

I don't even want to talk about it. You'd think Sherman would realize that the defense and the tackling has been the biggest problem for the Packers the last two seasons. This was just a poorly played game by the Pack overall.

Now to turn my attention to the Yankees, who haven't had that impressive an offseason to my mind. More on that later.

Let's Go Packers!

2005-01-09T11:48:00.000-05:00

I'm looking forward to today's Vikings at Packers matchup. Hopefully it'll be the first step in recovering from last year's 4th and 26 debacle. I'm a little worried about the defense this season, but I think the playoffs line up pretty nicely for the Pack. Normally I'd be concerned about a first round matchup with Moss and Culpepper, but it's at Lambeau in 20 degree weather - a situation dome teams don't generally handle very well (ignore the white-washing at the hands of the Falcons a few years ago). Next week, Green Bay will head to Atlanta to face the aforementioned Falcons. Vick scares me, just because he can take over the entire game, but I'm not convinced about the rest of the team. So hopefully that leads us nicely into a rematch with the Eagles in the NFC Championship game. But I'll leave that game until it happens - don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

Strategery

2005-01-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting conversation with my brother over Christmas about the record industry. He's a junior in Drexel's Music Industry program and is working for a small label in Philly so this stuff is his bread and butter. Anyway, we started talking the stranglehold the RIAA labels have on the whole music industry and how it's bad for the entirety of the value chain (except the labels of course). On the one hand, you have artists willing to sign away their rights for a chance to make it big; on the other, you have consumers who purchase arguably overpriced music and aren't even supposed to make copies of it to store on their computer or their mp3 player (at least according to my admittedly rudimentary understanding of the DMCA).

The interesting part of the discussion came when we were talking about ways to break the power of the major labels. The big labels have three main advantages as far as I can see:

1. Marketing budget and breadth: The major labels can afford to launch a nationwide (or worldwide) advertising blitz to get the word out on a new artist. Plus they have the connections to land artists promotional appearances.

2. Pooling of risk: Major labels will see much larger returns from a smash hit than will a smaller label. This allows the major labels to take chances on more acts, in the hopes they find one that is commercially viable.

3. Distribution channels: The major companies have relationships with national distributors and retail stores that enable them to get priority placement in stores.

I'm sure there are other advantages, but focusing on these three, I came up with a proposal. Small, regional labels should enter into a loose cooperative to promote and distribute each others acts. Obviously there's a lot more thought needed with this, and I'd be shocked if it wasn't being done somewhere, but it appears to be a way to challenge the status quo,

The main reason the conversation sticks in my head is not the idea itself, but more the nature of the discussion. My interest lies in strategy, and it's nothing something I get to think about on a daily basis in my job as a programmer. It's one of the reasons I started this blog - to have some place to share these ideas.

Welcome to the Tabularium

2005-01-01T23:12:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to create a blog for a while as a way of showcasing some writing (or convincing myself to actually get off the couch and do some writing). I plan to post my thoughts on whatever catches my attention, which if history holds will be some business, some baseball and an amalgam of other things.