Site omits Negro Leagues players Topic

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I understand what you are saying, but it has nothing to do with race.  I believe one of the major reasons they include the late 19th century guys but not the negro league is that they have fairly reliable records and box scores for one and not the other.  It would be cool to have access to negro leaguers, though.

6/13/2014 3:01 AM
I couldn't agree more...it's a shame the times were such that more accurate records weren't kept.  I've always believed that if those in charge had known the enormous interest of future baseball fanatics, the time and care would have been higher.

But with their situation, how could it have been known?
6/13/2014 5:39 AM
Racists!
6/13/2014 6:36 AM
There was once a TV movie where a reporter or a scout (who was a racist) is supposed to find a black player, and he's grumbling that you couldn't trust the stats,

At the end of the he finds jackie robinson and is no longer a racist.


Strat-o-matic does have the Negro league stats series as well as a Hall of Fame Series  which averages out the players best 7 years.  The negro league players (me @ and a couple of guys are playing a season with them)  are a real dominate team due to the superior stats.


6/13/2014 5:06 PM
Couple more things about stats in general,  caught stealing stats are inaccurate in the early years.  

Also the lefty / righty stats are guess work.  However I believe they are accurate when with all the complete games back then for programers and game makers to guess them
6/13/2014 5:09 PM
And they have Federal league stats in the data base, but Football doesn't have the USFL or the World football league.
6/13/2014 5:12 PM
I have never bought this "you can't trust the Negro League stats" argument, even allowing for the fact that, yes, the stats are partial and fragmented for many seasons and players' career stats. 

But we have a WIS database that has pitchers with 700-800 IP that never pitched more than 200 or 300 that entire season. That lists SB stats that are unreliable, that has NO Pitchers' batting stats, though pitchers have batted in the National League since just after the Civil War. Baseball has steroid era stats that might as well have been games played on Mars' lower gravitational field for how much they can be trusted, and stats for the Federal League which was hardly a Major League and so on, not to mention that ALL pre-1947 stats are untrustworthy because at least 20% (probably closer to 30%) of the MLB quality players were excluded from MLB for reasons of race. 

In short, there is no excuse. They should do something akin to what Strat-O-Matic has done or find some other statistical approach that is reasonable to come up with WIS iterations of Negro League players and teams that are reasonably realistic given everything else we know from post-1947 experience and from reasonably reliable anecdotal evidence that is confirmed by statistical realities. 
6/13/2014 5:35 PM
No pitchers' batting stats? I don't know what game you're playing, they're definitely included... that's why Bob Caruthers, Wes Ferrell, et al were major cookies prior to a price change...

IP are pro-rated to a 162 game season, so the high IP pitchers are based on that, especially with irregular game seasons in the 1880s (team quitting after 50 games?)

On the rest of that, you have a lot of valid points.
6/13/2014 9:03 PM
So in other words if we only have pitching performance for say 23 games we can extrapolate to a 162 game schedule? Great. Do it for Satchel Paige. 


6/14/2014 12:56 PM
Posted by italyprof on 6/13/2014 5:35:00 PM (view original):
I have never bought this "you can't trust the Negro League stats" argument, even allowing for the fact that, yes, the stats are partial and fragmented for many seasons and players' career stats. 

But we have a WIS database that has pitchers with 700-800 IP that never pitched more than 200 or 300 that entire season. That lists SB stats that are unreliable, that has NO Pitchers' batting stats, though pitchers have batted in the National League since just after the Civil War. Baseball has steroid era stats that might as well have been games played on Mars' lower gravitational field for how much they can be trusted, and stats for the Federal League which was hardly a Major League and so on, not to mention that ALL pre-1947 stats are untrustworthy because at least 20% (probably closer to 30%) of the MLB quality players were excluded from MLB for reasons of race. 

In short, there is no excuse. They should do something akin to what Strat-O-Matic has done or find some other statistical approach that is reasonable to come up with WIS iterations of Negro League players and teams that are reasonably realistic given everything else we know from post-1947 experience and from reasonably reliable anecdotal evidence that is confirmed by statistical realities. 

This post by the Prof covers the most salient points about this issue and deserves to be repeated.

6/14/2014 3:05 PM
     This site cannot even update what they have. To think they would put the time, effort and resources into making pre-1947 Negro baseball players available to us is nothing short of absurd. That aside, the argument that pre-'47 statistics are basically skewed because the best white players never had to face the best black players is flawed because the opposite is also true. Without real statistical evidence we have no idea how much historical baseball statistics or records would have changed. If blacks are playing maybe Ted Williams doesn't hit .406 in 1941, maybe Joe D never gets to hit in 56 straight, maybe Satchel Paige has a lifetime ERA of over 4.00, just a lot of maybe's and no real facts. I don't see an upside to creating evidence we just don't have to make a great wrong right again.
6/14/2014 3:33 PM
Posted by napolean on 6/14/2014 3:33:00 PM (view original):
     This site cannot even update what they have. To think they would put the time, effort and resources into making pre-1947 Negro baseball players available to us is nothing short of absurd. That aside, the argument that pre-'47 statistics are basically skewed because the best white players never had to face the best black players is flawed because the opposite is also true. Without real statistical evidence we have no idea how much historical baseball statistics or records would have changed. If blacks are playing maybe Ted Williams doesn't hit .406 in 1941, maybe Joe D never gets to hit in 56 straight, maybe Satchel Paige has a lifetime ERA of over 4.00, just a lot of maybe's and no real facts. I don't see an upside to creating evidence we just don't have to make a great wrong right again.

You missed the point. It's not flawed to say that the 'white leagues' would have been different, especially in the aspect of hitting. And yes we have no idea how much historical statistics would have changed, but we do know that they would have in some way. You are right that the negro leagues were"skewed" as well in relation to a mutually inclusive league. There's no revelation there. The point was that there should be some reasonable effort of inclusion whether or not this particular sight has the means or ambition to do so.

6/14/2014 6:16 PM
In this case  "some reasonable effort of inclusion" still entails "creating evidence". I just don't see how it could be done in a fair and equitable manner to both black and white players with no access to hardcore statistics. If we look at the partial stats for Josh Gibson on baseball reference:  http://www.baseball-reference.com/nlb/player.cgi?id=gibson002jos   how do you extrapolate these numbers into an entire season knowing full well he never faced any of the best white pitchers of his day.  The same holds true for any pre-1947 white player we look at again knowing he never faced the best black pitchers of his day.  It just seems like a problem with no reasonable solution.
6/14/2014 10:40 PM
The statistical issue with Negro Leagues is the same as the issue with the National Association, missing data (For many seasons they only have boxscores for half-two thirds of the games - making players stats fairly unreliable since the records we do have represent such small samples). It's not like the missing data for less vital data such as CS records from the dead ball era. In both cases, there are groups that have done fabulous jobs of finding and compiling records, and even comparing the strengths of the leagues and teams to other existing leagues and teams from the same and other eras. However, there just isn't enough data. If we had more records I'm sure we could easily norm the stats and records and fill in some of the gaps on less vital stats like we do already here, but we just don't have enough data to make either subset trustworthy.

The comparison the the National Association is also apt due to the length of the seasons for most Negro League teams and National Association teams. Taking a cue from greater minds than mine, both would be aided, along with the rest of the seasons in the WIS database by adjusting the proration formula from a /162 games formula to a /180 day season formula. The length of the season has been fairly consistent since the inaugural NA season in 1871 to today of roughly 180 days. If we prorate innings on this basis instead of on the /162 games basis the insane number of innings we see here, would become much more realistic. Clarkson's '85 season would no longer project to 900+ IP, but to a much more reasonable ~670 IP. Likewise, instead of Al Spalding's 1871 season prorating to 1,390 IP/162, it would prorate to roughly 260 IP/180 (I didn't actually do any of the math here, just ballpark guesstimated) and Satchel Paige's 1934 season (from the stats we do have, though we're likely missing roughly 6 starts) would go from 375 IP/162 to roughly 270 IP/180. 

Hitting stats aren't adjustable to quite the same extent as off days typically allow a hitter the chance to accrue more PA like they do for pitchers with IP, and the small sample sizes (24 games, 30 games, 60 games with 95, 140, 200 PA, etc... don't lend themselves well to prorating as they're very small sample sizes. As Napolean mentions above, look at Gibson's stats... it's hard to take them too seriously when two of his three best seasons have less than 100 PA accounted for... that puts him in the 1871 Levi Meyerle camp. Shoot, even marginal hitters can hit .400/.500/.700 for 100 PA stretches... and this is where the stats break down. Which brings back full circle, there's just not enough season-by-season data for either set of leagues to do anything useful with the stats (unless we treat them as short season hitters  and use just the stats we have with no proration at all and price accordingly, but then we just have a bunch of overpriced bench players that will never be drafted). 
6/16/2014 2:35 AM
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Site omits Negro Leagues players Topic

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