I made a few comments regarding Hall of Fame candidates and career "win values" for positional players in my World Chat. A couple people asked me what the hell I was talking about, so in the interest of not clogging up an entire page of my World Chat with sabermetric stuff that people may not care about, I will clog up one post in this forum with sabermetric stuff that people may not care about. I also believe that it is a really good way to look at Hall of Fame stuff and may help people in other worlds decide who is "worthy" as right now I think a lot of people have no idea who to vote in, how to quantify, etc.
So the basics of assigning how many "wins" a positional player produced is based around the idea that every 10 runs in run differential is worth about a win over .500. This is related to the "Exp PCT" you see in "Advanced Standings." For example, my team right now in No Quitters is 96-62 with a run differential of +184. Since a .500 record would be 79-79, I would be expected to be 97-61, so that is pretty accurate for me there. In Happy Jack, I am 70-45 with a run differential of +92, which predicts a 67-48, so I am getting a little lucky there, but it's still somewhat accurate. You will find that sometimes teams will be off a bit from their "Exp PCT", if they have gotten especially lucky or unlucky in close games, but generally, on a league-wide basis, 10 runs is worth about a win. So on a player basis, you are calculating how many "runs over average" he is, then dividing it by 10 to put it in terms of wins, which I think is just a more meaningful measure.
So to calculate win values for positional players, you need to consider offense and defense. I include basestealing as part of offense.
You can get an idea of "league average offense" pretty easily by simply looking at team statistics over the years and getting an idea of that. What you then do is take the total number of ABs by the player and consider what a "league average player" would have done in those situations. For instance, in No Quitters, batting average has been about .265, players have hit doubles on about 15% of hits, triples on about 1.8% of hits and home runs on about 13.7% of hits. They also walked a little under 9% of plate appearances. So a player who has been exactly average offensively in 5000 ABS would get about 1325 hits, with 199 doubles, 24 triples, 182 home runs, and 450 walks. Then you calculate how many runs that would be estimated to produce, using
www.tangotiger.net/wiki/index.php Batting Runs, which is pretty accurate for WifS. You then compare how many runs that player actually produced, and compare it to the average to see how many "runs above average" that player produced. Note that stolen bases are also included.
For example, an owner was wondering if people thought [URL=http://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/PlayerProfile.aspx?pid=887169]Philip Thomson[/URL] had a chance to get in the Hall when he's done. I compared his offensive output to the average and determined that he produced about 120 runs above average over the course of his career. That would be 12 wins.
Next, I have to find a way to value his defense. This part is a bit more subjective, but I think I get pretty close. The first thing I do is compare him to an average player at his position. This is simple because Thomson played CF basically his whole career. Over his career, Thomson had 243 (+) plays and 8 (-) plays. Yes, he was a freakishly good defender. He had 4946 put outs, 125 assists and 100 errors. I reason that an "average" centerfielder will make no (+) or (-) plays and will have a fielding percentage of .980. I see that Thomson made 5071 outs during his career while the average centerfielder would be expected (by my calculations) to make about 4787. Thus, Thomson made about 284 more outs then the average centerfielder. I then convert these outs to runs. My logic is that, for a centerfielder, about half of those outs would be singles and half would be doubles. I simply use the same Batting Runs values to convert these outs to runs and find that Thomson saved about 187 runs by making those extra outs. To be honest, this may be a little harsh on him as I think it's reasonable to expect that more than half of those (+) plays would have been doubles, so feel free to bump this number up a few more runs if you wish.
You may have now realized that this logic assigns a league-average centerfielder with a defensive value of 0. Certainly, the majority of players in the league are not capable of playing average centerfield. So, you have to assign a positional adjustment to account for the scarcity of the position. To do this, an easy way is to see how many more (or less) runs an average centerfielder produces offensively compared to the average player. I used an adjustment of 5 runs per year, which is based off calculations done on real MLB baseball, but to be honest it is probably a bit low for HBD, which seems to place more demands on the centerfielder then real life does. But, sticking with this, I divide total number of games started by 150 and multiply by 5 runs to get a positional adjustment of an additional 57 runs, just for trotting out there in CF for that many number of games. It is a little bit of a pain for guys who played multiple positions, as you have to do all the defense (I use .980 for CF, 2B, 3B, .975 for SS, .985 for LF/RF and .998 for 1B) and positional adjustments for each position played, but it's not that hard with spreadsheets.
So now we add up offense (120), defense (187), and positional adjustments (57) and come up with Thomson being worth about 364 more runs more than the average player over the course of his career. As noted, this can be adjusted to wins, so we can also say that he was worth somewhere around 36 or 37 wins above average for his career.
To put this in context requires examining some other players. I put some more guys into the spreadsheet and found that most of the guys on the All-Star team were in the neighborhood of 3-4 wins and the MVP candidates were often close to 5. So Thomson had about 10 All-Star caliber seasons. Now, it just depends on whether you consider that worthy of the Hall or not. Right now, the only position player in our Hall of Fame produced almost 70 wins for his career, so obviously Thomson is a ways off that. In No Quitters, [URL=http://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/PlayerProfile.aspx?pid=463856]Raul Cortez[/URL] is probably the best centerfielder who is Hall-eligible and he produced about 50 wins in just 11 seasons. So, based on that, my logic is that, if he retired right now, Thomson would not be Hall-worthy. If he gives another 3 years of 3+ win performance and then hangs on for a few more decent years after that, he should probably be considered.
If anybody is interested, I can probably send you the spreadsheets I used. It makes it pretty easy actually to go through and look at who are the most valuable active players, or who under-30 has produced the most wins and then compare them to guys already in the Hall or who are Hall-worthy. I can expand more on any of the points I made or calculations I did, and hopefully at least one person found this semi-interesting.
And yes, this is what you do when you are "in grad school" but only taking 1 class because you wanted to "get a job."