Posted by italyprof on 3/30/2012 8:10:00 PM (view original):
Wow. When will we be able to get these players here? How cool is that? Also reasonable aside from the social justice aspect of it, since I am not sure that playing conditions and league organization in the days of say, the Cleveland Naps were any better really than the Negro Leagues were in the 1930s, and the latter were almost certainly superior in coherence and recruitment to the days of Silver King. Thanks for posting this news.
It has nothing to do with playing conditions, league organization, coherence, or recruitment. It has to do with that statement right on the front page (that the link posted here goes to) about how these stats are continuing to change. Record-keeping in the negro leagues wasn't good enough to provide the kind of reasonably dependable stats necessary for WIS. The league schedules were also very short and sporadic to allow the teams to do their barnstorming and play amateurs and semi-pros. Look at the stats compiled by BBR. The aforementioned '36 and '39 Gibson seasons each feature exactly 95 plate appearances, and he was obviously an everyday guy. That's very problematic. It's one thing to prorate stats from a 140 or 154 game season to 162 games; it's entirely another to extrapolate out from a schedule that may include only 18 or 20 official league games, some of which no longer have a reliable boxscore extant (if one ever existed). Part-time players would be excluded because they'd miss the 50 AB/25 IP cutoff, and that doesn't sit well given that proportionately these guys might have had over 100 IP or 200 PAs at the same usage rate in MLB. In the end, the statistics are too limited and uncertain to be conducive to a game based entirely around statistics.