Posted by Jtpsops on 10/11/2017 9:34:00 AM (view original):
Posted by dahsdebater on 10/10/2017 9:06:00 PM (view original):
Posted by wylie715 on 10/10/2017 7:21:00 PM (view original):
how much value did a good player add if his team loses? Not as much as a player with basically the same stats on a winning team. The main point of the game is winning, right?
What is your logic here? Players don't win and lose games. Even pitchers credited with wins and losses don't really win or lose on their own (see 1987 Nolan Ryan). Teams win and lose games as a group. I don't see the logic that says that a player is more or less valuable based on the quality of his teammates.
There are 2 different scenarios here. A few days ago, somebody (don't remember who) argued that Gibson deserved to win the MVP in 1988 because he "inspired" his teammates to win. If your belief is that Gibson improved his teammates' performance, then add that to his hitting, running, and fielding in determining his value. He's adding something to the team. It makes sense for that to count. On the other hand, what I will never agree with is the argument that you and JTP were making earlier that, if its a close race, you pick the guy from the better team. Unless he's also the GM and he picked his teammates, their performance has no bearing on his achievements. Mike Trout has been around for parts of 7 seasons. In that time the Angels have made 1 postseason and didn't win a game. In the 7 years before Trout arrived, the Angels made 5 postseasons and 2 ALCSes. Is that Trout's fault? He's been the best player in baseball since he arrived in the league, and it's really not very close. It just so happens that the rest of the team got worse around the time Trout arrived. I don't see why that should reflect negatively on him unless you believe he caused the regression of his teammates.
The ultimate goal of a baseball team is to win games...to be successful. I hate WAR, but for the purposes of simplicity, I'll use it in this example.
Let's say Player A has a WAR of 7.5 and his team wins 70 games. Player B has a WAR of 7.3 and his team won 90 games and won their division by a game. Player A's team wasn't successful, so from a team perspective, Player A didn't really contribute to the success of his team. Player B's team likely doesn't make the playoffs without him. Did he do it all himself? Of course not, but he was more of a factor in his team's success than Player A was (since Player A's team wasn't successful). Are you saying there's no value in that?
Yes, I'm saying there's
absolutely no value in that.
I'll stick with your example. WAR is way too imperfect to just be able to add a team's WAR up and get the number of wins, but for simplicity's sake let's say it works. In your example, player A had a value of 7.5 wins. Without him his teammates would have won 62-63 games. Player B had a value of 7.3 wins and his teammates without him would have won 82-83 games.
As I see it, there are 2 differences between these two players. Difference #1, player A is marginally better. Difference #2, player B's teammates are substantially better. Neither player A nor player B had anything to do with picking those teammates, maintaining their health and conditioning, setting the lineups and rotation, etc. Player A did not contribute to that better team beyond his 7.3 wins contributed.
He is not contributing any additional value by having better teammates. That's 100% out of his hands.
As I said earlier, if you think it's
not 100% out of his hands, this is a different question. If you think he's helping establish a training regimen, dietary expectations, or general team culture that emphasize better gameday preparation for his teammates, then that could easily be worth more than 0.2 wins. But if all he's doing is showing up to work and having better teammates, that's not an accomplishment. As I said, he's not doing anything to make that happen. I don't think GMs should be determining who wins the MVP, it should be about what happens on the field.
As an aside, in the real world, even guys who vote by WAR would look much deeper into the stat line and defensive tape when WAR is that close. I think WAR can be a very bad proxy for total value in some cases. WAR says Rendon was the best 3B in the NL this season, followed by Bryant. If I were going to vote for any NL 3B for the MVP it would be Arenado. I think the defensive metrics this year were grossly skewed - dWAR has Rendon as a significantly better defender than Arenado, but single seasons of defensive metrics are unreliable and the eye test tells me that Arenado is still a much better defensive player. You may remember that I was still supporting Miggy for MVP over Trout in 2012-2013 in spite of the fact that WAR called that a landslide for Trout. But again, the above paragraphs are based on the assumption that WAR is perfect. If WAR is perfect, I take Player A.