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> Would some combination of opponents' BA
> and unearned runs be a good measure of
> the quality of team defense?
WS does allocation a teams Wins Shares (3 for Every game won) to OWS and PWS & DWS. A team with a great offense, but weak in Runs Allowed, will have more WS allocated to OWS - the team won games on their offense more than P&D. And of course the reverse. The P&D component is also split trying to capture how much of the P&D was Pitching and how much was D.
How effectively it nails those allocations between Pitching and Defense isn't something I've spent a lot of time studying. It does do a pretty good job of allocating between Offense and P&D, especially when considering the park factors. Team vs. Team DWS comps... I don't know how well it matches up with what we believe we "know".
One other thing to add:
Players on teams who perform well under their Pythag (like the 1952 A's) take it in the shorts, while players on teams that perform well over their Pythag (like the 1949 Red Sox) get boost. Long explanation for this, but the general concept is "those wins/losses had to come from somewhere", and it gets propotioned around the team at the same ratio that they contributed.
The A's and Reds took it hard this year. -10 is off the charts, and -7 is really big as well. You get more extremes like that in a game like OOTP than in real life.
Looking at the Reds and Dodgers, there's a 15 game Pythag swing. 45 WS swing.
John
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