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Originally Posted by dougaiton
It's really, really simple - a quick and dirty estimate. Well, I hope darkhorse (the true hero of historical simming!) won't mind me dishing it out, but IIRC it's as simple as subtracting 88 from BP's rate stats and multiplying the remainder by 4.
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Thanks for the formula, dougaiton. It looks to be as good as any other estimation of defensive range.
After fooling around with darkhorse's formula, I did some playing around with the numbers at the Baseball Prospectus website. By extrapolating from the Rate, FRAR, and FRAA for a number of extremely good defensive players, I was able to deduce the Rate of a replacement player at each defensive position (per BP). I'm assuming that the "88" used by darkhorse in the original formula was meant to represent the replacement level player at a given position. A potential problem with this is that BP appears to have different replacement levels for each position, which appear to be as follows:
- c: 75
- 1b: 90
- 2b: 80
- 3b: 87
- ss: 80
- cf: 85
- lf/rf: 90
For what it's worth, the replacement level used for defense for pitchers is roughly 93.5.
With this one change, I've taken the liberty of modifying the original formula; we now have:
Range rating (/100) = (Rate -
positional replacement Rate) * 4
Another question one needs to ask is: What range of ranges would one like to have? Do you want the occasional shortstop with defensive prowess of historic proportions to be reflected by a range in excess of 100 (~120), or would you rather have 100 be the cap? The answer to that question would determine how you set the multiplier (in this case, 4).
If one used the all-time career high for Rate at each position (e.g., SS - Ozzie Smith, 111) as the basis for setting the range rating to 100/100, one could conceivably come up with a formula for SS range such as this:
SS Range rating (/100) = (Rate - SS replacement rate (80)) * 3.225
This would then allow for extreme performances, such as that of SS Orlando Cabrera for Montreal in 2001 (Rate = 120). His OOTP SS Range for that season would be 129, his only season over 100. Ozzie, on the other hand, would have eleven seasons with an OOTP range of 100+.
What follows is a far from all-inclusive list of best Rate at each position, season and career:
season
- C Ivan Rodriguez, 127
- 1B Keith Hernandez 115
- 2B Bill Mazeroski, 121
- 3B Brooks Robinson, 120
- SS Orlando Cabrera, 120
- CF Andruw Jones, 121
- LF/RF Dwight Evans, 116; Barry Bonds, 115
career
- C IRod, Johnny Bench, 112
- 1B Hernandez, 107
- 2B Mazeroski, 113
- 3B Rolen, 108
- SS O.Smith, 111
- CF A.Jones, 111
- LF/RF Evans, Bonds, 104