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Originally Posted by swoboda
I am still an "old school" stats guy at heart, but over the past decade I have come to respect and use a few more stats. WHIP & OPS were the easiest to accept and slowly but surely WAR. It is now something I always look for both in and out of OOTP.
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Welcome aboard
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I remain a bit skeptical on modern fielding measures, at times when I look at dWAR for players who were solid fielders I am puzzled to see negative numbers,
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Defensive numbers are more difficult. Because, counterintuitively, they are more advanced.
With hitting, largely, though it's catching up to defense, it's just looking at results. A single is a single. Whether it's a 100 MPH linev drive or 22 MPH squib off the end of the bar.
Whereas with defense, it has to measure not only what happened, but what didn't happen. Sure, the SS made the play right at them, but how about the one 5 feet to their right?
Measuring defense is kind of like measuring offense by saying not that was a single, but that was a swing on a 93 MPH pitch with 6" of vehicle run and 12" of horizontal drop in a ball 2" above the bottom of the zone and 6" inside from the center of the zone. What was the expected outcome versus what really happened?
Defensive numbers for current players is pretty good and you can trust them. Though,, of course, they are not perfect. Defensive numbers for historical players are...not as good. The people who were keeping stats back then weren't, and didn't have the ability, to keep track of the right things