Quote:
Originally Posted by jaa36
Right, but the variables/linear weights for specific outcomes varies from year to year, as does the "FIP constant," so the "Fangraphs formula" is actually different from one year to the next. As in, the "value" of a single or a double in one year will be different (per Fangraphs) from another year depending on the run-scoring environment. And the FIP constant is used to get league FIP to equal league ERA, so also varies from year to year. And there are many others things that are unclear as well... Does OOTP WAR account for a different runs/win calculation from year to year? It's usually about 10, but can be wildly different in some leagues... Does OOTP WAR account for leverage index for relievers? If so, how? Does OOTP wOBA (and thus WAR) include hit by pitches, intentional walks or sacrifice flies? If so, how? I guess what I'm getting at, I'd love for the devs to show their work and let us know how these numbers are getting generated. It's a black box, and there are some pretty clear errors just on the surface.
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I'm pretty positive that OOTP WAR for relievers does take leverage into account because a. leverage is tracked in the game and b. it's part of the FG formula.
To the rest of this, yes, it's a black box. FG doesn't release the formula because it's proprietary and they benefit from some of the work they do on it and I'm sure that part of the agreement OOTPD has with FG is that they don't/can't release the formula themselves. The only way you get this formula available to peruse is if OOTPD breaks the agreement and comes up with their own (which seems unlikely because I'm sure their agreement with FG includes verbiage about how they can't just make up their own formulae that are based on old ones) or, for instance, move on to someone who open-sources their formula like BBRef (which has its own issues, of course).
And at that, at this point these things are so complicated nowadays that for the vast majority of fans, they won't have the understanding of math to parse it anyway. Check out some of the formulae that are out there - BoxRec's rating system, for instance (which I've plotted out a couple times for attempts at "managers" for Title Bout in the past) or Basketball-Reference's "win shares" (which is an absolutely horrendous piece of trash and a giant exercise in the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that's hidden behind complexity, but I digress). As a developer the way I figure my way through these things is to use actual inputs and see how they work in practice. I'm sure actual math people have more sophisticated methods and even my (crude) path is unavailable to the vast majority of people.
What I do know is that neither bWAR nor fWAR use a linear weights based model because that is a nearly 50 year old method of thinking about baseball events that the community has long since moved past. My fear is that fWAR is or will start moving on to physics-based data, which OOTP of course doesn't use because that's not the model of the game. At present that doesn't *seem* to be the case but I guess we'll see...