Ken Griffey and On Base Percentage

                           

I'll spare you reviews of 10,000 BC and Alien Vs. Predator - Requiem. All I have to say on the subject is thank God I didn't pay to see or rent them.

Still no phone by the way, and now my cable is whack-a-doodle, shutting off and turning on for no reason. I think the storm did a doozy on my line somewhere.

Thanks for all the condolences regarding Lisa's Great Uncle.

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Meanwhile I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Ken Griffey Jr on becoming only the sixth man in history to hit 600 home runs in Major League Baseball.

I'll save the fawning tribute for his eventual retirement, which sadly is not that far off. But the achievement has set off a flurry of pro-Griffey articles, and in response my favorite lurking spot (Baseball Think Factory) has lit up with commentary calling Griffey overrated.

[Keep in mind the folks at BTF are (largely) stats freaks, virulent left-wingers politically and socially, mildly tolerant of the PED implicated players, and cynics to boot. It is in their nature to disagree with the mainstream, and frankly they do so with style and panache.]

A recent thread has argued convincingly that Barry Bonds was a superior player to Ken Griffey, even prior to his alleged PED use at the turn of the century.

They have a point. Bonds was a great player, combining speed, average, power, and great D in left field. Bonds clearly outclassed Ken as a stolen base threat, but in the world of sabermetrics stolen bases are dismissed with a snort. OBP - on base percentage - is where the new center of the universe lies.

Take a look at this comment from the site:

Bonds 1989-98 versus Griffey 1990-99 (Griffey's best 10 consecutive years vs Bonds' 10 years prior to PED use)

Total WARP3 (adjusts for defense and position, though it is BPro's defensive rating)
Griffey 96.0
Bonds 124.7

Best Five Seasons
Griffey 12.8/12.2/11.4/10.8/10.5
Bonds 15.4/14.7/13.8/13.7/12.1

WARP3 is a proprietary statistical formula that stands for Wins Above Replacement Player, in thiscase revision 3.

"Replacement Level" can be thought of like this: take your average lounge singer. Replace her with your tone-deaf Aunt Mildred onstage and you've gone below 'replacement level'. Replace her with Celene Dion and you're (dramatically) above replacement level. Drop in another plain jane singer and your right at an even keel.

Now bear in mind a team with a full complement of replacement players is mathematically awful and expected to produce no more than 25 wins; that isn't realistic, and for that reason among others I find the math (but not the concept, which fascinates me) less than all-impressive.

Still, the math is clear: based on these and other detailed formulas Bonds walks away on top.

But wait.

A vast amount of Bonds worth is rightly attributed to his on base percentage, which was greatly (duh!) increased by drawing more walks than anyone in history. Valuable? Darn tooting. But in some situations is a high OBP a determent to a player's worth?

This is dangerous ground. Dusty Baker was crucified for criticizing some high OBP players for 'clogging the bases'. He sounded stupid, but he may have had a point.

Say you have two sluggers. Both are blessed with speed, defense, great power, and average. Both play for lousy teams and are the only legitimate hitting threats in the lineup.

Player A has a OBP of.380. Player B has a OBP of .320.

This might be an extreme example, because to my eyes Player A kicks B's behind, but those numbers came out of the air.

Let's say player A walks a lot, a realistic assumption given his OBP. Sure he gets to first base significantly more often than Player B, but he is no doubt stranded there just as often when his weak-hitting teammates step to the plate.

Meanwhile, playing for an equally lousy team, player B garners fewer walks. Instead of taking pitches he is attempting to drive the ball whenever he can, albeit with a corresponding drop in average and OBP.

All things being equal, we can guess that B manages to get a few hits with all those extra swings, and that some of them drive in runs. Those are runs that would not be created strictly by OBP. At the very least, the rise in productivity brings the two players to a level playing field. Or not. I could be wrong.

The weakness here, some would say, is that it would fail to account for the fewer times B gets on base and later driven home. My answer is that is that the whole concept is tied to the surrounding lineup - a pure example of a team statistic if you will, and that we have a reasonable expectation that the .220/12/64 hitter behind him isn't going to do much damage.

Mathematically I have no idea how to put this concept, let's call it Adjusted On Base Percentage (AOBP) to life. You would need to study a batters OBP and the slugging percentage of those around him in the lineup. So you'd need to come up with a baseline - the league's average slugging percentage would probably do.

At the league average the batter's actions are neutral in the equation. If his teammates perform above league average  there is no advantage to swinging away. In such cases, OBP is of great worth and should be valued as such, and therefore his AOBP would be higher.  If his teammates are below average OBP is not as important, and his AOBP would be lower than his OBP.

How the average would be calculated . .well, that's beyond me. In the morning this whole idea will probably seem foolish to me, but right now it seems worth considering.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: baseball