Baseball Graphs is dedicated to the better use and communication of baseball statistics. Below, you'll find excerpts from, and links to, some of the best baseball writers on the Internet. Follow the links above to read my own intermittent attempts at wisdom (the Baseball Graphs blog), and the heart of this site, historical graphs of every season dating back to 1900.
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Over at The Hardball Times, I’ve included something in the Win Shares stats called Win Shares Winning Percentage (or WSWP). Now, winning percentages and loss shares don’t really work in the Win Shares system, as we’ve discussed before. But I thought it would be enlightening to include some sort of Win Shares rate stat, so I gave it a shot.
The formula I used is simple: WS/(WS plus ExpWS). The beauty of this formula is that it expresses a Win Shares rate as a winning percentage (from .000 to 1.000) except for players with negative Win Shares (whom I zeroed out). The bad thing about this formula is that it’s not quite correct, for a couple of reasons I can think of:
- A true winning percentage formula would be WS/(2 times ExpWS). So as a player moves from his expected Win Shares total, the formula turns increasingly wrong.
- On the other hand, extreme players like Barry Bonds are not given enough credit, because their “negative Loss Shares” are not given full credit.
In a way, I’m trying to create a formula in which two wrongs make a right. So this is a formula that “satisfices.” It’s not quite correct for a lot of players, but it’s not bad overall, particularly for player comparisons.
The other idea I had is to just list the ratio of Win Shares to Expected Win Shares. This is probably a more honest metric, but it’s not as intuitive to many readers.
What do you folks think? Should I go with one or the other, or just drop the idea altogether?