Do Win Shares undervalue pitching?
December 14, 2003
In our last article, we reviewed total salaries paid and Win Shares achieved by position by league. There are a lot of interesting stories implied in that chart, such as:
- The American League is the better “value” league, despite the presence of one George Steinbrenner among its owners.
- Second basemen are a good deal in either league.
- AL shortstops and NL first basemen aren’t.
- Pitching is overvalued by major league GMs.
Pitchers created about 36% of all major league Win Shares, but were paid 39% of the money. What’s up with that? Do GMs know something Win Shares doesn’t know? Or vice versa?
Pitching and fielding are the next frontier of my offseason Win Shares quixotic adventure. The analysis is not nearly as clean as the batting analysis, cause pitching and fielding are hard to allocate. But these salary tables are an interesting place to start.
Of course, Bill James designed his system to allocate more Win Shares to pitching and fielding in general. Over an entire league, 48% of Win Shares are allocated to batting, and 52% to pitching and fielding. So is pitching still undervalued?
I ran a little study of 2003 Win Shares, in which I looked at all position players with at least 300 at bats, and all pitchers with at least 75 innings pitched. These two baselines account for about 5% of any team’s total. The sample included about 270 position players and 215 pitchers.
In that sample, ten pitchers created no Win Shares. Yet there was not a single position player with zero Win Shares. In fact, there was not a single position player with just one Win Share.
Of all the pitchers, ten had zero Win Shares, seven had one WS, 16 had two WS and 15 had three. Among position players, one had two WS, one had three WS and three had four WS. The rest had five or more.
Now, four of the position players did have zero batting Win Shares, but received at least two fielding Win Shares. Fourteen position players created less than two batting Win Shares. However, many of them were fielding specialists (or catchers) and they racked up a lot of fielding Win Shares.
No player, other than the DH (and pitcher) received zero fielding Win Shares.
I’ve thought about playing around with the 52%, just for kicks. What would things look like at 54%, for instance? But I wonder: does Win Shares overvalue fielding?
Hmm. Maybe I should change the title of the article.
David,
I have published a subset of “win expectancy” by inning, score, base, out (somewhere). This is the basis for “Win Probability Added”, as well as “Leveraged Index”.
I’ve also published the complete win expectancy by inning, score (theoretical and empirical, again somewhere).
When I get a chance, I’ll post the URLs.
I’ve also constructed the (poorly-named) Tango Distribution, which gives you the expected win% of 2 teams, given the RS/RA. From this, you can compute the “runs per win” (RPW) converter. That’s how I got the above figures.
Let me know what you want to discuss in particular, and we’ll focus on that.
Posted by tangotiger on 12/17 at 04:48 PM
If a pitcher performs at a level that we would all accept as being above replacement level (whatever replacement level is) and is still credited with 0 win shares for his effort, perhaps the 52% split, which is meant to account for the boundless nature of preventing runs, needs to be adjusted somewhat. Win Shares isn’t meant to measure replacement level, but if a position player performing at that level is credited with a positive contribution I would expect pitchers to be credited likewise.
Granted, adjusting the split would dole out even more fielding win shares to position players until we have a better idea of how much of a contribution a pitcher makes to preventing runs.
I’m currently in the process of running a simulation where the only variable is the defensive ability of an individual player to see if the improvement in a team’s record is being properly attributed to that player by the system. I have a gut feeling from the bit of work I’ve done with this already that fielding is being underrated as much as pitching is. Whenever I finish this up I’ll post a synopsis of my study over at ballpark analysis (I’m also planning on doing further tests with individual hitter and pitcher performances being adjusted and using leagues ranging from 2 teams to 30).
Jason
Posted by
Jason Moyer on 12/27 at 03:25 PM
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