Win Shares

Rating:
Summary: Lazy, Misguided, Counterproductive, Unreadable, Irrelevant
Review: First, I am impressed by the quality and thoughtfulness of the reviews here.

Second, I agree with those who thought it was unnecessary for Bill to beat up on Pete Palmer's work. He did enough of that in the first Historical Abstract more than 15 years ago. I was embarrassed that he was still at it.

Third, I agree with James' assertion that in this work he has taken the analysis of fielding stats further than anyone has gone before. An absolutely brilliant and valuable contribution to the field.

Fourth, I think Win Shares has an enormous problem with interpreting and assigning relative value to pitching stats. I believe his requirement that Win Shares work for -- and be fair to -- players from any era undermines his method when it comes to pitchers. He acknowldeges the essence of the problem in explaining the adjustments necessary for pitchers from the mid 19th Century -- otherwise, all the best players in baseball history would have been pitchers from the 1800s. Isn't it simplistic to make only one such blanket adjustment for early pitchers and then expect the method to hold up across the years for everyone else, from Cy Young to Pedro Martinez? Bill has explained frequently that how pitchers are used is in constant flux. I think it might serve the accuracy of Win Shares if there were several such adjustments to support the evaluation of pitchers from different eras. Bill likes to point out how the logical flaws in other methodologies lead to laughably wrong-headed rankings. His career win shares list has Juan Marichal ranked below Tony Phillips. I loved Tony Phillips, but I cannot believe he contributed more toward the success of his teams than Marichal did.

Finally, Bill doesn't seem to enjoy the writing portion of his work as much as he used to, doesn't seem to let it rip with the abandon he did in the '80s. That's okay, that's probably inevitable. He is still a brilliant analyst and a fine writer.

I'm glad I bought the book.

Rating:
Summary: a step in the right direction, but only a step
Review: First, I am impressed by the quality and thoughtfulness of the reviews here.

Second, I agree with those who thought it was unnecessary for Bill to beat up on Pete Palmer's work. He did enough of that in the first Historical Abstract more than 15 years ago. I was embarrassed that he was still at it.

Third, I agree with James' assertion that in this work he has taken the analysis of fielding stats further than anyone has gone before. An absolutely brilliant and valuable contribution to the field.

Fourth, I think Win Shares has an enormous problem with interpreting and assigning relative value to pitching stats. I believe his requirement that Win Shares work for -- and be fair to -- players from any era undermines his method when it comes to pitchers. He acknowldeges the essence of the problem in explaining the adjustments necessary for pitchers from the mid 19th Century -- otherwise, all the best players in baseball history would have been pitchers from the 1800s. Isn't it simplistic to make only one such blanket adjustment for early pitchers and then expect the method to hold up across the years for everyone else, from Cy Young to Pedro Martinez? Bill has explained frequently that how pitchers are used is in constant flux. I think it might serve the accuracy of Win Shares if there were several such adjustments to support the evaluation of pitchers from different eras. Bill likes to point out how the logical flaws in other methodologies lead to laughably wrong-headed rankings. His career win shares list has Juan Marichal ranked below Tony Phillips. I loved Tony Phillips, but I cannot believe he contributed more toward the success of his teams than Marichal did.

Finally, Bill doesn't seem to enjoy the writing portion of his work as much as he used to, doesn't seem to let it rip with the abandon he did in the '80s. That's okay, that's probably inevitable. He is still a brilliant analyst and a fine writer.

I'm glad I bought the book.

Rating:
Summary: Lazy, Misguided, Counterproductive, Unreadable, Irrelevant
Review: I can't remember the last time I was this disappointed in a book. James, at his lowest professional point, converts subjectivity into numbers with the goal of somehow legitimizing his opinions without any empirical evidence to back them up.

James is aware of these shortcomings, and attempts to divert the reader's attention with worthless tautologies. For example, he has a chapter called "Why 52?" that tries to explain why pitching and defense account for 52% of contributions, and offense 48%. Here's the initial few words:

"Why do we credit 52% of a team's success to pitching and defense, and 48% to offense? Basically for two reasons:

(1) I am convinced that it is as logical to do this as it is not to do it, and

(2) It causes problems if you don't."

He provides no empirical evidence of reason chain of evidence and logic to support his method. All throughout the badly written prose and structure of the metric, there's subjective opinion turned into numbers in an attempt to increase their credibility.

This book is lazy. If any of the new (and better) breed of sabermetricians had come up with this system, they couldn't have gotten it published. James is living off past successes, and has reached the limits of his mathematical and algorithmic capabilities. In an attempt to come up with one overarching metric to measure everything, he's come up with a worthless, distracting hodgepodge of numbers that simply don't do anything well. And, unlike most of his other work, much of which was numerically flawed, this book isn't filled with writing good enough to make it worthwhile.

One star isn't a low enough rating. This book aims high in terms of what it wants to achieve and the respect it thinks its deserves, and fails miserably. Worse still, it does so in a boring and poorly written fashion. James wasted his time.

Rating:
Summary: Win Shares another method to evaluate players
Review: I have read a number of Bill James books, so before I started I knew what I would be getting into. Baseball as a sport is fairly unique in the ways it lends itself to statistical analysis, and people like Bill James are always trying to find better ways to use those statistics to measure the games of baseball. It takes Bill about 100 pages to fully define his system, which seems like overkill, but since he is setting up a system that covers baseball over more than 100 years, with all the differences in playing style and statistics that were kept there are a number of special rules. Bill explains them all in detail, but of course if you are uninterested in how catchers defensive ratings for players in the 1880's were calculated you can always skip that portion of the book.

The next section is devoted to defending his system, and various short pieces discussing different ways that his new statistical method can make things clearer.

The nice thing about this book is that people can actually demonstrate if the "win shares" concept is valid or not. There are a number of computer games that realistically can "replay" seasons. These simulations take the actual statistics, adjust for the ballpark effect and allow you to do a number of things. You can trade players, create your own pitching rotations etc. There are many people who are in leagues, in which you take over the job of the field manager/ general manager, make your own trades and try to win your own world series. After a few years, the players on the teams in the fictional leagues have no relation whatsoever to the players on the teams in the real major leagues. I am associated with such a league that has been in operation for over 20 years. It is as if you took the players in the real major leagues and drew them out of a hat to redistribute them. If the "win share" concept was not valid, "win shares" would not predict the number of wins for the teams in our league. However, "win shares" has a very high correlation in our league, the teams get very close to the wins that their "win shares" indicate they should win. It seems to me that this validates the "win share" concept.

This book will destroy some of the baseball myths that people believe. After reading this book, statements like "pitching is 75% of baseball" (which I am sure someone just made up without even looking at any evidence) can be totally disregarded. If you want a deeper understanding of baseball, you should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: I was quite disappointed that Bill felt the need to take so much time and space criticizing Pete Palmer in an apparent effort to justify his own work. This is not like Bill, not necessary and very distracting from the book. There is room in the world for both.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to Bill's standards
Review: I was very disappointed in a couple of aspects of the book.
First, I thought Bill spent way too much time dissing Pete Palmer and his
system. It was almost as if Bill James felt that in order to sell his point,
he had to run down Palmer.

Second, try as he will to persuade me that his formula doesn't favor the
winning teams, I do not yet buy it.

Third, Bill has a serious objection to Palmer's use of 0 and negative numbers.
He states several times that a player with a 0 score in the Linear Weights system has no
value. Plainly the player has a value -- it is 0. That is plainly a value because it is
better than many other players whose values are in the minus range. A team of 25 players valued at 0 would theoretically finish 81-81. That's a simple concept. Bill seems to have a visceral complaint with
a system that works off an 81-81 average, but I fail to comprehend the
logical reasons why this should be any less legitimate a premise than, for
example, assigning precisely 3.0 Win Shares, no more and no less, to every
victory.

Fourth, Bill's rationale for assigning Win Shares to offense and
defense/pitching at a 52-48 ratio boils down to "it works" and "I wanted
to." Huh?

Finally, Bill's system works backwards. Rather than
calculating the values for an event -- such as a hit -- and figuring the
appropriate impact of those events on the game, he assumes the final number
of points and makes the data reach that conclusion. That has the value of
neatness. In Linear Weights, it is true, a team's TPR/TPI accumulation may
not necessarily justify the number of games it actually won. Bill's system
always will because it is constrained to do so. But this entirely dismisses
the element of random chance as a legitimate factor. Bill must know he can't
do that. A mathematical system (such as Win Shares) which recognizes no
element of random chance is simply not an honest mathematical system.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and Fascinating
Review: James' discussion of player evaluation, particularly fielding, is thoughtful and fascinating. I docked the book one star for poor sequencing. The essays - which describe his insights on the way to coming up with the formulas - come after the detailed discussion of the formulas. I think it would have worked better in the other order.

His description of Win Shares as "an accounting system" - things must balance out - seems a real strength over other valuation approaches (not that my knowledge is that broad in this area). The book makes you want to think through the mysteries - like why is hitting worth 52%?

Oh yeah, and he's an entertaining writer as well.

Rating:
Summary: A flawed system- Glaus or Conine?
Review: OK, I was the one who wrote that Troy Glaus was better than Conine in 2001 (contrary to Bill James' conclusions). Three months later, I still believe so, and I've decided to edit my review in order to better explain why.

First, let's take a look at the numbers. Conine had a .386 on-base percentage, and a .443 Slugging percentage. Glaus had a .367 OBP, and a .531 SLG. When looking at their OBP's, they are very similar: Conine tops Glaus by a mere 19 points. Yet when looking at the SLG, Glaus is 88 points higher. That's a huge difference. Clearly, Glaus outperformed Conine at the plate, big time.

Let's talk about the issue of ballpark adjustments. First of all, half of the games these guys play are on the road, which omits them from the equation. Now we're down to 81 games for each of them. Glaus played 81 in Anaheim, Conine 81 in Baltimore. In order to adjust for ballparks , we'd have to imagine that Glaus had played 40 games in Baltimore and 40 in Anaheim, and Conine had played 40 in each stadium as well. This makes it equal, because they would have each played 80 on the road and 40 in each stadium.

If Glaus and Conine had traded places for 40 games, would Conine been the better hitter? No way. Remember, Glaus' OPS was 69 points higher than Conine's. So for them to be equal hitters, Conine's time in Anaheim would have had to raise his OPS total 35 points over the course of the season, while the effect of Glaus' time in Baltimore would have had to drop his OPS 35 points. For that to happen, Conine would have to have hit an OPS of .969 in his forty games in Anaheim. Glaus would have to have an OPS of .758 in Baltimore.

That's just not realistic, and clearly when you look at the numbers, Glaus is a better hitter than Conine. So, let's talk about fielding, then. When it comes to defense, there is only one point to be made: Glaus is far superior. Third base is a much more demanding position, and the fact that Glaus plays it increases his value dramatically. It would be quite amusing to see Conine play third. On the other hand, I can't imagine that first base would be much of a problem for Troy Glaus.

Hitting and fielding, what more can you want? Jeff Conine ("The Barbarian") may a nice guy. I like him. But he isn't a better player than Glaus. He wasn't over the course of his career. And he wasn't better than Glaus in 2001, either.

I could certainly go into long theorhetical explanations as a to why James has come up with so many faulty conclusions, but I think that my best argument is common sense. Look at the results, do they look correct to you? In the American League in 2001, 13 of the 14 teams had a first baseman who ranked in the top five in win shares for their team. This makes no sense.

Now, for an argument about pitching: not all innings are created equal. A dominant closer does more than pitch 65 innings; he pitches 65 extremely valuable ones, when the game is on the line. For him to come and have an ERA of 2.50 at the end of 65 outings is far valuable than the rookie long reliever who strolls around when the team is down by six runs and winds up with a 2.50 ERA over 65 innings. Obviously the difference is dramatic, and yet the Win Shares system does not compute this!

How about this quandary: If you had your choice of two teams, in all ways equal, and yet for Team "A", its ace had an ERA of 2.00 and its fifth starter had an ERA of 6.00. Team "B", however, had an ace with an ERA of 4.00 and a fifth starter with an ERA of 4.00 as well. Which team would you choose? Why, Team A, of course, because when the playoffs roll around, your fifth starter will be on the bench anyway! (P.S. The Diamondbacks chose team A as well).

That's why "37 percent of baseball is pitching" is innaccurate. Because the pitching that COUNTS is extremely valuable, and what your long reliever does, forget it. The value of pitching is an elastic number because you can decide who to pitch and when to pitch him. You can have a great defensive centerfielder, but you can't tell the opposing team to hit the ball to him with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. And this is what makes pitching so valuable, so much more than can be quantified with a bunch of season totals.

Thanks,
-J

Rating:
Summary: Good but....
Review: Randy Johnson the 20th best player... I dont think so

Rating:
Summary: interesting but flawed
Review: The concept of win shares is wonderful and represents a fascinating step forward in sabermetric analysis. Any book that provides a single number to measure the value of each player for each season in baseball history is thought-provoking and worthwhile. Bill James's work on analyzing fielding statistics is incredibly useful and important.

I have a major criticism with the win shares system, however, and I hope I'll be able to express it adequately in writing. My problem is this. Win shares are based on the idea that a player contributes offensively to the runs that the team scores and defensively to limiting the runs the team allows. What James does, however, is start with the total number of wins for a team -- e.g., 97 for the 1977 Baltimore Orioles -- and then he takes as a fundamental premise that the Orioles as a team created 291 win shares. He then allocates those win shares to the offense, the defense, and the pitching, and then calculates each player's "share" of the team offense, the team defense, and the team pitching -- adding the total together for each player. For instance, Ken Singleton gets 36 win shares for the 1977 Orioles.

Here's the problem. Based on the total number of runs the Birds scored that year and the total runs they allowed, and using the "Pythagorean" formula popularized by James himself, Baltimore should have only gone 88-73 in 1977. So there should have been only 264 win shares to go around, not 291. That's a difference of 9%; accordingly, I would submit, Singleton should only get 33 win shares, not 36.

By contrast, take the 1972 Orioles, who actually went 80-74, but whose Pythagorean won-lost mark is 90-64. James's system allocates 240 total win shares to the team that year, instead of 270 -- a 12% percent difference. And therefore, Jim Palmer, who James gives 24 win shares for that year, should get 27. This makes a big difference; the James win share system gives Singleton's 1977 season a 12-win share advantage over Palmer's, but the Pythagorean system would peg the difference at only 6.

What's wrong, you ask, with assigning win shares based on actual wins instead of Pythagorean wins? Because in reality, the difference is simply a matter of luck. Over a five-year period, a team's actual and Pythagorean won-lost records will almost always be the same. The fluctuations come in one or two-year samples. Certain teams -- the 1977 Orioles, the 1975 Red Sox -- just get a lot of breaks. The ball bounces their way. And the win shares system should recognize that.

In fact, however, James not only doesn't recognize it, he compensates in the other direction. He gives Singleton (and all the 1977 Birds) extra credit for the fact that the team exceeded its Pythagorean projection. He briefly discusses this in the Snider/Mays essay in his book. I think this is a serious mistake.

The whole idea of tying the system to actual wins is a fiction, of course. Bill James doesn't know what Ken Singleton's statistics in 1977 were in the Orioles' 97 wins, as opposed to their 64 losses. It's theoretically possible that all of Singleton's production came in losses and was thus effectively useless to the team. We simply have to assume that every player's production is roughly proportionally distributed across the team's wins and losses; that assumption is built in to all analytical systems. That's why player evaluation is based on offensive runs created and defensive/pitching runs prevented. The Pythagorean system converts team runs scored and allowed into a won-lost record, and it is that record that should be the basis of the win shares system.