[Big Train]

OK all you DIPS supporters, I know you're ready to jump all over me but please hear me bear in mind that I'm not making any comments on DIPS as applied to the modern era. It might be a great theory when applied to todays pitchers. The thing is, other than watching some games on the tube I'm really not that interested in the inner workings of today's game. My interest is in the historical aspect of baseball and specifically in the 1900-1950 period. My feelings on this aren't based on "emotion" but the stats as I interpret them. I have upmost respect for Bill James who I consider perhaps the greatest baseball mind ever so my feelings aren't coming from an anti-sabermetric bias,


The thing is that baseball has changed a lot in the last 80 years and one of the changes has been an ever increasing number of strikeouts. I posted a while ago about looking at Grover Alexander in 1915 [perhaps one of the greatest pitching seasons in league history] and how his BABIP was 50 points lower than that for the league or for the rest of the pitchers on his team and also for his career his BABIP was significantly lower than average.

But anyway, today when I was looking over the 1920 debut pitchers that I am editing I came across many examples which I think DIPS would find it hard to explain. One such example was Eddie Rommel. Now Eddie Rommel wasn't a Hall of Fame caliber pitcher by any means but he pitched 12 years with the A's from 1920-1932 and went 171-111 with a 3.54 ERA. Considering the climbing ERAs of the time this made him one of the better pitchers in the AL. But what I really noticed were his average season stats on baseball reference.

232IP 245HA 12HR 65 walks 54 strikeouts

His control is good and homers allowed are average for the time and of course strikeouts are amazingly low. So how does the extreme version of DIPS written in to OOTP6 handle this? does it say that he doesn't have any "stuff" and there fore isn't good? That is an incorrect conclusion because compared to his contemporaries he was good.

And he is not an isolated incident, there are many pitchers from this era. who have similar stat lines [for the sake of brevity I won't bother listing all of them].

What I cann't help feeling is that some people are taking a piece of modern baseball theory and extrapolating it back into the past. "If I believe this works now it must have always worked.". These people may not care much if their assumption is correct, To those of us who really care passionately about accurately representing the stat ratios of earlier eras this kind iof attitude is really distressing.

I know nothing about computer programming but it seemed to me that this would be relatively easy to fix by either making the OOTP5 engine acailable to online leagues. Showing the "hits allowed" rating without the player editor having to be on or to add a BABIP rating for each pitcher rather thatn have it league wide. This woud allow the advocates of DIPS to knock themselves out with it while still allowing us historical simmers and others who maintain skepticism about it to use the system which we enjoy more and feel is more accurate,

I've been playing OOTP since version 2. I have loved every version and often thought that buying OOTP was the best $30 I spent all year by far. It has opened up a whole new world to me of the richness of in depth baseball history not to mention creating numerous firendships so I am truly graetful for the game. That hasn't exactly changed with OOTP6. I see many positive aspects and improvements to the game. and that is why this lack of real choice about the pitching engine has saddened me. So Markus if you're listening I'm begging you and sincerely hoping you will give online leagues a real choice of which engine to use by allowing people to see the "old" ratings without the editor or add an option for a BABIP rating for each pitcher in an upcoming patch.


Thank you for reading and allowing me to vent a little

Mike

[gmo]

Supposedly the DIPS basis research covered the entire 20th century, and it is not simply a case of taking today's data and imposing it on the past. Rommel - see page here at b-f.com - is an interesting case indeed with so few K's. For the most part in his career his yearly BABIP was lower than DIPS would predict, and in several cases much lower. The metric I used was (Hits-HR)/(Inn*3+Hits-HR-SO), and gives values a little to low, but I figure him as 25-30 points below league average BABIP for his career. The year you show was his year most better than league-average BABIP, 50+ points.

That said, his other numbers do not look that far off from what I would probably expect - generally at least a few more Hits than IP, good ERA because few HR and good control (generally <3BB/9Inn). You would not want him to have a very good Avoids Hits rating since he had more Hits than IP would you? Another thing to consider is what kind of park/defense he pitched in/with. The park was apparently more of a hitter's park, which is interesting. I have no idea about his defense - maybe one of the history expert knows the 1920's A's. Along with defense you have to consider whether he was more flyball or groundball and if the defense fit his pitching manner well.

All pitchers' results cannot be explained within the error bounds of DIPS, and Rommel definitely appears to be an outlier. But I think the system overall represents most pitchers very well with a minimum of variables, and overall better than the old system. Don't think I'm picking on you - just taking the flip side because I think the discussion can be interesting. A lot of the DIPS talk here a while back when it was the hot topic was how much effort, if any, should go into replicating the extreme outliers. The extreme cases may grab attention, but I think they are few enough that the current system is fine considering how good it appears to be for the majority of cases.

But I'm far from the final authority on this, especially since I'm a fictional league guy.

[remangiii]

I hope this means that MLB Replay won't be converting anytime soon.

[Skipaway]

One thing often ignored in DIPS discussions is the defense. DIPS ideas simply imply that pitchers got very little control over balls in play, but it doesn't mean pitchers can not have extraordinary BABIP.

The easiest way to have better BABIP than others:

1. Luck.
2. Defense.

If you are a groudball pitcher, go find a team with great infielders and home stadium with slow infield, then you'll get a great BABIP easy.

If the defense models and the G/F ratios are programed right, it shouldn't be hard to find pitchers that seemed to be "outliners of DIPS" in a DIPS-based game like OOTP6.

[Skipaway]

Again, people should not feel so intimitaded by the DIPS ideas. It's just another attempt to seperate the contribution of pitching and defense.

Whatever credit "taken away" from pitchers, it's actually added to the defense.

[Anonymous Ghost]

Supposedly the DIPS basis research covered the entire 20th century, and it is not simply a case of taking today's data and imposing it on the past.

What is your source for this claim? All of the research by Voros that I've seen focuses on 2000-02. Tom Tippett went back a few years further, but only into the mid-1990s. Did someone do a scientific anaylsis of the preceeding decades?

[gmo]

Yeah, I almost completely agree with Skipaway. I still cannot 100% shake the gut feeling that a tiny fraction is not adequately explained by DIPS, defense, and dumb luck. But again, though it may seem incongruous with the previous sentence, I think the current DIPS engine is plenty adequate.

[Skipaway]

Originally posted by Anonymous Ghost
Supposedly the DIPS basis research covered the entire 20th century, and it is not simply a case of taking today's data and imposing it on the past.

What is your source for this claim? All of the research by Voros that I've seen focuses on 2000-02. Tom Tippett went back a few years further, but only into the mid-1990s. Did someone do a scientific anaylsis of the preceeding decades?

There are couple of other ones, like this one checked 1979 and later: http://philbirnbaum.com/btn2001-05.pdf

[Big Train]

Originally posted by remangiii
I hope this means that MLB Replay won't be converting anytime soon.

At least not until BOSI is updated and if possible I would like to use the old engine although we may ve no choice to go with the new one

As far as defense, you'll notice when I studied Alexander I compared him to the rest of the pitchers on his team. I found the rest of the pitchers were very close to the league average for BABIP while Alexander was way below it.

I simply think DIPS over-estimates the role of defense and consequently devalues the pitcher's ability to control to some extent his own destiny with ground balls. Obviously a great defensive team will help any pitcher and a groundball pitcher more than a strikeout pitcher. BUT if the pitcher is inducing ROUTINE ground balls [and I define routine by plays that if they were not made would lead to an error].

The fielder *should* make those plays, if he doesn't he isn't doing his job [hence the error]. It's over-simplifying to a huge extent to say that every non-strikeout pitcher who has ever had low BABIP has a great defense working behind him. The way in which the hitter makes contact with the ball has a lot to do obiously with how hard and where it's hit. How many broken-bat homers have you seen?

And the pitcher is at least partially responsible for inducing the batter to hit the ball the way he wants it rather than the way the batter wants to hit it. Maybe that is less true today but I certainly believe it was very true for a large portion of baseball history.

[Anonymous Ghost]

<i>What I cann't help feeling is that some people are taking a piece of modern baseball theory and extrapolating it back into the past. "If I believe this works now it must have always worked.". These people may not care much if their assumption is correct, To those of us who really care passionately about accurately representing the stat ratios of earlier eras this kind iof attitude is really distressing. </i>

I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that the stuff rating is based mostly on a comparison of the player's K/9 to the league's K/9 (as you have entered in the league setup). If that's the case, then the problem should not be anywhere as near as dire as you describe.

In terms of star ratings, my understanding is that it's based on standard deviations from the league average. So, even if you have greater convergence in K/9 rates, because the ratings are relative to the league average there should still be a proper distribution of talent.

Let's look at the player that you mentioned: Rommel averaged 2.11 K/9 over the course of his career (1920-32). During that time, the AL mean was 2.98 K/9, so he was 3.95 standard deviations below his peers.

If the game assigns Rommel a low rating for stuff, it's not because Rommel's K/9 rate doesn't compare well to the modern pitcher. Rommel, in this particular aspect, simply doesn't compare well to his peers and the game, appropriately in my opinion, diminishes his rating.

[Malleus Dei]

It's been done. Tom Tippett did the analysis for "every pitcher who appeared in the big leagues since 1913." Others have done it as well.

[gmo]

Originally posted by Anonymous Ghost
Did someone do a scientific anaylsis of the preceeding decades?

There's this by Tippett. From the in-OOTP perspective, it takes the side essentially favoring a small modifier. But I think it shows that in general the applicability DIPS in not dependent on the timeframe, at least since WWI.

Randomly players vary within the DIPS system away from the league average baseline. So in fictional leagues for me it's Kool and the Gang. To get historical players accurate, a modifier would obvisously sound good so the right players are "non-randomly" better. But what if a pitcher was lucky to some extent to be as good as he was IRL? A pitcher can also be better than his teammates if he pitches better to his defense's strengthes. Again, I don't think DIPS is quite everything, but to me for OOTP DIPS has been shown to be better than the old system, and I would have to be convinced a different system, like DIPS with this particular modifier - {X}, would be better.

[Big Train]

Well no one's going to convince me that some pitcher is "consistantly" lucky for 10 or 15 years and even if he is "making better use of his defense" that is a skill he should be credited for [although I honestly think there's more to good pitching than that].

If OOTP6 compares strikeout to the league average to determine "stuff" that is a good thing from my point of view. But there's one problem. Because of the inverse relationship between setup screen league totals and actual league totals [you often have to set strikeouts in the league totals very high to get a very low actual total of strikeouts) wouldn't this skew results?

Anyway, like I said, I think DIPS probably has some validity although I don't agree with the extreme form which exists in OOTP and it does run into problems with quite a few pre-1960 pitchers. All I am asking for is either the ability to use the old engine without the editor [in order to allow its use in online leagues or a stat acknowledging that pitchers have at least some control over balls in play. That way everyone could get maximum enjoyment out of the game

[*Hopes Markus is reading this and has fingers crossed for a future patch*]

[Skipaway]

Originally posted by Big Train
Well no one's going to convince me that some pitcher is "consistantly" lucky for 10 or 15 years and even if he is "making better use of his defense" that is a skill he should be credited for [although I honestly think there's more to good pitching than that].

I wouldn't consider it more "making better use of his defense" than "pitching style happens to match the defense".

It's already proven that G/F ratio is more consistent than HR rate, and is definitely a very important pitcher trait.

Andy Pettitte consistently got bad BABIP comparing to his team mates. Bad BABIP skill, not good at making the better use of his defense, or highest G/F ratio on the team+bad infield defense?

[Skipaway]

Originally posted by Big Train

Anyway, like I said, I think DIPS probably has some validity although I don't agree with the extreme form which exists in OOTP and it does run into problems with quite a few pre-1960 pitchers.

What problems? Can you be more specific?

I would tend to be the problems would be caused by poor translation of defensive abilities. For the DIPS engine to work the best, defense efficiency ideas would be key.

G/F ratio could be another major problem.

I don't think we got enough historical data on defense and G/F ratio?

[Carlton]

Big Train,

I believe it has to do with the fact that Rommel was the first "true" knuckleballer...which no simulation can acurately produce.

The best you can do is edit his endurance to max, have him low velocity, low Hit batsmen and higher than average Wild pitches and see how he fares...and he should be inconsistent and durable

Be nice if knuckleballers could last longer than most pitchers though

[Big Train]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by gmo
There's this by Tippett. From the in-OOTP perspective, it takes the side essentially favoring a small modifier. But I think it shows that in general the applicability DIPS in not dependent on the timeframe, at least since WWI.


This is a very good article and tends to agree far more than disagree with my feelings on this. Thank you for pointing it out. it says that while there is some vaidity to DIPS theory:

"Charlie Hough has prevented more hits on balls in play than any other pitcher in our study, and our sample includes the last ninety years, so we've covered most of baseball history. Compared with the league-average pitcher, Hough has allowed 371 fewer hits on balls in play. Compared with his teammates, that figure drops to 299 hits, suggesting that his parks and defenses deserve some of the credit.

How important is 299 hits? Hough would have given up an extra run every three games or so if he had allowed hits on balls in play at the same rate as his teammates over the course of his career. That's a pretty big deal."

Hough being an example,he sites many others. I'm not sure if it totally establishes that DIPS can equally be applied to every era equally since it seems to be comparing pitchers to their league and team-mates more than say comparing Pedro Martinez to Walter Johnson.
But the most important thing is that the author establishes that there is a statistically significant difference between rates of BABIP and pitchers with long successful careers have lower rates than the average pitcher even the pitchers on their team *with the same defense behind them).

It isn't the whole idea of DIPS that I have a problem with. Pitchers who strike people out a lot and don't walk many people and don't give up many homers and have a great defense playing behind them obviously have an advantage especially in a modern context. It's people who go to the extreme of saying that there is absolutely no ability (or a very insignificant ability) of the pitcher to prevent balls in play independant of the defense that I disagree with and I think Mr. Tippet has done a much better job than I could of proving that assertion false in the above article.

I'll concede that the new system with a BABIP rating for each pitcher would probably be more accurate than the old system but I'll settle for one or the other

[Skipaway]

Tippet did not consider park/defense profile vs. pitcher profile. Sharing the same defense/park does not prove anything, since different pitching profile would benefit from the same defense/park in different ways.

Without that part figured out, adding a BABIP rating would only reduce the significance of parks and defense.

The ideal system would be much closer to the work MGL did than what Tippet did.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/..._2004-02-29_0/

[Big Train]

Originally posted by Skipaway
What problems? Can you be more specific?

What I was thinking of is that 2 of the key statistics DIPS uses are homers allowed and strikeouts. In the deadball era an average pitcher may allow 1 homer every 200 innings pitched so that is really an insignificant stat. Strikeout rates were also a lot lower and there was a lot less difference between the strikeout leaders ration and the average strikeout ratio in most cases. So there wasn't a lot of differentiation between pitchers as far as strikeouts.

That leaves walks and defense and the ever-popular "luck" as well as the usually relatively small difference in strikeout rates.. Obviously control and good defense help a pitcher and probably then more then than now but I just intuitively and logically can't accept that the *only * difference between pitchers was control and defense, it's just too simplistic and illogical an argument. There were a lot of ground balls compared to fly balls then and so a lot more balls were put in play. It seems that those pitchers who regularly gave up less hits per balls in play than their team-mates as well as the rest of the league had to have some ability to prevent or reduce the chance of hits on balls in play which was statistically significant.

[moore4807]

Big Train....
I'm reading this thread and noticed - the Rommel fellow and Charlie Hough share one sparkling trait * the knuckleball*. While this pitch allowed Hough to extend his career, I hardly think it improved Hough's W/L record or "took away" 299 hits that would have been attributed to other pitchers on his staff pitching instead of him... There should be a review of knuckleballers vs. knuckleballers, power pitchers vs. power pitchers, etc. the stats can be manipulated to appear to what someone wants them to appear IMHO.
This is one of the reasons I'm satisfied with DIPS until an algorthym is developed for each pitch type and useage (speed/movement/location) and the batters can do more (bat speed/contact vs. power/hi vs. low -n- inside vs. outside) than swing freely and bunt. I'm not taking ANYTHING away from what has been created in OOTP (good job Markus!) but, until this type of game is created - then we will all have to accept a less than perfect re-creation of America's pastime!