Quote:
Originally Posted by howard38
Bill, you say defensive WAR is highly inaccurate for older players yet you recently used it to defend your choice of Robin Yount as the best player you ever saw. Yount and Dawson's careers were more or less contemporary so the same standards should be used for both.
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I didn't use dWAR to defend anything. The discussion was about the best player ever, and I said Roberto Clemente. When the discussion turned to the best player I'd ever seen in person, since I clearly never saw Clemente in person (as I was two when he died), I said Robin Yount, and I would still say that with or without the dWAR metric. dWAR was not the basis for that statement. I said he had a complete skill set, and he did. He could do everything, and he did.
Where I brought up dWAR was in reference to his lack of Gold Gloves at the position in the early 80s. Multiple awards went to Alan Trammell, who in at least two of the years, did have inferior dWAR figures. Yes, I do feel that dWAR metrics are inaccurate. That doesn't, however, negate anything I said, does it? No. Why? Because the metric would be off across the board. I'll explain my rationale.
I watched an awful lot of baseball back in the early 80s. When I was a kid, nearly every spring or summer, I had a broken arm, or leg, and had to spend my days inside when school was out. We didn't have cable tv back then, so what did I do? I watched baseball. Any game that was on, or This Week in Baseball. Anything to do with baseball. There was no ESPN in my house growing up, so I had to watch the games. And my opinion about Yount was the best player in the game, and the best shortstop based off of the plethora of games I saw him play in person, as well as Trammell. I probably went to 10, sometimes 15 games a year at home, and watched as many as I could on tv. So, it was my personal observations that led me to believe that Yount deserved the Gold Gloves over Trammell (and some youthful bias, I'm sure). The dWAR figures were provided as a reference point. Yount is shown as having a 2.8 dWAR in 1981. Is that accurate for 96 games? Probably not. I feel that dWAR for older games is over calculated, either to the positive, or the negative, meaning very good defensive players are made to look slightly better than they are, and below average defenders are made to look slightly worse then they are based off of the metric alone.
If dWAR is too high by 20%, and Yount's 1981 dWAR goes from a 2.8 to about a 2.25, and Trammell's dWAR in 1981 goes from a 2.3 to a 1.85, does it not still show Yount was better? I do not discount it entirely. Whether Yount had a 2.8, a 2.25 or a 2 dWAR in slightly less than 100 games played, he was still sensational, and what I saw him play that year backed it up. I thought he was better defensively in 1981 than he was in 1982 when he did win the Gold Glove. I also pointed out in that same blurb that Robin Yount won the Gold Glove in 1982, even though Alan Trammell had a higher dWAR. That should support my recent statement that dWAR is not the be all, end all metric of defensive performance, at least in older games.
Each season there are 162 games. And 27 outs in each game. A shortstop might handle 10 balls a game. That's a lot of chances each year, and there's no way to know in hindsight how well Yount did getting to all those balls. So, dWAR is probably using some fancy algorithms to arrive at the final number. It doesn't mean that Yount wasn't great defensively. It just means that we probably can't compare a 2.8 dWAR from 1981 against a dWAR of 2.8 from 2014. I wouldn't expect complete accuracy.
What Yount was able to do, in his prime, at one of the two or three toughest defensive positions in baseball, was remarkable. He hit for average. He hit for power (he was an extra base machine). He stole bases. And he was really outstanding defensively, both with his glove, and throwing out runners with his arm. I felt that for a few year period, he was the best in the game, along with George Brett and Rickey Henderson. Those guys had so many tools, so many ways to beat you. I can't tell you how many times I watched Yount take a game over. The last game of the 1982 regular season against Baltimore is a prime example.