Clayton Kershaw

[steve B]

Originally Posted by bravos4evr

so I didn't say they were equal players on a year by year basis, but the RESULTS of their career say they provided equal value.

so what? the voters were mostly morons back then who still thought batting avg and RBI's had value (as well as pitcher wins). Voters are smarter now.

I think that's somewhat unfair to anyone who evaluated players years ago. I'm not sure what date would be appropriate, but the newer stats were used by very few people until fairly recently.

As an example, I went to the SABR convention in 2002, and one of the talks was about a system teams were using to track some detailed player data by video. Really neat system, each pitch was filmed and annotated with situational info that was entered into a searchable database. The teams traded tapes, and since messing with the data would spoil it for everyone apparently it worked really well. Being able to pick up tendencies and tells for both pitchers and batters was a big benefit.
And at the time, only six teams were using the system.

The only pro I can think of who might have been trying anything similar earlier was Earl Weaver, who had those 3x5 cards of his. (I'd love to get hold of a handful of those! ) Varitek did something similar to help prep, and was supposedly really happy to use the video system as well as his own.


And if that's the state of the art for baseball pros ca 2002 I can't imagine most writers were doing much at all.


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Interesting debate about cumulative value vs peak value. I can see an argument for each side. I often hear people downplay a player as merely building up stats by hanging around a long time. I don't quite buy into that, since some part of me says "hey, the amount they get paid now, if a guy is merely average there's got to be some reason they don't just replace him with random prospects until one sticks. Which did happen regularly for a few years, taking some of my favorite players out of the game because they could supposedly be easily replaced with a younger player for less than the veteran minimum. Like Brian Daubach, not spectacular, but a solid slightly above average player. The big contract kicked in for 2002, went from 400K to 2.3 million. Then he was allowed to go into free agency and Chicago would only sign him to a minor league deal putting him back at 450-500K over the next couple years.
A fairly common career arc at the time, and a situation where the CBA didn't do much for the average player.



Steve B