7 replies to this topic

[BSLChrisStoner]

FanGraphs: How (Not) to Build For Depth

[dude]

One comment before the article.

 

It's amazing how little accountability there is in what has become the public conversation wrt rebuilding.

 

Before the 2017 season, the White Sox made 2 of the most ridiculously lopsided trades moving Sale to Boston and Eaton to DC.  EVERYONE was talking about how they were "rebuilding the right way" and would build sustainable success and have to be reckoned with in the future.  They added elite Talent from the International market (Jimenez, Robert, Abreu, others), spent money on perceived impact Talent (like Grandal).  They've traded for pitching (Cease, Lynn).

 

...but the merit of everything going back to 2017 - in one of the weakest Divisions in MLB - is a WC knockout in a COVID shortened 2020 season and a 1st place finish (93 wins) in 2021 with an ALDS knockout.  No playoff advancement, only 2 playoff wins.

 

They implode in 2023 and have no meaningful products of 'rebuilding' heading into 2024.

 

You can look at every team that's tried this (including the Orioles) and you will struggle to find even modest causality between rebuilding and winning.

 

What the WhiteSox failed to do well is identify, acquire and develop Talent. That's just the Talent component and it has nothing to do with 'rebuilding'.  The 2023 WhiteSox collapse and around mid-year, we begin to hear the rumblings of the internal challenges the entire Team was going through....that's the L, A and C components.

 

Every Team can't win, no matter how good they are.  30 Teams develop great plans, execute on the field, are well led and do everything right.  Someone loses every night.  The average win total every year is 81.  It never changes.

 

Heading into the 2023 season, the White Sox and Orioles had similar Win projections (around 81).  The White Sox have done everything Orioles fans want the Orioles to do.  The Orioles Team is built mostly on existing 2018 players ('not good enough') and waiver claims or modest adds.

 

The Orioles win 101 games and the White Sox collapse to 61 wins.  The separation isn't Talent.

[dude]

I don't seek out Fangraphs articles.  I think the site does more of a disservice to the baseball community than improves it, but whatever.  Credit to them for building an accepted platform on a house of cards.  I discuss the articles that are presented here only because this is a baseball message board and they are presented here.

 

This article is an F for me.  It's an example of why the work there lacks....but if you read the comments to the article, you get the mindless following that every product I've read there gets.  Maybe it makes everyone feel good, but that doesn't make it useful in Baseball.

 

Assumption:  The data presented is correct.  I didn't go check it.  Where I think Fangraphs is generally good (useful) is they have people that roll up data.  It's the analysis and conclusions and some of the presentation (like 'surplus value') that drive everyone over the cliff.

 

There's probably a useful (actually more than one) analysis of this data set.  It needs to be expanded and more included....I'm not taking a swim in it, but I will go ankle deep.

 

What isn't useful is looking at this data set...having "102%" jump out at me and then writing an article only on that with a conclusion (and the title that likely drew Chris in) that says....

  Why did the White Sox fall apart so completely this year, from a preseason expectation of 80 wins to a 100-loss stinker? It’s because their team was uniquely vulnerable to a need to replace production during the season. Everyone has to do it – it’s a long season and roster moves are inevitable. How you handle those situations, and even how you build your organization with them in mind, can be the difference between a season where adversity helps you find new contributors and one where everything collapses.

 

This [analysis] doesn't support the first bolded line.  The second bolded part may be true, but it's not supported by this [analysis].

 

Why would we uniquely settle on "this" as the causality for the failure of the CWS2023 season?...because "102%" jumped out at us?

[dude]

Ankle deep.

 

I don't know anything, but if I look at this data set, the first thing I would want to know is if there's any correlation between the OD% or the ODWAR% and winning.  I don't know. It's not presented.  We didn't even head in that direction. 

 

I copied the data into EXCEL, added a column for Wins and the CORREL (Excel function) between Wins and OD% is 0.48.  That's not strong, but it's something.  Same thing for Wins and ODWAR% and that is 0.12....so that is nothing to weak....but we took the "102%" out of this column and that made the leap to causality of the 2023 season.  Not supported by any of the other data.  

 

Did the same thing for OD% to ODWAR%....that's was 0.50.  Hey, what about the difference between wins and the delta between OD% and ODWAR%?  ...ugh...that's 0.16 so the usefulness of ODWAR% might not be there (maybe there's another angle to consider it).

 

My issue with %s as the metric is that it doesn't speak to how good you actually were (playoffs) or maybe planned to be (heading into the season).  Having a high "OD%" on a team that wasn't trying to compete that still loses because you did (maybe intentionally) a bad job building a Team isn't helpful.

 

So you HAVE to compare this against some measurement of expectation or success. Would you rather pay 0.5% in fees or 5% in fees?  Don't answer that until you know the returns.

 

Here's something interesting.  Sort the data by OD%.  Highlight the Playoff teams (I'm not dropping my file here, you can do it).  The range of %s goes from 58.9% (CIN) to 88.6% (TOR).....something jumps out.  The top 7 teams in OD% (TOR, HOU, TEX, ATL, PHI, MIA, BAL) all made the playoffs.  In fact, when you break it into thirds, only one team (MIL) made the playoffs from the bottom third.  The other 4 teams (ARI, LAD, SEA, MIN) were in the middle third on both sides of the 72% average.

 

No idea if that's meaningful or not.  I'd like to look at the last 5 years of the same data.  I'd like to evaluate it by age.  I'd like to break it into pitching and hitting, by age, by year, and see if there's trends over the last X years.  Does it speak to the importance of Health?  Seems like maybe, but we'd need more.  Is that health tied to age? Does it matter (strength of trends) for pitching or hitting?  You can do more...but it's a pretty obvious as a first look to pursue something along that path. 

[dude]

The 2023 White Sox failed horribly, but they were in the top half of OD%.  The ODWAR% doesn't matter because the problem is they didn't accumulate enough WAR.  Side note, WAR may correlate ok to wins, but that's backwards looking, not predicative, so we can use it looking at the 2023 White Sox but the problem wasn't their depth didn't generate more WAR, it's that the Team didn't generate enough WAR.  

 

The Orioles had some terrible depth play this year.  Top prospects like Stowers, Cowser, Ortiz and others that the article suggests the WhiteSox needed, weren't the answer in Baltimore.

 

....but the Orioles won 40 more games, from what was generally considered a similar start point.  That's Performance....because performance isn't static and the "intangibles" that Roch should be writing about on an amazing 2023 Orioles performance were the exact same intangibles (but on the negative side) that the Sox suffered from.

[TwentyThirtyFive]

Thanks Stoner 😑

[Pedro Cerrano]

War and Peace 

[bmore_ken]

Thanks Stoner 😑

Come on. You know you read every word. Lol