Of those 38, 17 have been qualifying MLB regulars for 10 seasons or more. Of those 359 players with a career value above 10, 38 are currently active. There are no park or positional adjustments this is just a pure measure of relative offensive production that has the side benefit of splitting a player’s value into its separate OBP and SLG components. There are, however, 359 players who have accumulated 10 or more standard deviations (OBP and SLG) above league average over their careers, from #1 Barry Bonds (54.26 standard deviations above league average OBP plus 48.93 standard deviations above league average SLG = 103.19 total standard deviations above MLB average production) to #359 Don Mincher (5.22 + 4.81 = 10.03). This is not a good way of measuring the talent of players in the league average range an average performer, after all, would come up with a score of zero. Then, I summed those relative OBP and SLG scores over each player’s career, obtaining an ordered list of the players who have accumulated the most offensive value in the game’s modern era. I have gone back to 1901 and measured the number of standard deviations above/below league average in on-base and slugging percentage (OBP and SLG, respective) for each MLB regular. However, summing the number of standard deviations above league average is a pretty informative way of evaluating the elite tier of performers in a given population. I am fully aware that when you are working with standard deviations, or z-scores, you technically shouldn’t be adding them together. How do Harper’s three good though not great seasons, plus his 2015 for the ages compare to other players at the same age and/or experience level? Let’s look at Harper in the same way we recently examined Trout.Īs I have occasionally done in the past on these pages, I’m going to tick off some statistical purists. Any number of superlatives can be applied to his MVP campaign, but perhaps the greatest tribute that could be paid is that he was pretty clearly better than Mike Trout last season, by any measure. ![]() So high, in fact, that his perfectly acceptable though not overwhelming 2012-14 performance was seen by some as a disappointment. This obviously set the bar at a very, very high level with regard to his eventual major league performance. He was locked in as a Scott Boras client at a very early age, and his precocious nature can perhaps be best summed up thusly: he was the first overall pick in the 2010 draft out of the two-year College of Southern Nevada, a full year before his high school class graduated. He was barely a teenager when he was bombing 500 foot drives, albeit with an aluminum bat, in a home run hitting contest at Tropicana Field.
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