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Barry Shows Why "Bondsian" Has Become a Valid Adjective Only Bonds could play 130 games and run away with the vote. 11/19/03 Phil Orr A mere one day after the writers fumbled with their pens to scratch down random players names on their AL MVP ballot, they managed to take a collective deep breath and actually think logically, if only for a second, about who deserves to win the MVP award. Hats were off around the stathead community as the BBWAA members made the right choice and awarded Bonds his third consecutive MVP. It's gotta suck being a player in the National League. The season
Pujols put up would no question have given him the AL MVP, and there
wouldn't have been the whole debate. Even if you simply look at his
"traditional" statistics as many writers will, .359 with
43 HR and 124 RBI would be a no brainer. From a sabermetric point
of view, his 41 win shares just dominate A-Rod and Delgado's AL leading
32, and his 97.3 VORP is spectacular when you consider A-Rod was 11
points below that at a position where a VORP that high is easier to
obtain. In all fairness, Pujols season was one of the best we've seen
in a while, and it's not like he went unnoticed. At the start of the
year, it was "Pujols this, Pujols that." And rightfully
so. Although triple crown statistics aren't the most important in
baseball, it would still be a special achievement worthy of honouring
if one accomplished this task, which Pujols was making an early run
for. Yes, things looked good for Albert. But then one got to wondering
"Hey... what's Barry up to?" It's well known that he doesn't
like the media, and the media doesn't like him, thus they really don't
make that big of a deal of what he was doing. Barry, however, was
quietly putting up another one of the best seasons in baseball history.
While I was going over his splits, I was looking over them, thinking
"Well, that's not THAT impressive." That was until I realized
what I thought was OPS was actually his slugging column. In back-to-back
months he had a slugging percentage of over 1.000. This effectively
means that even if there is no one on base, you're better off walking
Bonds than pitching to him. The thing is, we've gotten used to seeing
this out of Barry, and we've come to expect it, which slightly diminishes
the accomplishments in the eyes of many. They don't appreciate what
they're seeing. Using OPS, This was the 7th best season of all-time
we got to see here, but no one really gave a second thought to it,
because the first and third both belong to Barry as well, last year
and the year before respectively. Anyway, let us break the stats down
of the two main contenders for the award.
So, there you have it. Two of the best seasons you'll ever see organized into a nice little table. It is for this reason that all but 2 voters (2 voters not voting for Matsui, Berroa, Delgado... there seems to be a pattern of two stupid voters. Anyone want to take odds on if it was one of these guys who gave Grudzielanek an MVP vote?) had Bonds and Pujols as the top two players on their ballot. With the clear-cut vote and the dominating statistics, why was there any question that Bonds should have been the MVP? Oh yes, those pesky "games." You see, Bonds only played in 130 games, leaving some people questioning how valuable he truly was. Bill James' Win Shares formula takes that into consideration, and actually has Pujols come out on top because of it. But wait a second... aren't Win Shares something us statheads live and die by? Well, we also have to take into account the meaning of every stat. Win Shares is useful when kept in perspective. For one, it's a great measure of showing how many of one team's wins a player is accountable for, thus comparing who on any given team is responsible for what share of their success. One thing it wasn't designed to do though, is count the performance of a players replacement. Thus, Bonds doesn't play a game, he gets 0 win shares. Fair enough, he didn't do anything that game, why should he receive win shares for what he didn't do? But ay, there's the rub. Pujols had 2 more Win Shares than Bonds, thus 2/3 of a win. So the big question is this. In the 27 games that Pujols played where Bonds had a replacement in, were his replacements able to get at least 2 win shares in his absence? If so, then that would make Bonds more valuable to his team. It seems fairly obvious that that is the case, but just for shits and giggles, let us take a look at what Bond's replacement would have had to accomplish in his absence to meet Pujols
Now, those of you who are faithful readers remember me doing something like this to look at the difference in innings in the AL Cy Young award. I stick by this manner as an effective way to judge value when accounting for replacement. And much like the AL Cy Young, the numbers naturally look a little out of whack due to Bonds obscene walk rate. The slugging percentage would be a fairly sizable amount for the replacement to handle, but the OBP could be destroyed. Fact is, when looking at runs scored for a team, OPS correlates fairly accurately to a teams offense, and is thus a pretty good easily calculated measure of a players offensive ability. And in this case, the player would have only needed to put up a .583 OPS in order to cover for Barry while he was gone, and make Bonds' season equal to Pujols. Anything above that means that the combination of Barry and his replacement are of greater value to the team than Pujols was to the Cardinals. Now, let us take a look at the statistics put up by all other left fielders. This is not only the total of all LF, this is just the games where they started in left, and Bonds did not play, effectively showing exactly what they did as a replacement for Bonds in the games where he did not play. This also excludes games where Bonds DHed, as he still played.
What we see here is that hte team played absolutely terrible in place of Bonds. These are the numbers you're rarely likely to see. One will talk about replacement level and such, but this group is BELOW replacement level. Honestly, who hits below .200? Anyway, the point is as bad as these guys were, they were still better than what they needed to be in order to But hold on a second. The astute might observe that a hit does not equal a walk. It's been shown that a single is approximately 1.4X more valuable than a walk. So lets take a look at these numbers again. First off, this group finished with a whopping 38 total bases. Nothing to be all that proud of. But let's keep this in perspective. They did it in roughly half the AB's. Thus, we can double the total to 76. It still falls short of Pujols, but that was what we expected. Now, if a single is 1.4X more valuable than a walk, lets be generous here and say that Pujol's extra 79 hits were all singles. Using 1.4 to even it out, it would mean that Bonds walks have a value of approximately 49 hits. This means there is 30 hits to make up. Now, taking this group of trash the Giants call replacements, we convert walks to hits and we get a total of 27 hits, doubled to 54. With all this math, calculating OBP and SLG becomes a little more complex, but the point is it really doesn't matter. The fact that a walk isn't as helpful as a hit is already weighed into the formula for OPS. All these numbers are nice to throw around, but all that you really need to know is Bonds replacements had an OPS of 50 points better than they needed to. So, this is where subjectiveness comes in. It's obvious that Bonds helped his team more when you look at these numbers, but a mere 50 point difference in OPS in 27 games? That is one homerun. That's it. One long ball makes up that difference. So despite Bonds obviously being more valuable to his team, does the fact that Pujols played so many more games make up for that single homer? The "Value" of MVP is defined as a players "strength of offense and defense." Clearly, Bonds was slightly more valuable to his team. However, as an individual, you have to credit Pujols for the games that he played. One simply can't just say "Well... it's nice that you played them, but your replacements could have done (blah blah blah)." The point is you can look at replacements to establish the difference in value to a team, but the replacements do not change the players value as an individual, and it is my believe that as individual, the games Pujols played clearly make up for that one homer difference, and thus should be MVP. But that's one of the problems. That's just a subjective opinion on whether the games played have greater value than that one homerun I'm comparing it to. Keep in mind that when I started this article, my intentions were fairly clear. "Bonds won, Bonds deserved to win, show why Bonds deserved to win, go to sleep, dream of many sexy redheads cheering me on as I trade some scrub for Vladimir Guerrero." But as I continued to write this, my views changed, despite wanting to stay with Bonds as it was the "stathead thing to do." I refuse, however, to delete and change information just to prove the point I want. If you looked at my study on BABIP you'll see that I have no problem completely disproving my beliefs. And this is the case here. As much as I originally believed Bonds should win this award, I'm no longer sure of that such thing. That being said, I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing Bonds. And I know I'll take a lot of heat for picking Pujols as my choice for MVP, but ultimately it doesn't matter who I think should win. As long as I made you at least start to question your stance with what I've dug up in this article, that's all that matters. |
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©Copyright 2003
Phil Orr
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