Incontrovertible Evidence

Dave Paisley

Hmmm, so Pete Rose is on his way to reinstatement. Personally, I think it all goes back to the Jim Gray interview that to me seemed horribly staged. It was as if Pete had begged Jim to humiliate him just so the general public would feel his pain. And guess what? Two years and much whining later and here we are, with Pete on the verge of reinstatement.

But I say, "Eh, whatever..." to that, because I really don’t care. Nothing will change the fact that Rose is a self-serving piece of scum. And even if he eventually makes it into the Hall of Fame, he won’t be the only self-serving piece of scum there.

So on to other things. For a change of pace, I’m going to check out the ol’ mailbag. After the MVP voting, a certain David S. wrote me and mentioned how my support of the "A-Rod was robbed of the MVP!" camp was maybe a bit misguided. David bases his opinion on the fact that Rodriguez benefited rather well from playing at home in Arlington, while Miguel Tejada was treated poorly by the Oakland Mausoleum. David wrote:

"A Rod, as much as he's become the poster child for some in the stathead movement, just isn't. Alex was helped a lot by his home park and Tejada was destroyed by his. Look at their road stats:

Alex - 277/381/547 (AVG/OBP/SLG)

Miguel - 336/.378/.532

You going to tell me that 3 points of OBP and 15 points of slugging is a cut and dried case? It's park effect; A-Rod hit 323/403/700 in the Texas heat. Meanwhile the non-hitters paradise of Oakland resulted in 280/330/483 line for Tejada.

In other words, perhaps by luck, the AL Voters very well might have voted for the right player."

Well, them’s fightin’ words, so I decided to check into it a bit more. After all, while Texas has generally been the most hitter friendly park in the AL, it’s no Coors Field. And the acres of foul ground at the Mausoleum are legendary, but it’s not like it’s an offense-free zone.

So what’s a stat guy to do but go check the actual numbers. Now here’s a curious thing. Most of the time when you see park factor quoted, the number is based in the number of runs scored per game. That’s OK to a point, but it’s hardly the best way to measure individual production.

I like to think of it this way. In making cookies, the ultimate measure of how successful you are is how many cookies your factory makes in a week. But the process starts way back with the basic ingredients — flour, eggs, sugar and so on. Well, the hits and walks that a player provides are like those basic ingredients, and they can be measured reasonably well by on base percentage and slugging, or OPS if we add the two together. Those ingredients get mixed up with all the other player contributions and result in cookie dough, or runs.

We can think of the pitching contribution as trying to minimize the other team’s cookie dough. Along the way we might lose some cookie dough to various kinds of unavoidable, but random, waste. Then we bake the dough and we get not cookies, but wins. Again, in the baking process a little something may be lost along the way, so the number of wins may not be perfectly correlated with the amount of dough.

So my next question is, "Is anyone getting hungry other than me?"

So where am I going with all this? Well, the best measure of a player’s individual contribution is OPS rather than team runs scored. But more on that next week.

I’ll finally get to the A-Rod/Tejada point here by showing some actual numbers form this past season. Here are A-Rod and Tejada’s numbers at home and on the road. Oh, by the way, HS=Home SLG, HO=Home OBP, RS=Road SLG, RO=Road OBP, OPSH=OPS at home, OPSR=OPS on the road, and PFO=OPS Park Factor=Home OPS/Road OPS.

Oakland	HS	HO	RS	RO	OPSH	OPSR	PFO
Tejada	.483	.330	.532	.378	.813	.910	.893
Rodriguez	.700	.403	.547	.381	1.103	.928	1.189

Wow, those road numbers sure do look similar, while A-Rod blows Miguel away at home. But is there more to the story than that? You’d think that given those comparisons above that the Oakland Mausoleum is just death on hitting, while Arlington is a hitter’s delight. Well, here’s the actual evidence from 2002:

Oakland	HS	HO	RS	RO	OPSH	OPSR	PFO
Oak	.462	.351	.404	.327	.813	.731	1.112
Opp	.374	.307	.394	.324	.681	.718	.948
Tex	.496	.358	.416	.319	.854	.735	1.162
Opp	.475	.358	.425	.351	.833	.776	1.073

Hmm, not so clear cut now, is it? For whatever reason, the Athletics did very well offensively at home. Not so much for their opponents, mind you, but the A’s were rather deadly at home. That 1.11 home team park factor was the 4th highest in the league (behind only KC, Tex and Chi). Meanwhile, Texas was also making serious hay at home, but so, to a lesser extent, were their opponents. So the teams both did well at home, as did A-Rod, yet Tejada struggled rather badly at the Mausoleum.

So what are we to make of all this? For one thing, I’m rather wary of the home/road split for individual players. While it’s interesting and often instructive, it isn’t the be all and end all of player evaluation. There are too many random variables that play in any one individual player’s numbers. Only really extreme examples need apply for consideration. Just for comparison, here are all of Tejada's teammates who had more than 100 AB at home and away this past year.

Oakland	HS	HO	RS	RO	OPSH	OPSR	PFO
Tejada	.483	.330	.532	.378	.813	.910	.893
Chavez	.526	.336	.500	.358	.862	.858	1.005
Dye	.453	.303	.464	.361	.756	.825	.916
Justice	.428	.418	.392	.332	.846	.724	1.169
Hernandez	.340	.318	.330	.307	.658	.637	1.033
Long	.425	.314	.355	.283	.739	.638	1.158
Mabry	.625	.353	.382	.288	.978	.670	1.460
Hatteberg	.467	.383	.403	.365	.850	.768	1.107
Ellis	.472	.390	.328	.330	.862	.658	1.310

As is consistent with the team data overall, just about every Oakland regular played much better at home than on the road. The fact that Tejada bucked the trend is unfortunate, but true. The facts show that Miguel Tejada’s team did much better offensively at home, yet he didn’t. While I can sympathize with his struggles, I sure as heck wouldn’t give him an MVP because of it.

about the author

Anyone got any spare MVP awards they'd like to sell? Send them to Dave Paisley at drdjp@strikethree.com and he'll make sure they get a good home.