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... 1 Overview
“Who is the best player of all-time? ...
Bill James is a life-long baseball fan who also happens to be a mathematician. He decided to try and implement a purely mathematical concept to the age-old question of the greatest players of all-time. He is one of the forefathers of the field of sabermetrics, essentially the study of baseball statistics. His work is so admired and respected in the field that the new Boston Red Sox management group has hired him as a player scouting consultant, helping them find and rate players that can help their team. ... However, I would say that 80% of the overall process is included in my work, which includes the six years since Lee University has reinstated baseball. ... 2 How it Works
Win Shares is a system which rates players as to how many games they essentially helped their team win. Very simply, if a single player is credited with 20% of the team’s overall success, then he would earn 20% of the total Win Shares given to that team. In this project, I took the team’s total wins and multiplied this number by six to get the total number of Win Shares credited to the team. For example, if a team won 40 games, then 240 Win Shares would be available to the team’s players. If our player from above, who earned 20% of the team’s credit, were to play on a team with 40 wins, then he would earn 48 Win Shares. ... In James’ system rating professional players, he uses the constant 3. His reasoning was to find a number at which you can reasonably say that a Win Share or two makes a meaningful difference between players. ... However, if the ratio is too large, then the differences are not a valuable tool in comparing players. If one player has 110 Win Shares and another 108, then there is essentially no difference in overall totals. ... the three, is that Lee averages 60 games a year, with roughly 30-40 wins. ... So, an average team that finishes with an 81-81 record would be awarded 243 Win Shares, while in my system, an average team with a 30-30 record would receive 180 Win Shares. ... 3 Basis of System
So far I have shown how teams get Win Shares, now the next step is to explain how individual players are credited. ... The credit is then are based on the concept of runs created by each individual hitter, the number of quality innings each pitcher pitches, and how good of a fielder the individual players are. ...
The Win Shares system is based on the concept of marginal runs. ... Below is an example using the 2002 TranSouth Conference statistics, which is the Conference Lee competes in. ... Margin; Ratio- Total/Wins (How many Marginal Runs contribute to each win)
The fact that five of the seven teams in the league had a ratio between 13 and 14 shows a strong correlation between marginal runs and wins. This simply means that, at least in our level of college baseball, roughly 13 marginal runs will win a baseball game. ... This concludes the hitting Win Shares component. ... Next would be assigning Win Shares to individual pitchers. ... Once this process is done, simply take the Win Shares designated to each player in each of the three steps, total them up, and you should arrive at the overall value of each player on a given team. ... I feel that I did the best I could with the available data, and the fact that I did not factor these calculations in to any of the year’s data should make all of the data and calculations made in the project come out equal still in relation to each other. ... 5 My Hypotheses
I simply wanted to figure out who I thought would be the best player in Lee’s Baseball history. ... Pitching-wise, I expected for the highest career numbers to be held by players who played earlier in Lee’s history, such as Ramon Lopez and Steve Saccone. This is because Lee’s best current pitchers are, for the most part, two-year transfers who wouldn’t be able to rack up very high career numbers in only two years.
Another by-product would be to find who had the best single-season in Lee’s history. ... He set school records in Runs Batted In, with 56, and hit 21 home runs, which was second-best in the nation. In pitching, I figured Jay Eller’s 2002 season, in which he set school records in wins, 10, strikeouts, 89, and complete games, 10, would also be the best in school history. ... Determining Batter’s Win Shares
2.1 Dividing Win Shares between Offense and Defense
The first step in the process of determining Win Shares is to split all of the available Win Shares up between the offense and defense of the team. ... The reasons for coming up with precisely these numbers are quite similar to those for choosing six as a Win Share constant; they just worked the way I wanted them to. ... I had to determine these percentages and ratios for each of the six years that has Lee Baseball existed, however, will only be using the 2002 season for examples. ... 1- 2002 TranSouth Conference Batting Statistics/Lee Offense/Defense Percentages
Team Exp. ... %- % of individual team’s success attributed to Defense
Win Shares (WS)- # of Win Shares attributed to offense, defense, or hitting, pitching and fielding
All of the calculations on the bottom half of the chart are for Lee’s 2002 team. ... This simply can be explained by the fact that an average team will both score and allow roughly 393 runs, and Lee scored 345 (below average), yet only gave up 256 (much better than average.
Approximate Word count = 4841
Approximate Pages = 19.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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