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More Average Talk

I've been thinking more about this average average thing, and I've reached a conclusion: academia kills the way we think of baseball value. In school, the best grade was an A+, or 100%. 90% was great, 80% good, 70% fine, and 60% was acceptable. Anything below 60% was failing and unacceptable.

In baseball, sometimes that same mindset interferes with reality. Gabe Gross isn't 60% of Albert Pujols, or 50%, or even 30%. Try 20%. Yet Albert Pujols is the best player in the game, and Gabe Gross is an average ballplayer. Yeah, you read that right: last year Gross was worth 20% of what Pujols provided, yet Gross is an average player. If Albert Pujols was the genius in school who skipped a few grades and still aces his tests, that makes Gross the kid who sits in the back making jokes about giant freaking spiders and gets a 20% on each test. Their futures would look like this:

Pujols - valedictorian - Harvard - Oxford - Nobel Prize - discovers cure for cancer and AIDS while goofing off in his lab.

Gross - flunks out - sells drugs - arrested - dies in jail at the hands of a giant freaking dude named "Spider".

For Gabe to "graduate" at their current rates, Pujols would have to make 300% on every test.

The first time I noticed that I was shocked. How can a player be worth only 20% of another, yet still be valuable? It is because baseball's talent is not equal, and not a pie graph, but rather a reverse pyramid. There are more replacement level players than fringe players. More average players than above average players. Less superstars than anything, yet they get most of the attention and fan desire.

Being a superstar in baseball requires an otherworldly amount of talent, but being an average player still requires being one of the best players in the world.

 

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I know it's besides the point. I agree with your main point.

I agree with KLaw and say Utley is the best player in baseball right now.

by Erik Hahmann on Jan 9, 2009 2:03 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

I read that.

I thought the question was “If you could take one player moving forward.”?

by R.J. Anderson on Jan 9, 2009 2:25 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

He's underrated an probably in the top five.

But I don’t see how you can go with anyone but Pujols. His bat puts Utley’s to shame. And yes, I realize that Utley plays a much tougher position and is a stud defensively.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 9, 2009 2:35 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

He took my job as well

Anyway, as I was lying in the puddle, I think I may have found a way for us to get Bonds and Griffey, and we wouldn't have to give up that much.

~George Costanza~

by Sandy Kazmir on Jan 9, 2009 3:41 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

In the offseason Utley works

as a janitor at MIT who solves complex math problems that the teacher leaves laying around. That was my schtick for years.

Anyway, as I was lying in the puddle, I think I may have found a way for us to get Bonds and Griffey, and we wouldn't have to give up that much.

~George Costanza~

by Sandy Kazmir on Jan 9, 2009 3:57 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

Baseball talent is scalable.

Non-scalable things are hourly wages, heights, etc. They group around the mean in a bell curve.

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan he harps on the difference b/w these two things and how they effect different things in this world.

by rglass44 on Jan 9, 2009 1:28 PM EST reply reply actions actions   0 recs

I didn't say it wasn't scalable.

Rather that I think people use the grading scale to judge players, and that simply doesn’t work.

by R.J. Anderson on Jan 9, 2009 1:33 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

I was agreeing

Grades in school are on a bell curve. Baseball talent isn’t. I guess I should have made my point clearer.

by rglass44 on Jan 9, 2009 1:40 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

Baseball talent isn't on a bell curve?

MLB talent isn’t, but overall it should be. MLB is the tail of the curve.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 9, 2009 1:42 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

I'm not sure about that.

It doesn’t really matter, though. I doubt there is a mass of avg. players bunched around the middle, but I have no desire or ability to argue this point.

by rglass44 on Jan 9, 2009 2:27 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

Intuitively it seems like MLB and overall talent should be the other way around;

this is an oversimplification, and retarded, but just for fun:
MLB: a few Tomas Perez types on one hand, a few Pujols types on the other, and a bunch of Gabe Grosses in the middle. —→ bell curve, more or less
Overall population: graph would look more like ( # players @ given talent level = 1 / talent ) . In that case, MLB players would be the tail of the curve.

by E. Hayden on Jan 9, 2009 3:04 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

A few Tomas Perez types?

There’s TONS of 0 to 1 WAR players in the majors. Think of all the bench guys and two week callups. All the back-end relievers.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 9, 2009 4:38 PM EST to parent up reply reply actions actions   0 recs

Another way of looking at it.

Absolute zero in baseball skill would come from you or me. That’s 0% on a test.

Replacement-level in baseball would be 60% on a test. These guys can actually play baseball pretty well, just not in comparison to major leaguers. Getting a 60% on a trig test is pretty decent for our population as a whole, just not when you’re taking trig.

Average would be, well, it depends. 75% or a C, by definition, but probably more like 80 to 85% in some classes.

Stars in baseball would be 130% on the test, as the difference between them and average is 2-3 times the difference between average and replacement level.

Barry Bonds’ 2004 season would be infinity.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 9, 2009 1:35 PM EST reply reply actions actions   0 recs

Leave the grades to John Sickels

I know he only grades out prospects, but he’s probably the one person that does it better than anyone else.

I want Baldelli to be healthy enough to play in 150 games, I just hope he sucks. Like Greg Vaughn suck.

by SeanDubbs on Jan 9, 2009 1:57 PM EST reply reply actions actions   0 recs

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