WERE struggling.  The first five weeks of the season runs were scarce.   Normal hiting the last two or three weeks.

 

 

 It is being done more and more.  It actually results from short-sightedness on the part of managers.   It's stupid to trap yourself in a position where you have to do that, but people pursue immediate payoffs without regard to what might possibly happen several innings down the road, and managers treat rest schedules for relievers as if they were Holy Writ; my God, I can't use this reliever two innings today after I pitched him an inning yesterday.   I don't like it, either, but you know. . . there are a lot of things I don't like.  

 The point about gymnasts is interesting.  

 

I was thinking of something vaguely related.   The NBA adopted the 3-point shot in 1979-1980, college basketball some time in the mid-1980s, but the full effect of this has only been realized within the last two or three years, and we don't know for sure if the full effect of it has hit yet, or may still be in the future.  I can remember when the three-point shot was being argued about, a basic argument was that this would give an advantage to a shorter, quicker player rather than a 7-foot behemoth, and also that it would draw the action away from the basket.   Both of those arguments proved to be true, and both proved to be MORE important than anyone expected, but what no one understood or anticipated was how long it would take for the full impact of the rules change to be felt.  

 

 

I was thinking of this in connection to the shift in baseball, and bunting to beat the shift.   Many people think "Why don't the just bunt, if the defense is going to give that to them", in which the problem is the word "just".  It makes it sound like anybody could do that any time, nothing to it; you just bunt.   But the reality is that if you're going to rely on bunting as a central part of your game in the major leagues, you need to spend 15 years developing that skill before you get to the majors--and that's not the end of the process.  Once bunting becomes a central skill again, then scouts will start looking for players who can bunt, and then that skill will come to be more refined and more refined.  It's not an immediate transition; it takes a few decades.   We're about 10 years into that in baseball, but we've got a long way to go.  

 Yost especially.   Joost had an up-and-down, varied career in which he did a lot of things well at different times.  At times he was a first-rate defensive shortstop, and at times he hit for power.

 

Yost would have hit 20 homers a year in a different park.   He played in Griffith Park, by far the toughest home run park in baseball for most of his career.  The Park Home Run factor there was usually around 30, with every other American League team usually over 75.  In 1952, for example, the number was 32 in Washington, 91 or higher in every other American League Park. IN 1949 it was 27; every other American League Park, 82 or higher.  

 

Yost in 1949 hit 9 home runs on the road, none at all in Washington.   In 1950 it was one at home, 10 on the road; in 1951 it was 1 at home, 11 on the road.   In 1952 he hit none at all at home, 12 on the road, so there's a four-year period in which he hit 42 home runs on the road, but only two at home.  In 1953 it was 1 and 8; in 1955 none and 7.  You can see that Yost would have hit 20-25 homers a year in a normal park, 25-30 in a good home run park, which would have changed his perceived value.   But you are correct in saying that his value in in his walks, because you don't get value based on what you would have done in some other park. 

 I reallly have no idea.   The Red Sox are dealing with a similar thing, with Xander Bogaerts.   If it was my decision, I would fight to keep Bogaerts if we have to let half the team go to do it.  Judge. . . I don't know.   There's no Aaron Judge mystique to me.  To me, he's just this over-hyped guy, a good player and worth quite a bit of money, but nothing really special.  

 Unclear whether you think this is unprecedented in BASKETBALL history, in sports history, whatever.   If you mean basketball history, it seems like a reasonable guess.  If you mean all of sports history, I would guess there have probably been parallel events somewhere.  

Yes, but the data in that regard is almost impossible to assemble. 

 Either I agree, or I am just being irascible about it; I'm not sure which. 

 That's who I was thinking of.   Sure, it's a long shot, but. . .you never know.   Bob Lemon and Bucky Walters and Jack Harshman were a long time ago, I grant you, but. . .it's there if you can find the right guy and he wants to try it.  

 I don't know Soto.   It's an individual thing; some people worry about it, some don't.  Xander Bogaerts in on the edge of a contract, but he's playing great.   He's always been that way; he's always been a confident player who just keeps playing, doesn't seem to worry about that.  I have NO idea whether that is what is going on with Soto or not, but I do know that you can't generalize about all players in that category.  

 No, that is just bluntly untrue.  The importance of getting on base is that when you are on base you may score a run.   When you are out you will not score a run.   The fact that you haven't made an out is very much a secondary benefit, a small portion of the benefit, not, as you suggest, a primary contributor.    The importance of getting on base is that you are on base.  The importance of making an out is that you have used up 1/27th of a game without contributing much.   We don't--and shouldn't--measure the two things as if they were all the same.  

 Teams don't keep track of it, but we do.  This site is functionally a part of Sports Info Solutions, which tracks any information like that that we can think of to track, and then sells the information to the teams.   So.. .yes, we know.   

 

 

Your point is a good one, and this is a significant analytical quandary, how to handle this.   To start with, first basemen are often sluggers because one CAN play first base even if you can't run and can't throw, so players who can't run and can't throw often wind up at first base.   Because that is true, the offensive numbers of first basemen are always high.   Analytical logic, related to the defensive spectrum, assumes or sometimes assumes that if the offensive contribution at a position is high, the defensive contribution at the position is low, and this is SOMETIMES very true; that is, there are many first basemen who make a very limited defensive contribution. 

 

Nonetheless, it IS true, I think, that the defensive delta at the position is enormous.   (We have been witnessing this day to day on the Red Sox, where Dalbec has been in a season-long slump, so Franchy Cordero has been playing half the time at first base.  They're trying to get Cordero to achieve the potential he has been wasting for five years, and making actually pretty good progress on that, but anyway, Dalbec once he gets a little experience will be Don Mattingly at first base, and Cordero is just God Awaful there, so all kinds of costly crap happens to the Red Sox when Cordero is at first base, and you always gnash your teeth and wish Dalbec would start hitting.)  

 

Anyway, it could be an overstatement that first base is defensively more important than, let us say, shortstop or third base; it could be an overstatement, and I think that it is.   But it is true that the defensive contribution of the first baseman is historically undervalued in analytic systems, and also true (b) that this is very hard to avoid, and (c) that the real defensive value of a first baseman is hard to measure.  

 

In Win Shares, I gave some credit defensively to the first basemen if the number of errors by shortstops and third basemen on the team was low.  But this honestly is as much desperation as anything; since the defensive values of first basemen are so hard to measure, I'll try anything to fill in the gap.  

 

The Pete Palmer system for rating defensive first baseman is just horrible, horrible, horrible, just absolutely and completely dysfunctional.  It relies heavily on ASSISTS by first basemen; since putouts by first basemen are 90%+ secondary plays initiated by someone else, Pete switched to assists.  But assists by first basemen are discretionary, since there are about 100 plays per season on which a first baseman can choose either to touch the base himself or to flip to the pitcher, thus getting an assist.  So there is basically no correlation at all between first base assists and first base defensive contribution.  

 

 I don't have an answer for you, but many position players were pitchers in college or part-time pitchers in college.  Dave McCarty, who was a backup first baseman on the Red Sox when I first got there, wanted to try to transition to a pitcher, and we would use him to pitch an inning or two when we were desperate.  You've always got SOMEBODY in your lineup who was a college pitcher; for the Red Sox now it is Bobby Dalbech, who I think was maybe a better college pitcher than hitter, not sure of that.  

 

It the player's career as a position player is going well, then it is not going to happen.   But if the player is struggling as a position player, then it might.  There was a guy, same era as McCarty, who DID move mostly to pitching, although he wasn't really successful.   What the heck was his name. . . seems like it was a K name.   

 Well. . ..when you have one similarity, you look for others, and this is a common and appropriate intellectual approach.   Suppose that you have dated a girl from a small town in Missouri, and then by coincidence you meet another girl from the same small town in Missouri.  You WILL start to see similarities between the two girls; you will start to look for them and find them.   This is how the mind builds understandings; it finds commonalities and builds on them.  I believe that that is a universal and involuntary process.   

 

And it is appropriate.  Two girls from a small town in Missouri ARE likely to have some things in common, in having come from the same environment.   In baseball, two players who have high similarity scores are likely to have many other things in common, other than what is measured in the similarity test (and remember, when I use similarity scores, I don't use the values used by the Baseball Reference method, so I may not be referring to them.)  But let's say that you look for players similar to Tommie Agee, for example.  A player who is mathematically to Tommie Agee is more likely to be another center fielder than he is to be a first baseman or a shortstop or something, even if "center fielder" is not part of the similarity test.  He is more likely to have begun his career in the mid-sixties than in any other era.   Although we don't want to focus on that, he is more likely to be black than white, more likely to be relatively short than relatively tall, more likely to bat right-handed than left-handed, more likely to be from Alabama than from California, etc.   Similarities DO form clusters, and this fact creates both Bias and Understanding.   

 Thank you.  I appreciate the feedback.