In doing the 4th installment of this series, covering the 1991 season, I ran into my first snag. Or to be more precise, the first sure sign that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, statistically speaking. I don’t think it represents a serious refutation of my thesis here. (Which, for those of you not paying meticulous attention to a series begun weeks ago and kept up sporadically here on BJOL, states that young batters may well have about 50% more career value than comparable young pitchers do, which, if true, might represent an unexploited market inequity.) I’ll explain my error first, ask for your understanding of it next, and move on to the 1991 numbers last.
In tracking the batters who had WARs over 1.0 in 1991 while being listed in BBref.com as under 25 years of age, I noticed the name of Tommy Greene, barely making the cut at 1.0. "Hmmm, thought Greene was a pitcher. Maybe this is a different Tommy Greene?" But no, it’s just that the young Mr. Greene had 1.0 WAR as a batter in 1991 while also compiling 3.2 WAR as a pitcher, which made me consider if I’d been doing this study incorrectly. I don’t really understand how BBref measures a player’s overall WAR at this point, or if they put partial WAR in three categories, Pitching WAR, Batting WAR, and Fielding WAR, but total them up nowhere, or if the figures under "WAR" for batters and for pitchers are their totals in all three categories for the year. I’ve been assuming the latter, but I think I could be wrong about that, given Tommy Greene’s showing up in both categories, pitching and batting, and probably fielding as well. Is there any place I should be looking for his (or for anyone’s) total WAR for the 1991 season? That’s really what I’m trying to compare here, not their WAR values in each separate category.
Now, in my defense (said the man with the noose around his neck to the hangman), I don’t know how much this matters to my overall thesis. I’d suppose that very few pitchers have positive offensive value, and that cumulatively (which is how I’m drawing my conclusions here) pitchers have negative offensive value, making them even less valuable over the course of their careers than I’ve been saying, not more valuable. (The fact that Mr. Greene is the first pitcher to show up on these charts who got even a 1.0 WAR for his batting makes me further inclined to think that it’s negligible, and probably a negative figure, overall. I’ve run over a hundred young pitchers in this study, and Greene was the first one to turn up, and that just barely.) Similarly, I’d suppose that most batters (again as a cumulative group) have positive fielding WAR, so again they would be more valuable than I’ve been assuming, not less valuable, if the WAR represents only their batting WAR. Finally, if pitchers would also have positive fielding value, it would be a very small figure since they play the field so much less often than a batter would, and it would still probably combine with their negative batting WAR to create a negative total in those two categories. So I actually think this error may make for a stronger thesis, rather than a weaker one.
So correct me if wrong about any of this, please, but pending sharp correction, I’m going to proceed with my study. Not that I enjoy bitching (I do, sorta) but if BBref really doesn’t have a place where players’ total WAR in a season is listed, that seems like an error on their part, and if they do (or if I’ve been looking in the wrong place for the total WAR figure), please let me know where to find it, and I’ll see if that changes my findings in any way.
Some of you seem quite adept at navigating BBref—perhaps we ought to share tips for getting around it in their complicated system. Let’s begin here, with this "Comments" section being open to anyone who can offer instruction in understanding where, if anywhere, they put their WAR totals for each player. Maybe this can become a place (or "Readers Posts"?) for a general BBref (and related) Q&A? I’d love to show what I’ve learned about copying from BBref into Excel and into WORD tables to anyone who’d be interested. For me, copying-and-pasting from one into the other in doing this "Heart-break" series has been a little trickier than expected, and there are some quirks that I’ve become resigned to. (Seemingly at random, for example, when I copy a player’s name from BBref into Excel, most of the time it goes smoothly, but about one time in ten, the copied version looks different and it occupies a double-wide line in Excel—the only remedy is to erase the entire line and try again. And often again.) I’m sure Rylan can help in showing all of us some basic posting skills, and maybe we can see if some facilities for posting in various places in BJOL can be explained. (For example, Bill and some others seem to be able to post photos in threads, a skill I have yet to master. In these columns, I sometimes post those ugly strings of interminable letters instead of links, either because I’ve forgotten how to post links or the icon for "links" isn’t where I think it should be.) In any event, I don’t think my lapses in posting the correct total WAR for these young players has had a significant effect on my conclusions, and I suspect it’s even made my thesis stronger.
There is the slight danger here, I should mention, of these lists five years apart of young players overlapping. If one them pops up on a list as a teenager (i.e. under 20 years old) then he could also pop up on the next list five years down the road at age 23 or 24, though so far no one has done so.
But this set of figures supports the past sets: the WAR figures for 1991 are very close for batters and pitchers, 2.9 and 3.0., but over the course of their entire career, they diverge significantly, the batters averaging 36.5 WAR over their careers, and the pitchers averaging 23.3, again an over 50% increase in the value of the batters.
As I keep reminding myself (and you), maybe this is commonplace knowledge within MLB, and maybe when a team contemplates trading a young pitcher for a young hitter, they routinely factor in this 50% difference.
But that’s certainly not what I hear from my listening perch well outside of MLB. When I hear about a potential deal, there’s never a warning about the vastly reduced long-term potential of the young pitcher. It’s mostly "Yah, well, it’s a crapshoot all around, ya never know, que sera, sera" for both sides, with a lot of anecdotal BS about past deals gone sour. And to some extent that’s true. Ya never do KNOW if a particular young pitcher is going to be Mark Fidrych or Nolan Ryan, and you need to gauge their individual potential on a variety of personal factors, and not rely on some broad-based statistical mumbo-jumbo about ALL pitchers starting with the dawn of time.
But if I were making deals involving young pitchers, I would certainly factor this in, bigly, if only as a corrective to the enthusiasm I may have for acquiring a young pitcher, or as a corrective to the general skepticism some of us apply to everything about knowing the future. If you can gain an edge over some trading partner in seeing likely patterns in future events, well, that’s the definition of an untapped market inequity, isn’t it?
Another counter-argument here might be that teams no longer control a player’s entire career anyway, so why concern yourself about players’ career potential? Focus on the next few years, that all. The problem with this counter-argument is that I think it holds up over virtually any period of time: often as not, the player whose career implodes sees his implosion immediately, not five or ten years down the road. A lot of these guys with fairly modest WAR in their youth have even lower career WAR—their main WAR contributions, in other words, derive from these early seasons, and they often have negative WAR offsetting them over the rest of their careers. Such total implosions occur with batters as well as pitchers, of course, but there’s no safeguard against a total meltdown happening to anyone, at any time. So the argument that "the disaster, if any, will come in the distant future when we will have likely gotten rid of him anyway" doesn’t really hold.
I would maintain that the reason for this thesis is obvious to the point of simplicity: pitchers rely on a single body part (or a single set of body parts), their arms, so anything that goes wrong with the arm is going to have a serious effect on a pitcher’s effectiveness, while batters can sometimes maintain their effectiveness after a severe injury to an arm or a leg or a foot or a hand. Just a theory, of course, but as I say, a sorta obvious one. If you’re going to trade me a young pitcher, I will want that deal to be so one-sided in my favor, superficially, that you’re probably going to withdraw your offer from me, and trade with someone else who doesn’t share my skepticism about young pitchers. But if you want one of MY young pitchers? Let’s make a deal, friend.