We need more meaningful stats-Ed Cowan

[Furball]

free market mate. indians want to see indian stars in their side so they will always get more money plus the whole mandatory 6 indians or whatever rule in the ipl so they will always make more money

Yeah, I'm aware of all those factors.

 

[DingDong]

Just because every team uses it does not mean that it is useful. It could just be a fad picked up because the team that used it seemed to have some success. You can look at the Oakland Athletics record in 2002 and it does not seem significantly different from the few years before it. You can argue that they lost their best players for that season but a winning culture had been established at the club. And, in the end, they did not even make the baseball world series.

This sort of thing happens all the time without some magic formula being involved. The perfect example being the Melbourne Storm in the rugby league this year. It may be that it is useful but I don't see any real evidence. The sample size was way too small to be of any use. You really need to set up an experiment where half the teams use it and half don't over several years and see if there is any significant difference in performance, which will never happen. I still don't see where luck has been ruled out.

a bit of both really u still need players to perform. but some of the stuff is sound and used by everybody now like onbase percentage for a lead off hitter

 

[DingDong]

Yeah, I'm aware of all those factors.

great we agree

 

[BoyBrumby]

Great article, I read it only minutes before you posted it.

Ed Cowan is a much better writer than he is a cricketer (and he is a very good cricketer).

I'm willing to bet his batting has fewer unnecessary adjectives. Clearly a clever chap, but its very overwritten. Using a double negative like "That is not to say the game has completely ignored the ideas of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics" where a positive would've done the same job means the quote-unquote "authorial voice" gets in the way of the point he's trying to make.

If he bats like he writes he'd be the kind of **** who holds the pose for the cameras when he plays a forward defensive.

 

[honestbharani]

I just do not understand if they have ever proved stats is the be all and end all for any game. But I know for sure that no matter how good the metrics you use are and how sensible they seem to be, they are not gonna predict performance. At the end of the day, there is always a human factor involved in selecting sides and that is gonna continue. This game is not played by robots who are gonna play exactly the way their stats indicate. I wonder what a Flintoff would have been valued at back in early 2002, using these measures. How he was till then and what he became thereafter shows why stats are such a bad tool to judge players on, by itself.


Now if we are gonna use these said stats to understand players' performance over a period which might be tied into what they are gonna get paid (some sort of a performance pay that you receive at the end of a season than at the beginning), then yes, it is great. Otherwise, as an indicator, it is always that, just one among a few indicators that is just as liable to go as wrong as the others.

 

[Гурин]

Just because every team uses it does not mean that it is useful. It could just be a fad picked up because the team that used it seemed to have some success. You can look at the Oakland Athletics record in 2002 and it does not seem significantly different from the few years before it. You can argue that they lost their best players for that season but a winning culture had been established at the club. And, in the end, they did not even make the baseball world series.

This sort of thing happens all the time without some magic formula being involved. The perfect example being the Melbourne Storm in the rugby league this year. It may be that it is useful but I don't see any real evidence. The sample size was way too small to be of any use. You really need to set up an experiment where half the teams use it and half don't over several years and see if there is any significant difference in performance, which will never happen. I still don't see where luck has been ruled out.

Little OT- The main problem here is that in baseball true value can be shown only over a fairly long amount of time; over the single series, every team can beat every other one. In MLB, what's really difficult is to qualify for the playoffs, performing constantly over 162 games; then, you have 3 best of 5 (or 7) series that can easily go either way; once you're there, it becomes basically a matter of luck. That's why, by the way, it is an abomination the current expantion of the playoffs (once there were only the best 2 teams in the league, then 4, then 6, since 2013 it will be 8). In the beginning of the 2000's, the A's constantly qualified to the playoffs despite having one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, and then, when other teams started to use their methods, their advantage obviously got smaller and smaller, and, being one of the poor... less rich teams in MLB, they've gone back in the pack.


Regarding cricket. A lot of the considerations that have been done on this thread are right, but we mustn't forget that to simply think that "if SABR worked in bseball, then it should surely work in cricket!" is just as rubbish as to think that there's no need for new stats at all.

For istance, the first and most famous thing that came out of the "SABR" revolution was the notion that the batting average, which back in the day was used to determine how good a player was, was an overrated stat. And that was true; in baseball, batting average didn't take into account the typology of the various hits (a single was considered the same as a home run) and disregarded walks completely; so they developped a simple new stat that took everyting into account (OPS, but I don't want to be too much specific on baseball here). But, in cricket , bowling and batting average are much more useful to look at the general contribution of a player. Wides, as walks in baseball, are not taken into account for batsmen, but here, if you bowl a wide, you have to bowl that ball again, so there's no skill whatsoever by the batsman involved, because you simply have to take a penalty and repeat the delivery; in baseball, if you swing, it's always a strike, and sometimes it can be a strategy to give a batter a walk, so you don't have to face him. And, then, while in baseball's BA every hit is counted the same (as 1), you have to take out of the equation things like errors or sacrifices, which are completely subjective to the scorer, while in cricket EVERYTHING, included overthrows, is taken into account.

So, we can fairly say that the averages in cricket are much better gauge to measure players' contributions. However, I believe that it's still possible to improve them; but let me digress a little.

The stats in baseball are developped for a game that is organized as an open market, with every team competing against everybody else and playing the same amount of games every year; in this environment, the awareness of a player's true skills is possibly one of the greatest assets that a team can have. Even the fans, over the various internet forums, argue with stats about which players should their team sign in the next offseason or who should they trade.

Now. In cricket, we have national teams; except a few cases, a player can only play for his nation. The boards have to rely more on their coaches than on their scouts (careful here, more doesn't mean only); and given the differences in playing time and the non-balanced schedule that every team has from year to year, it is extremely difficult to compare the results; probably it would be quite easier to do so in the national first-class complex, but, as we know, skills for FC and TM cricket are not always directly related, so there would be probably no point into installing some kind of special camera on every ground only to collect data.

However, what's amazing is that the cricket community has been driven in a completely different way; cricket fans are obsessed with historical comparison, continuously trying to find empirical evidence to determine if Alan Davidson was better than Wasim Akram or something like that. I think that the search of methods for historical comparisons is probably absorbing the quasi-totality of the efforts around the globe.


Anyway. Talkin' stats, weren't we? So I'd chip in some of my opinions (everything that follows, will be categorically IMHO). There are quite a few things that could be improved, and I already wrote something about the fielding part in another thread. But the first and more important thing, however, is to start determinine every value as compared to averages; so, how did a fielder/batsman/bowler performed compared to the average performer from his country, and compared to the average global performer. An extremely good and easily achieved method is this one, which, over a fairly lenghy sample size, will work even with batsmen (remember, beware of small-sample size is te mantra of every statistician). English ain't my native tongue, so I'd be quite long winded to explain why but the possible confutation "what about batsmen who see off the best bowlers" wouldn't be a problem. A bigger problem would be that it has togheter home and away stats, and ever more importantly that old data would still be taken into account. Vettori's average in the last few years has been over 40, but he'd be still paying in his average the price of his first years, when he was a ferret (a trait common to new zealanders: given the low level of the NZFC, they usually get bathed much earlier in the test arena compared to the aussies, who growns in the Sheffield Shield so when they step up, they're usually more complete). The problem is, even if you take into account only some of his last innings, what's the right number? It is extremely important to avoid every possible arbitrary selection. A good start could be measuring averages of both EVEN and UNEVEN innings, analizing then the correspondance between the two and how long it takes before they uniform. Still, that simple stat, even only as 8ankitj measured it, it's a very good step forward, and IMHO should become one of the benchmarks.

I just read everything what I wrote and I find it crap, but I'm in a hurry so I'll leave it as it is (for now). There are other things that probably could do: a dissect of the averages based on lenghts and shot, averages per chances (arbitrary, I know, but whatever), a cricket-version of the BABIP (In baseball, over a couple of years, the percentage of balls hit in the air that becomes out is the same for every pitcher and every batter; could it be the same for cricket?). I'd maybe write more tomorrow. Cheers

 

[Lillian Thomson]

What in God's name are you on about?

 

[benchmark00]

Cliffs?

 

[Flem274*]

Cliffs?

uggboots

 

[BoyBrumby]

Cliffs?

Averages a better guide of a player's worth in cricket than rounders but could still be improved upon; SABRmetrics works better in an open market place.

 

[Furball]

2 questions for the baseball peeps:

If I'd played 3 or 4 years at college (however many it is) then played 2-3 years in the minor leagues after being drafted, how many games could I expect to play?

Would baseball's batting average be the equivelant to a cricketing statistic that measured a player's %ge of scoring shots?

 

[Гурин]

Averages a better guide of a player's worth in cricket than rounders but could still be improved upon; SABRmetrics works better in an open market place.

Cheers for decoding it for the masses. I shall consider you an enlightened fellow.

If I'd played 3 or 4 years at college (however many it is) then played 2-3 years in the minor leagues after being drafted, how many games could I expect to play?

I presume you mean, how many games could I expect to play in MLB? It depends, of course, on where did you played in college/high school, in which round were you drafted and how did you played in those 2-3 years in minors. Usually, 2-3 years is not enough for a player to be ready for the MLB (the average is around 4-5), but again, historically only about 12% of minor leaguers made it to the majors, and only a small part of this 12% did become regulars. Lot of players have played their entire career never going above the AA level (A, A+, AA, AAA, MLB). However, in lower levels, everybody plays: fortunately, baseball teams are clever enough to understand that player developpment is more important than winning in minors.

Would baseball's batting average be the equivelant to a cricketing statistic that measured a player's %ge of scoring shots?

Somehow but not exactly, keep in mind that in baseball there are no defensive shots, and base-on-balls are not calculated in BA; so i'd say it could be like "no. of scoring shots/balls that the bastman played at".


EDIT: I want to clarify that I never watched an entire baseball game in my life, I've just studied the dynamics of the game. As freak as it may sound.

 

[Furball]

No, I meant how many games would I have played in my college/minor league career?

 

[Гурин]

No, I meant how many games would I have played in my college/minor league career?

Again, it depends, but I'd say about 110-120 games per year if you're a positional player, and 50-60 if you are a pitcher (here is also important if you're a starter or a reliever). I don't know much about college baseball, but they play less than the professional teams.