The Curious Case of Mark Reynolds

So I was having a friendly debate last night about the validity of scoring metrics in general and their ability to truly measure a player's value and possible impact on their team. Of course, it has been well documented that fantasy baseball is limited in its ability to measure the true value of a player, but I continue to argue that it is good at measuring raw offensive output. Again, we cannot measure defensive worth in fantasy baseball at least in its current incarnation. Some of the arguments that were brought up included situational hitting, lineup dependent thought processes by both the pitcher and the hitter, and various other psychological things. My argument is that there is no way that we can measure a player's psychological impact on a game so why worry about it? I think we should include an overall "fudge" factor that can include our "gut" instincts about a player's actual value. Take, for instance, Mark Reynolds. Reynolds, the perennial strikeout king, is like Adam Dunn's retarded little brother. Retarded because he strikes out more and walks less. They both just tear the cover off the ball though, but how good is Reynolds? I think all of our instincts will tell us that he sucks, but by how much? His replacement on the Diamondbacks this year, Ryan Roberts is, according to my gut, a decent third baseman but not an elite player. While I don't think he is better offensively than Reynolds, I "know" he is a better player overall. But is he? Let's take a look at the top third basemen according to Sawsheezle's scoring metric along with some advanced metrics from fangraphs. Recall that Sawsheezle's metric is fundamentally limited by the inherent parameters of fantasy baseball to only deal with offensive output.

The top third basemen according to Sawsheeszle (excluding Jose Bautista who is primarily in RF and Johnny Peralta who is at SS/3B):

1. Aramis Ramirez (300.7)
2. Michael Young (285)
3. Kevin Youkilis (248.5)
4. Mark Reynolds (241.8)
5. Adrian Beltre (232.8)
6. Evan Longoria (229.5)
7. Edwin Encarnacion (212)
8. Ryan Roberts (208.6)

Did you know that Aramis Ramirez is the best 3B in baseball (offensively)?

Now let's look at OPS from fangraphs which is still a raw metric, but doesn't include/consider number of games played/total at-bats:

1. Aramis Ramirez (.865)
2. Michael Young (.862)
3. Kevin Youkilis (.861)
4. Daniel Murphy (.809)
5. Mark Reynolds (.803)
6. Evan Longoria (.802)
7. Edwin Encarnacion (.801)
8. Ryan Roberts (.791)

No real shockers here, but Youkilis and Murphy are higher than expected, but this doesn't include total at-bats. Aramis has 107 more ABs than Murphy and 103 more than Youkilis and that is why Aramis has so many more points.

Now let's look at wRC which is a "runs created" metric:

1. Michael Young (91.5)
2. Aramis Ramirez (84.8)
3. Kevin Youkilis (75.9)
4. Mark Reynolds (71.8)
5. Ryan Roberts (65.3)
6. Edwin Encarnacion (62.4)
7. Evan Longoria (62.0)
8. Daniel Murphy (58.9)

Nothing so far has looked into fielding. Again, I wish we could do fielding in the fantasy league, but we really can't as was discussed in the scoring treatise. If we include fielding stats we can look at a player's WAR which is the number of wins above a replacement level player that the player is worth. The difference in two players' WARs should tell you how many more/less wins a team would have with one player or the other. Again, WAR is perhaps the most complicated statistic used in baseball today and I am not necessarily a believer in it, but it paints a different picture at least so let's dive in.

1. Kevin Youkilis (4.2)
2. Evan Longoria (4.0)
3. Ryan Roberts (3.6)
4. Michael Young (3.5)
5. Daniel Murphy (3.2)
6. Aramis Ramirez (3.2)
7. Alberto Callaspo (2.6)
8. Placido Palanco (2.3)
9. Macier Izturis (1.8)
10. Martin Prado (1.6)
11. Edwin Encarnacion (1.5)
12. Casey McGehee (0.7)
13. Mark Reynolds (0.6)

Now, at least according to WAR, Mark Reynolds drops from about 4th in the other metrics to 13th. We can see that the Diamondbacks gained three more "wins" by getting rid of Reynolds in favor of Roberts. But why is Reynolds' WAR so low? It is because he is a terrible fielder. We knew that. In our guts we knew that he sucked. We can at least see it here even if we can't measure some of the intangibles like whether or not he is a strong "clubhouse presence" or what he thinks about when he strolls to the plate with runners in scoring position.

This was interesting to do. I will be doing a lot of analysis like this over the offseason to reevaluate the scoring metric so as to improve it for next year. I would also thank my friend for putting up with a physicist who loves to argue about baseball.