Interview with Jin Wong, Director of Baseball Administration for the Royals (Part 2)

While they also had flaws, were much closer in walks. If you do comparisons using RC and linear weights you will find walks have about the same weight. If you run them against the average outcome, you will get a similar result as well. In the end James’ formula tends to skew a little high, in large part because he really overvalues singles. (The walks, and extra base hits compare much closer.)

I don’t know why people think it stands for runs + rbi’s. They must be fantasy players.

it undervalues walks

I’ve never seen it listed anywhere, and I’ve never actually heard it called anything except with descriptive words like “difference between BA and OBP.”

I like it because it gives you a more exact picture of a guy’s on base skills than just seeing BA and OBP and doing a quick estimation in your head. But since I’ve been doing that quick estimation for a while now, I have an idea of what are good isolated OBP numbers. It’s not much more useful, but could be used to emphasize things—like if you have 2 players with no power and you want to compare them based on how well they get on base aside from hits. Like say, Gregor Blanco and Chris Getz.

I would just think so much money pumping through a pro sports organization, one would think that a whole stat committee with weekly presentations would be needed, kind of like where everyone has the same power and then the 3 at the top decide together based on the info. I guess there is a point where it gets too saturated, but one thing I have found from analysis for fantasy purposes is that I don’t listen for who a commenter hypes, but rather how they do it. If they like a guy and are grasping at air, I immediately change my opinion.

For example:

Commenter A: “I really like this MU basketball team in the tourney, if they can get anything out of Kim English, who has been a sleeping giant, they can go far. They are my sleeper pick.”

Commenter B: “You’re right Jim, English hasn’t given what MU needs, and the tournament is the perfect place for him to shine.”

My thought, “Have you guys even watched the games? I don’t catch many and can see English clearly hurts the team every time he is on the floor (this is a 2011 example). He is sloppy and single-handedly given up games for MU.” So I picked them to bow out early rather than a sleeper.

Well, not really a clear example, but I would just think with that much money on the line, it wouldn’t hurt to throw another hundred grand or two at a good team that can help you avoid Maueresque contracts.

I’m a big believer that any team can only compete two basic ways: outspend or outsmart, and since the Royals aren’t equipped or willing to outspend, they are left only with being smarter. Seems like this would be one of the ways to do that, so it’s a missed opportunity if it’s not.

Ha. If I were Wong and I wanted some ideas or even some answers to some statistical questions, I bet I could get them for free in droves if I asked for them on RR. Stuff like, “Hey bloggers: How would you rank these five free agent pitchers, and how long would you be willing to sign each of them? Discuss…” He wouldn’t have to use it, but I’d bet it would be a pretty exhaustive brain-storm session. Issues really get hashed out and considered from a lot of critical points of view, here, and I think there would be things to come out of it that wouldn’t have been considered, otherwise. The Royals might as well focus our attention on something the FO is actually interested in.

I’m sure everyone is looking to steal statistical analysis techniques from the Royals

Along with my first point… there are many other situations where a quick and dirty would be useful. Maybe they want to compare a Royals player coming up on arbitration with another player in the league who attained arbitration last year. To get a quick idea of how that player performed, take a quick look at the proprietary stat.

Weigh sac flies and hitting behind the runner?

Better than Allard and Tony is…..well, better than Allard and Tony. But being better than awful isn’t necessarily where you want to be. It’s a nice step in the right direction, but it is far from where they should be.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean looking for the “One True Way.” I think a front office should do everything it can to have the very best in scouting and the very best in statistical analysis. Clearly the Royals have worked hard at the former. It doesn’t appear that they are working hard enough on the latter. They are behind the times, and it would be too hard for them to catch up if they really wanted to. They can afford to have one of the best SA departments in baseball. I think they should. Is that some unattainable “One True Way”?

I just saw a bunch of things there that don’t really sound like good, state of the art statistical analysis. I don’t think those things can easily be explained away. If somebody told me that the head SA guy of Team X was talking about how he likes “FIPS” and uses WHIP to evaluate pitchers, and that he’s an “OPS guy”, I would be very concerned about the quality of SA in that organization.

why they would even do this interview. I mean, I’m glad they did. But they have nothing to really gain by doing it. And it is very doubtful they feel the need to keep us updated on their decision-making processes or what goes into the decisions. That would include any data analysis.

I think the interview (which Jeff did a great job with, BTW) was most likely granted simply for PR purposes- to extend a handshake to a pretty vocal, critical group of fans. And that’s fine, if that is important to the Royals. If I were them, it would not be to me. The implications that Mr. Wong made that the Royals FO is reading internet blogs to get info for their personnel decisions, to me, is pretty doubtful in its reality.

Boss mentality. I cannot tell you how many times I have come up with, and completely fleshed out an idea, and had a boss use the Royal WE when he presented it further up the line. Or take credit for the idea and maybe say that I helped him out. It’s the way of the world.

There seem to be lots of guys who get internships and just work their way up through the ranks, even to very high levels (I think that’s Theo Epstein’s bio).

I’m just a little concerned that Groopman and Williams weren’t put into their SA roles because they were gifted advanced statistical analysts with a deep and thorough knowledge of sabermetrics, but because they were good, hard working guys in the organization who they thought could “learn on the job” or something like that.

Groopman assists in all areas of the Baseball Operations department, including Major League operations, amateur and professional scouting, and player development. Groopman also oversees much of the quantitative research and analysis for the department.

I don’t think that first sentence includes statistical analysis. I think the second does.

In this role, he is responsible for providing support to all areas of the Baseball Operations Department and has significant involvement with the quantitative research and development of analytics for the department.

Tango takes the weight above out value then multiplies it by a constant so that it is scaled to OBP. you can verify this “working” by doing wOBA minus lgwOBA and dividing by 1.15 times PA and see that you get the correct linear weights runs created above average.

The 1.15 is a basic approximation, he shows how he scales lgwOBA to lgOBP for each given year here:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/woba_year_by_year_calculations/

Maybe you sold yourself short on considering a career change to do statistical analysis for a MLB team. I think you’d fit in nicely on the Royals team.

I’m not an expert on linear weights by any means, but the weights he’s working from seem pretty uncontroversial to me. They are “generic” averages from a few years back in the 00s:

HR 1.40, 3B 1.07, 2B .78, 1B 0.47, NIBB 0.32, Out -.3

so the value above an out is:

HR 1.70, 3B 1.37, 2B 1.08, 1B 0.77, NIBB 0.62

I don’t get what is wrong with the weights or the procedure, but maybe there is something there.