Derek Jeter & UZR

[Kenny Krew]

any of them??? It was a general statement about how stats like OPS and ISO and even wOBA are more widely accepted, verifiable, and actually "prove" a players value, while defensive stats have many more retractors. Or to put it another way, IMO, offensive stats would have a much easier time meeting the Frye standard than defensive stats.

How does OPS prove a player's value? What is Nick Swisher's OPS compared to Ty Cobb? Every single stat out there has flaws. The fact that someone said one the flaws was not judging the spin of the ball just proves UZR is a pretty good stat.

[natepro]

I want to marry this thread.

[Doogolas]

Just because they're more widely accepted does not make them more valid statistics. OPS is just bad. It's like fielding percentage. ISO only tells us one thing. wOBA is much better, as are any linear weight-based formulas, but they're still all estimators. Runs Created, Base Runs, ERP, XR, etc., they're all estimators. They don't "prove" a player's value. They will often overvalue certain players and undervalue others.

Point is, offensive stats aren't that much better than defensive stats. They have their strengths and weaknesses.

First of all, OPS is not "Just bad" it's correlation to runs is pretty damn close to that of wOBA about a 1% difference, something like .955 vs .964, saying OPS "is just bad" is pretty ignorant. It's certainly not the best stat, but it's quick, easy to calculate and gives you a good idea of who is a good hitter and who isn't.

UZR is more flawed than OPS or wOBA and actually a few other hitting stats. It's a nice stat, better than eyes or media, but it's certainly not as good as a lot of hitting stats as it's far more difficult to actually quantify defense completely.

We'll only really know how good UZR is once this new system comes out. Until then it's a yard stick, but it's impossible to show if it's even close to as accurate as OPS or wOBA are for hitting because, well, you can't do things like find it's correlation to runs. You just have to trust it. So again, we'll see how UZR stacks up when this new system is unleashed on the world, but until then it's a nice tool but not even close to gospel.