Quote:
Originally Posted by Gom
Also, ORS, you and I both know that with VORP, every successive point is harder to achieve than the previous point. You can't "add" the two players and assume they are of the same value. Secondly, the Yankees moved him to LF because they had a better CF option in Melky. Heck, you had Manny DH often...you didn't have to, but Ellsbury in left with Crisp in center was a better defensive alignment.
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Do you realize what you are saying by stating that each successive point of VORP is "harder" to get than the previous? VORP is a counting stat, meaning it is playing time dependent. Suppose you have a 60 VORP player who is extremely consistent month in month out. Guess when he'll be at 10 VORP? The end of April. He'll pick up his last 10 VORP in September. For it to be "harder" then his performance in September would have to be better than his performance in April to pick up those same 10 runs. No, what I'm confident you are thinking about is "unlikely" given the normal distribution of VORP, ie improving from being an 80 VORP player to a 90 VORP player is "harder" than the jump from 70 to 80. Yes, you can add them. There are 162 games where you need a CF. If player A and player B play those games, then their collective VORP is what the team got from that position.
What you are trying to say is that player B (Ellsbury) played other positions and I need to account for that. I did, sort of. When player B wasn't in CF, he was in LF, and the normal LF was at DH when the DH was hurt. It works in this example because those are the positions where Damon played most often (all games except 1 at 1B ). It's not perfect, like I said, but I went conservative in accounting for the performance the Sox got. I threw away all contribution from Ellsbury in '07 and anyone who contributed at DH or LF other than Ortiz, Manny, Bay, and Ellsbury. The bias in the analysis was all tilted toward Damon.