Important Intro Note: I’m going to skip past the old debate of whether or not the MVP has to play for a team that sneaks into the playoffs. I’m defining value as a player’s contribution towards his team winning individual games, regardless of overall season-long team performance.
Thanks to the Important Introductory Note, the second (first?) question becomes “how do you interpret the context of a player’s performance”. For example, park effects are important. Jake Peavy’s a great pitcher, but his ERA is deflated by his home park.
I’m going to make a side journey into park effects, then come back to my point. There are two ways to account for park effects. One is to take a player’s line and translate it to a neutral park. Baseball-Reference has OPS+ and they also neutralize raw counting stats, presented with the caveat that each player is affected differently by each ballpark.
Year G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB BB SO BA OBP SLG Actual 150 604 112 205 48 5 36 131 11 57 117 .339 .402 .614 Neutral 150 585 99 186 44 5 33 115 10 52 117 .318 .379 .579
Now you can more accurately judge the runs created by Holliday against those created by Chase Utley, if you neutralize Utley’s stats in the same way.
Here’s the second method to account for ballpark — instead of bringing Holliday’s performance out of Coors Field, we can also judge his contributions within that context. Instead of thinking that Coors boosts Holliday’s numbers, you can think of games played at Coors requiring more runs to win. Thus, each run is less valuable in Coors because there are more of them, but the same number of wins to go around. WPA takes this route, using a different run expectancy table for each ballpark. (If you don’t like crediting players with game leverage, you could go the WPA/LI route, which takes into account game situation, but without the leverage aspect*.)
Anyway, I’ve presented two reasonably effective ways to deal with park effects (and other non-standard contexts such as quality of pitchers faced.) However, there might be park effects that aren’t symmetrical — they don’t affect both teams equally, by definition. For example, consider the supposed Coors Hangover Effect. Pitches don’t break as much in Coors and don’t travel as far. Thus, Rockies hitters hypothetically struggle on the road because they aren’t used to reacting to full-scale breaking balls and are no longer rewarded for hitting lots of flyballs. (I’m not saying the Coors effect exists, but it certainly might**. And while the humidor instituted a couple years ago “fixes” the distance traveled by flyballs, it doesn’t affect the break of pitches.)
When Matt Holliday and his Rockies go on the road, they lose a lot. They’re still suffering from a Coors park effect, but the opponent is not. It’s like drugging one team but not the other. Nobody on the Rockies racks up a lot of value in away games.
Notice that the Hangover Effect isn’t accounted for in either park effect neutralization method presented above. Should it be? That’s the real question I’m asking in this article.
Is Matt Holliday’s value his actual contribution towards the Rockies winning games or is it his value compared to what other players would have done in the same exact context. Position A would dock Holliday credit for not doing more to help win away games, even though it’s not his fault. Position B would lower the bar in away games, because all players — Utley, HanRam, whoever — would have played worse on the road if they were on the Rockies. Even though the Rockies aren’t winning much, they’d win more without the Hangover Effect. Are we juding a player’s demonstrated value or his demonstrated ability? Holliday doesn’t have as much value as Chase Utley — he did not contribute as much towards his team winning games — but depending on the size of the Coors Hangover Effect, he may have demonstrated more ability. We might deserve to be more impressed by Holliday’s performance than Utley’s.
So what do you think. Should the MVP discussion give credit to Holliday and other players on teams dealing with non-symmetrical ballpark effects? Or should the MVP simply be the player who contributed most towards his team winning games, accounting for environment?
It’s a tough call and I personally think the decision only matters because we put so much importance on the MVP award. In the realm of player projection and free agency, of course we’d take the Hangover Effect into account. For fantasy purposes, knowing Holliday’s on the Rockies, we don’t care about the Hangover Effect. I’m guessing most people would stick with a straight definition of value, docking Holliday for his lack of contribution towards winning away games.
** Some researchers I respect have tackled the Coors Hangover topic and concluded there isn’t much of a Hangover effect. However, their methodology isn’t really convincing. I’m still on the fence. The difference between the Rockies home and road winnings percentages is historically much greater than any other team. Why?
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.
September 21st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
My position is that everyone is free to judge as they please, but for myself, I try to avoid going down the “what if” road, if for no other reason than that I am not smart enough to fully account for all of the variables.
There are some what ifs, like the Coors Hangover, that can be identified and could be accounted for. But what about others? Wouldn’t ARod be more valuable if he had never been traded to the Yankees and was still playing shortstop? And might that not make Michael Young more valuable too, since instead of being a dreadful shortstop he would be (presumably) an average to above-average second baseman?
One might scoff at that example, and say “But, Patriot, Holliday really does play on the Rockies, so it’s not really the same.” This is true to some extent, but is it not true also that this is the price of being a Rockie to Holliday, just as the price of being a Yankee to ARod is having to play third base? Given that the Hangover is real, an equally skilled Rockie is going to have less value then an equally skilled Cardinal. To me, that’s tough luck.
Another ballpark effect that you did not touch on but that is very real is the fact that not everyone is effected equally by a given park. Some parks help home runs, but don’t really increase runs (CIN for instance). Some parks favor righties. I take the same position on that in a retrospective analysis of value as I do with something like the Coors Effect–too bad.
I do disagree that this stuff only matters because of the value placed on the MVP award. I follow the same approach with any retrospective question of performance, including the Hall of Fame. More than half the fun in baseball, to me at least, is looking at the past.