Arrogance would be saying that I’m right and they’re wrong without having evidence to back it up. I’m not saying that, I’m saying that I don’t think it’s possible to measure individual defensive value independent from pitching and team defense in a way that’s as intrinsically valuable as offensive ability measures. That’s not arrogant, that’s simply stating my view on the subject.

I’ve read Tango’s WOWY method, I have “The Book”. Stop trying to make me look like an asshole who hasn’t read any of this stuff. I have, I’m just not convinced that its “all that and a bag of potato chips” like you seem to be.

I’m not even saying I have a better way to do this. I’m simply saying that I find a lot of fallacies in the ways that it’s being done. Enough that I don’t believe it entirely and that I don’t put as much stock in it as I do offensive statistical analysis, and I’m certainly not alone in this belief, others on this board and the authors of the models themselves don’t blindly believe that they are right.

I would rather make decisions based more on the statistics that have a higher rate of estimating future performance. I believe offensive statistical metrics provide a greater certainty than the defensive statistics that I find suspect.

Do you know what weighting is? It would be like saying player X saved 5 runs and produced 5 runs so his WAR is .8*5+5 since we have to reduce the value of defensive runs. If you disagree with how defensive calcs are made that’s a separate argument from them being "weighted". If you admit that a run saved is a run earned than they SHOULD be weighted the same (i.e. not weighted at all) . Your qualm is with the calculations of individual defensive runs saved.

Um, YEAH!!! You just made my argument for me, via circular reasoning. Let’s break this down into parts so you can understand why part I of your rant doesn’t mesh with part II:

1. if you believe that individual player defensive metrics are the same as individual player offensive metrics then you are “weighting” them equally: 50/50.
2. I don’t believe that individual defensive metrics have the same level of predictability and certainty as offensive metrics, so therefore I don’t think they deserve equal “weight” when performing a WAR calculation.
3. If my qualm is with the individual defensive runs saved, then having a defensive metric equal an offensive metric isn’t properly weighting their score
4. Asking me if I know what weighting is and then fleshing out exactly what I’ve been talking about for two posts is a bit hypocritical.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that the measures for individual players preventing runs are independent from pitching, which is factored into run prevention. Thus, while a run saved = a run scored, offensive prowess is all that’s needed to score or create a run (i.e. it’s independent), while defensive prowess is only part of the equation for preventing a run (i.e. not independent), pitching must also be factored in. So when I say I don’t think it’s weighted equally, what I’m saying is that you either need to factor in pitching to the WAR equation somehow, or you need to degrade the defensive part of the formula for the amount of weight that pitching would have on preventing runs. We do this for pitchers with FIP, by removing all instances out of the pitchers control to determine whether that pitcher is effective at getting guys out independent of defense. It’s not a perfect stat either, but it does illustrate my point.

Again your qualms boil down to "I don’t like some of this on a subjective level" when multiple models arrive at very similar conclusions on defense. If you think you are smarter than Lichtman, Pinto, Fox, etc. just say it and you’ll save us all a lot of time.

I didn’t say I was smarter than any of these guys, nor am I. I’m simply pointing out that each and every one of them also has concerns about their model’s ability to measure individual defensive play consistently and effectively. Much more so than most of the metrics that have been established to measure offensive play. Do you read the footnotes to their analyses? That’s a very important part of the actual analysis, when you point out the model’s potential shortcomings.

What’s arrogant is believing that you are right in the face of disputable evidence simply because you have a method based on numbers and I don’t. Sometimes statistical evaluation can make things look far different from what they actually are.

“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” — Mark Twain.

You do this to just about everyone that challenges the validity of the sabermetric statistics. I’ve seen it before, and I’ve been part of those discussions, so I have come to find out that you don’t like arguing about their validity. That’s absolutely ok by me, but don’t call someone arrogant just because they don’t agree with you. I wasn’t being backhanded, I was simply stating this is what I’ve seen and been involved with for the past couple of days.

We were arguing in circles. I’d bring things up, you’d say you didn’t buy into it. You’d question the logic of some stats, I’d say it’s the best that’s out there.

We were not arguing in circles — you were arguing in circles with yourself, and implying that I was saying that the defensive metrics out there are worthless. They aren’t — they provide good information when comparing players of the same position and they do give genera information that can be used to evaluate players. My entire argument was based around the fact that I don’t think any specific individual defensive statistic can independently measure with a high degree of accuracy how much an individual defensive player impacts the prevention of runs, and therefore that those statistics should be discounted for outside factors like pitching and team defense when using them as part of a WAR calculation to determine player value, because they aren’t as accurate and independent as offensive statistics like wOBA. You’re not comparing apples to apples, you’re comparing apples to crabapples. I really don’t know what was so confusing to you about that idea or set of ideas, but you obviously didn’t understand what I was talking about.

You were the one trying to get me to come up with my own system or whatever, which I’m not interested in doing, because people much smarter than me have tried and haven’t come up with one that really is the cat’s ass. I think that doing this effectively is a very, very, very difficult thing to do, as I posted above, That said, I have the right to question the validity of these statistics, especially when they are being used to determine overall player value. Comparing the WAR of Dunn and Izturis against each other does not look right to me, so I said something about it. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked at two WAR values and been completely mystified, but this is the most egregious example that I’ve seen where two players are that close based solely on defense and positional adjustment, when one is an exceptionally better offensive player.