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Positional Adjustments for Finding Player Value

This week, before I start next week into the end-of-season routine sequence with the conference races, I want to throw out one more fairly important piece of statistical analysis. On the small side, it's the answer to the question, "If Kellen Kulbacki is playing center field and Evan Longoria is playing third base, how much do you adjust the stats to allow for the differing positional value when voting for Player of the Year?" On the large side, it's the question of how much you adjust offensive stats when trying to determine the value of a college player to his team. That question doesn't take quality of defense into consideration, really; it's just a question of whether a player plays a position well enough that you're willing to live with him there and how much value he loses when he slides to an easier position.

There are two conflicting pieces of evidence to consider when thinking about this issue before looking at the actual numbers, which are hard to get. On the one hand, you'd expect that the hardest positions to defend would have fewer candidates and, therefore, would have the worst offensive numbers. Historically, that's been true at the Major League level, although in recent years there have been a few players like Alex Rodriguez and Mike Piazza who hit as well as anyone and are good enough athletes to play a difficult position as well, which has resulted in some oddities like shortstops being around the middle of the pack most years these days in MLB. On the other end, where did the best hitter on your Little League team play? Right, he was either the pitcher or the shortstop (or both, most likely, in different games), since pure athletic ability tends to express itself on both sides of the ball. This part of the curve actually holds on both ends of the age curve, as everyone who was good enough to play college baseball ends up playing shortstop in church-league slow pitch.

Where, then, does college baseball fall on this spectrum?

Before I throw out the numbers, a word about methodology: Positional data for college players en masse is quite hard to come by. Rosters tend to contain helpful entries like "INF" or the always wonderful "Fr., INF/LHP/OUTF". The last couple of years, though, I've maintained a mostly complete archive of box scores as the season goes, and I've parsed out the positional data with surprising accuracy, so that's the source of my player identification. For this study, all of a player's stats are counted for the position that he plays most often, and only players who have played at least ten games at their most common position are counted.

Here, then are the offensive numbers by position for the 2006 season to date:

 OPS   AVG   OBP   SLG  Pos

0.815 0.298 0.382 0.433 1b
0.801 0.296 0.379 0.422 rf
0.795 0.302 0.384 0.411 cf
0.790 0.288 0.371 0.418 dh
0.788 0.292 0.377 0.411 lf
0.785 0.293 0.376 0.409 3b
0.783 0.292 0.375 0.407 ALL
0.760 0.294 0.374 0.386 ss
0.758 0.277 0.363 0.395 c
0.753 0.289 0.372 0.382 2b

There are no huge surprises here, although I suppose it's hard to be surprised when you have two acceptable conflicting theories and a willingness to accept something in between. It's interesting that there's an apparent counterpart to the athleticism of shortstop going in that means that college center fielders are hitting right in the middle of their corner brethren despite playing a tougher position. The spread here is actually rather small; the difference in the average first baseman and the average second baseman is only about 8%. DH's don't hit nearly as well as you'd expect someone with no glove to hit. Except for the catchers and DH's, almost all of the difference between positions is in slugging; OBP is fairly consistent except for those two.

One final point that needs to be made is that there's a difference in quality and value. An average-hitting center fielder is probably a "better" player than an average-hitting left fielder; he plays a more difficult position and is more likely to be of value at a higher level. However, he's not more valuable to his college team, since, essentially, everybody has one.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East   SWAC                  Oklahoma State        Southern California
Atlantic 10    WAC                   Kansas                Alabama
Atlantic Sun   Notre Dame            Baylor                Georgia
Big Ten        Winthrop              Cal State Fullerton   South Carolina
Horizon        Old Dominion          UC Irvine             Arkansas
Princeton      Clemson               Long Beach State      Mississippi State
MAAC           Georgia Tech          Cal Poly              Mississippi
MAC            North Carolina        Rice                  Louisiana State
MEAC           North Carolina State  Houston               Kentucky
Mid-Continent  Florida State         East Carolina         Vanderbilt
Mountain West  Wake Forest           Southern Mississippi  College of Charleston
MVC            Virginia              Tulane                Elon
NEC            Miami, Florida        Arizona State         Troy
OVC            Nebraska              UCLA                  South Alabama
Patriot        Texas                 Oregon State          Pepperdine
Southland      Oklahoma              Washington            San Diego

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated. As always, I welcome actual pitch count corrections.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Positional Adjustments for Finding Player Value

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