1. Basic Offensive StatisticsAlex Rodriguez and David Ortiz put up similar offensive statistics in 2005. Their traditional statistics are shown below.
Basic Offensive Statistics, 2005
G | PA | AB | H | 2B | 3B | HR | R | RBI | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 162 | 715 | 605 | 194 | 29 | 1 | 48 | 124 | 130 | 91 | 139 | 0.321 | 0.421 | 0.610 |
David Ortiz | 159 | 713 | 601 | 180 | 40 | 1 | 47 | 119 | 148 | 102 | 124 | 0.300 | 0.397 | 0.604 |
Advanced Offensive Statistics, 2005
OPS | RC | RC/27 | OPS+ | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 1.031 | 163 | 10.2 | 173 |
David Ortiz | 1.001 | 149 | 9.0 | 158 |
Player Won-Lost Record: Batting, Context-Neutral
eWins | eLosses | eWinPct | eWins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 16.6 | 10.5 | 0.611 | 3.0 |
David Ortiz | 16.4 | 11.1 | 0.597 | 2.7 |
2. Everything ElseThere’s more to playing baseball than simply batting, of course.
• Baserunning
David Ortiz is a rather notoriously slow baserunner with 15 career stolen bases. Alex Rodriguez stole more bases than that in 2005 alone (21). Even beyond stolen bases, Rodriguez is, in general, a much better baserunner than David Ortiz. The context-neutral baserunning Player Game Points accumulated by each of them are shown below.
Player Won-Lost Record: Baserunning, Context-Neutral
eWins | eLosses | eWinPct | eWins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 1.2 | 1.2 | 0.499 | -0.0 |
David Ortiz | 0.5 | 0.8 | 0.380 | -0.2 |
• Fielding
David Ortiz is a poor-fielding first baseman who played a total of 78 innings in the field in 2005. Alex Rodriguez is a former Gold-Glove winning shortstop who played 1,390 innings in the field in 2005.
Let’s see how they compare.
Player Won-Lost Record: Fielding, Context-Neutral
eWins | eLosses | eWinPct | eWins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 4.3 | 5.0 | 0.466 | -0.3 |
David Ortiz | 0.2 | 0.3 | 0.414 | -0.0 |
Player Won-Lost Record: Context-Neutral
eWins | eLosses | eWinPct | eWins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 22.1 | 16.7 | 0.570 | 2.7 |
David Ortiz | 17.1 | 12.2 | 0.584 | 2.5 |
3. Contextual AdjustmentsSo why did David Ortiz do as well as he did in the MVP voting?
• Inter-Game Adjustments: Performance in the Clutch
Inter-game contextual factors adjust for the relative importance of a player's performance within the context of a given game. In other words, hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game is worth more than hitting a home run leading off the top of the 5th inning of a game in which the player's team is already leading 12-1.
There are two inter-game adjustments to Player won/lost records: Context and Win Adjustments.
• Inter-Game Context
Inter-game context is basically what some other people refer to as Leverage. This measures the relative importance of situations within the context of a single game.
In 2005, Alex Rodriguez performed in an average inter-game context of
1.024, about
-2.4% below average. This serves to lower A-Rod's total player decisions by
-0.9 games.
In contrast, David Ortiz performed in an average inter-game context of
1.070, about
7.0% above average, which increased Papi's total player decisions by
2.0 games.
• Inter-Game Win Adjustment
Of course, the issue is not simply how many high-leverage situations a player performs in, but how well he does in those situations. The MVP argument for David Ortiz was not simply that he had a lot of high-leverage at-bats (which, as we just saw, he did), but that he rose to the occasion in those situations, performing even better in those high-leverage situations than his already-excellent self.
In this regard, David Ortiz excelled. Overall, in 2005, Ortiz batted .300/.397/.604. With runners in scoring position, he improved that to .352/.462/.580. With two outs and runners in scoring position, he batted .368/.507/.719. When the score was tied, Ortiz batted .289/.405/.583. In "late and close" situations, Ortiz batted .346/.447/.846. No matter how you slice the data, Papi delivered big-time in the clutch in 2005. Because of this, his effective winning percentage was better than his context-neutral winning percentage of
0.584. In fact, his inter-game win adjustment increased his winning percentage by
0.041 to an inter-game adjusted winning percentage of
0.625.
Alex Rodriguez, on the other hand, while not as "un-clutch" as maybe some people thought at the time, performed almost exactly the same regardless of the inter-game context, so that his inter-game win adjustment was
0.004.
Taking inter-game context and inter-game win adjustments into account, the comparison between Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz looks thus.
Player Won-Lost Records, Inter-Game Adjusted: 2005*
Wins | Losses | WinPct | Wins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 22.9 | 16.8 | 0.576 | 3.0 |
David Ortiz | 19.6 | 11.6 | 0.628 | 4.0 |
• Intra-Game Adjustments: Performance in Team Wins versus Team Losses
In addition to adjusting for inter-game context, I also adjust for intra-game context. As with inter-game adjustments, I adjust for two factors here: Context and Win Adjustments.
• Intra-Game Context
Intra-game context adjusts player wins and losses to normalize the total number of player decisions per game to be equal to exactly three decisions per team per game.
Alex Rodriguez played in an average Intra-Game context of
1.075 about 7.5% above average. This increased Rodriguez's total player decisions by
3.0.
David Ortiz had an average Intra-Game context of
1.018 (1.8% above average), increasing his total player decisions by
0.6.
The intra-game context adjustment basically gives A-Rod as much of an edge in player decisions over Ortiz as the inter-game context adjustment gave to Papi.
This is because intra-game context is somewhat negatively correlated to inter-game context. This is because games with lots of high-leverage plays will tend to generate more raw Player Game Points than games with relatively few high-leverage plays. But, at the end of the day, all games count exactly the same in the standings: a team can only win a game once no matter how many clutch hits its players managed to get.
• Intra-Game Win Adjustment
There is one final adjustment that I make to Player Won-Lost records. This adjusts player wins and losses such that the players on a team earn exactly two player wins in any team win and exactly one win in any team loss, and that players earn exactly two player losses in any team loss and exactly one loss in any team win. In this adjustment, positive events which contributed to wins are weighted more heavily than positive events which happened in team losses, while negative events which contributed to team losses get more weight than negative events which happened in team wins.
This final adjustment improves David Ortiz's player winning percentage by
0.007 and A-Rod's winning percentage by
0.023.
This final adjustment benefits both Rodriguez and Ortiz, as they both tended to perform better in games which their teams won than they did in games which their teams lost. Of course, this is true of most players (that’s why their teams win those games after all). Rodriguez and Ortiz were both also helped by the fact that their teams won 95 games apiece.
While this adjustment helped both players, the help to Ortiz was fairly minimal, an extra
0.2 wins (and a reduction of
0.2 losses). Rodriguez, on the other hand, gained more than
4 times as many wins as Ortiz
(1.0) by virtue of having produced better in Yankee victories than in Yankee losses.
Does this make sense?
Well, here are A-Rod’s numbers.
Alex Rodriguez's Batting Line in 2005
G | PA | BA | OBP | SLG | Runs | RBI | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Yankee Wins | 95 | 437 | 0.376 | 0.490 | 0.736 | 101 | 101 |
Yankee Losses | 67 | 278 | 0.241 | 0.313 | 0.430 | 23 | 29 |
David Ortiz's Batting Line in 2005
G | PA | BA | OBP | SLG | Runs | RBI | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Red Sox Wins | 94 | 431 | 0.332 | 0.441 | 0.685 | 92 | 104 |
Red Sox Losses | 65 | 282 | 0.253 | 0.330 | 0.490 | 27 | 44 |
On September 29, 2005, David Ortiz went 3-5 including a home run leading off the bottom of the 8th inning to tie the score 4-4 and a walkoff RBI single with one out in the bottom of the 9th inning. Baseball-Reference.com credits Ortiz with a WPA of 0.584 for the game. Obviously, those hits were huge for the Red Sox and Ortiz was rightly celebrated as the hero of that game.Take Ortiz's two RBIs off the scoreboard for the Red Sox in that September 29th game, and the Blue Jays would have won that game 4-3. Then again, if Ortiz made a (single) out in his final at-bat, Manny Ramirez would have come to bat with the potential winning run still in scoring position (albeit with two outs).
On April 26, 2005, the Yankees defeated the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they were calling themselves that season) 12-4. The Yankees took a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the first inning and led 10-2 by the end of the 4th inning. Obviously, there weren't a lot of "clutch" situations in this game. It was over early. Do you know why it was over early? Because Alex Rodriguez hit a 2-out, 3-run home run in the bottom of the first inning to give the Yankees that 3-0 lead, he hit a 2-out, 2-run home run in the bottom of the third inning to extend the Yankees' lead to 5-2, and he capped it off with a 2-out grand slam in the bottom of the 4th inning to give the Yankees that aforementioned 10-2 lead. For all of that, Baseball-Reference.com only credits Alex Rodriguez with a WPA of 0.490 for that game.
3. Comparing a Third Baseman to a Designated HitterTaking everything into account, here is where we stand with Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz in 2005.
Final Player Won-Lost Records: 2005
pWins | pLosses | pWinPct | Wins over .500 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 25.6 | 17.1 | 0.599 | 4.2 |
David Ortiz | 20.2 | 11.6 | 0.635 | 4.3 |
• Positional Average
A player who hit (and ran) like an average third baseman given Alex Rodriguez’s batting opportunities, and fielded like an average third baseman given A-Rod’s fielding opportunities, would have been expected to compile a
0.502 winning percentage. In contrast, a player who hit (and ran) like an average DH/1B given David Ortiz’s batting opportunities, and fielded like an average first baseman given Ortiz’s fielding opportunities, would have been expected to compile a
0.515 winning percentage.
Using these figures for “average”, then, Alex Rodriguez’s final won-lost record was
4.2 pWins over Positional Average (pWOPA) while David Ortiz compiled a pWOPA of
3.8, a solid, albeit modest, lead for A-Rod.
• Replacement Level
Alex Rodriguez earned
34% more Player decisions than Ortiz because he played so many more innings in the field than Ortiz. If Rodriguez had earned the same number of decisions as Ortiz (if, say, he missed 40 games to injury), is it likely that the Yankees could have found an average player (which, in Rodriguez’s case, means a
0.502 player) to make up those extra decisions? No, it is not. Instead, the most likely scenario is that the Yankees would have had to make up those Player decisions with a below-average player. Consider who the Yankees played at third base in April of 2009 while A-Rod recovered from a hip injury: Cody Ransom, who batted a robust .190/.256/.329 for the Yankees.
Hence, instead of comparing A-Rod and Papi to average players, a more relevant measure of the relative value contributed by Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz is to measure how many Wins they contribute over Replacement Level (WORL). In my work, I set Replacement Level one standard deviation below positional average.
I have recently made one adjustment to this calculation, which actually helps Ortiz in this comparison. In constructing replacement level, I calculate separate standard deviations for four groups of players: position players who play the field, offense-only players (DH, PH, PR), starting pitchers, and relief pitchers. The logic behind the distinction between the first two is that, in replacing a fielder, a team may be able to ameliorate some of the loss of A-Rod's bat by replacing him with a player who was a better defensive third baseman. For a DH, such as Ortiz, however, there's no such opportunity to ameliorate the loss of Ortiz's bat (outside of the ability to find a better baserunner).
The standard deviation applied to Alex Rodriguez's positional average for 2005 was
3.6%, so that the relevant replacement level for Rodriguez is
0.466 (0.502 - 0.036). For Ortiz, the standard deviation was somewhat wider, 5.8%, so that the relevant replacement level for Ortiz is
0.457 (0.515 - 0.058).
Wins over Replacement Level for Rodriguez and Ortiz are shown below.
Final Player Won-Lost Records: 2005
Wins over Positional | |||||
pWins | pLosses | pWinPct | Average | Repl Level | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Alex Rodriguez | 25.6 | 17.1 | 0.599 | 4.2 | 5.7 |
David Ortiz | 20.2 | 11.6 | 0.635 | 3.8 | 5.7 |