Bill James on Fielding, Part 6

By foxsports
Published

For the last week or so, Bill James has been publishing articles about his revised system for figuring Win and Loss Shares, and going through the catchers. From Monday's article:

In theory, in this system, it is possible for a catcher (or a player at any position) to have a winning percentage greater than 1.000, since the impact of a player'€™s defensive play may be larger than the area of defensive responsibility assigned to him. The only catcher ever to actually do this, in 100 or more games, was Ivan Rodriguez in 1999. Rodriguez also hit 35 home runs that season, and was named the Most Valuable Player in the American League. 

We use eight indicators of defensive quality for a team'€™s catchers; I'€™ll explain that later. All eight are over .500 for the 1999 Rangers, which is not terribly unusual; there are about 40 teams in history which were +.500 in all eight indicators. The 1999 Rangers weighted average of the eight is .653, which is the highest ever.

I bring this up today because there are still a lot of people, 99 percent of whom are shoveling snow right now, who think that Pedro Martinez should have been named Most Valuable Player in 1999. Or if not Pedro, then Derek Jeter. In fact, bWAR backs those shovelers up:

9.7 Martinez
8.0 Jeter
7.4 Alomar (Roberto)
7.3 Ramirez (Manny B.)
6.6 Nomar
6.4 Pudge




Nobody's ever really complained about the other guys, but Alomar and Ramirez did have tremendous seasons, too.

Wondering about FanGraphs' version (fWAR) of WAR? Yeah, me too ...

7.5 Manny
7.4 Jeter
7.3 Alomar
6.8 Pudge


What? Oh, right. Forgot about the pitcher.

11.9 Pedro

I don't know, man. When I started this, I figured I would wind up making the case that Pudge might actually have deserved that MVP. Seems like a tough case to make, though. Even now.