Camden Chat Group Analysis

by SeanP on Feb 12, 2012 10:06 PM EST

Yesterday, I wrote a lengthy comment comparing Mark Reynolds and Chris Davis, noting that Davis could be a very useful player if he made several small improvements in areas such as walk rate, strikeout rate and power production. Based on the data, I guessed that Davis may be the kind of player who shows flashes of excellent talent but never actually puts everything together.

I think most people would agree that that's a reasonable guess. But it seems like that kind of prediction lacks any value without some kind of statistical backing. What if we could take Chris Davis's skill set, find a list of comparable players - call them the Chris Davis Family of Hitters - and see how those hitters' careers played out? How many of those players improved their strikeout rates? How did they perform in their age-26 seasons? Every player is different, but we might be able to learn more about Chris Davis by looking at similar players.

This isn't a new idea, not in the least. Tom Tango used this method extensively in The Book. Bill James wrote an essay titled "The 96 Families of Hitters" in his 2009 Gold Mine (page 23). Dave Cameron recently used a similar approach in assessing the value of Adam Jones's upside.

So, this is probably a good way to think about Chris Davis's future. But I don't have the time, resources and skills necessary for doing this kind of analysis. Why not open up the ideas to the people who can analyze the data properly?

I figured I would start this thread as a place for everyone to ask the baseball questions that they've never been able to answer definitively. Some questions will be able to be answered by linking to someone else's work; others will have to be answered by combing through the numbers.

Note: It's going to be pretty important to give credit if you borrow somebody's work. If you follow through on someone else's idea, link to the source, be it a blog post, CC comment, tweet, etc. Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference have a ton of data, and Stacey can help anyone who needs data from B-R's premium content.

FanPosts are user-created content and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors of Camden Chat or SB Nation. They might, though.

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Comments

As a first cut, let’s use his baseball reference page, seen here:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/davisch02.shtml

The list of players with similar careers up to his age isn’t promising- none of the top ten were still in the majors past age 30.

However, the list of players who had similar seasons at his age we get a slightly better picture. Two of the guys on his top ten are Carlos Pena and Greg Vaughn, who turned out to be potent power hitters at some point during their careers.

None of the players on either list posted a career average over .270. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. It appears, based on this quick, dirty, sample that the downside is he could be out of the league before too long, with the upside being a .240-.250 hitter who can hit 35 HR a year.

goldomatic, who is King in the art of wishful thinking

by goldomatic on Feb 13, 2012 1:10 AM EST reply actions

That's a good start.

But I want to be able say: based on the performance of the Chris Davis Family of Hitters, we can say that X% of those players went on to improve their walk rates by 3% or better in their age-26 to -28 seasons; Y% of those players cut down their strikeouts by 5% or more; Z% posted a higher wRC+ in a significant number of PAs. Things like that.

Thanks for looking at comparables though, sometimes just saying a name can provide better context than any number can.

by SeanP on Feb 13, 2012 2:55 PM EST up reply actions

this is tangentially related

but some of your longer comments recently, I thought to myself, “I wish that was a fanpost so that more people would see it.” So I guess, good job.

by Stacey on Feb 13, 2012 1:27 PM EST reply actions

Thanks, it is kinda nice to know that other people are reading my thinking-out-loud comments.

I’ve been working on writing some fanposts recently, but I have some focus-related issues that have kept me from writing full posts. I’m working on it though.

Maybe I’ll re-post some comments as fanposts so that we can get some more discussion going.

by SeanP on Feb 13, 2012 3:02 PM EST up reply actions