quote:Originally posted by #32 DAD:
I found this interesting so I went and calculated my son's for last year.
58 inn/ .444 ops / .91 whip
competent scorekeeper (me)
If I were in charge of the baseball gods, I’d make sure they had everything set up so that every team had a great SK, all stats were submitted to one central location, and everyone would have access to them, the way everyone has access to MLB data. That would pretty much be paradise to me from the standpoint of producing all kinds of numbers all kinds of different ways. But as good as that would be, there would still be hitch in the git-a-long.
At any level there’s a range of skills and talent available, and the higher the level, the less the range from the best to the worst. That makes it possible to be reasonably accurate in assessing ML players, but almost impossible to assess players at lower levels. A good example is those numbers for your son.
Assuming he’s in HS, whether he’s playing Fr, JV, or V ball, they are fantastic numbers. However, they would be more impressive if they were V numbers. Why? Of course its because the skills and range of skills for V is generally higher than either the Fr or JV range. But unfortunately, the difference doesn’t stop with the 3 levels of HSB.
Like college, almost every state has divisions of some kind, normally broken down by school size. Trouble is, one state may have 4 divisions and another 7. Right there you have problems, various things like distances and population have a severe limiting effect. But even at that, by the very nature of baseball, its possible for a small school to compete very well with the large ones. Not likely, but possible.
For a large part of most HS schedules, they play teams who’s talent pool is fairly equal. But other than that, things can get pretty wild. So what ends up happening is, its extremely difficult for any team to play all of its games against team with the same level of skill and talent. Now you end up with needing rules to stop embarrassing massacres. The end result is, no matter how honest and skilled an SK is, the numbers for his//her team could very easily be skewed tremendously. That’s how every year there are batters batting .600+ and pitchers having an ERA of 0.00. Perhaps one day they’ll come up with something like a BPF where the numbers all have something factored into them that takes into account the level of their competition.
But for me it really doesn’t matter because I don’t try to use the numbers for anything other than entertainment. Its when people try to use them to determine things like college scholarships or pro contract that it would cause any real problems.