HS stats matter? Not so much

jacjacatk,

 

Assuming you’re correct, that still tells me the user has to somehow determine which teams or players to include in a league, and therein lies the problem I run into, albeit in a different way. FI, we play 18 different teams from 3 different Divisions. We’re a DI and most of the teams we play are DI’s as well, but one of the DII’s is stronger than 90% of the DI’s we played so how do you tell it that that team is “worthy”?

 

Then comes the biiiig problem. Say you only want to include “good” pitchers. How do you make that choice? Is it their W/L record, their ERA, or something else, and then how do you choose the games to include that he pitched? After all, a stud throwing against a really weak team is likely gonna show some inflated stats, and worse, if he has a bad game against a weak team how would that play into it.

 

Naw, I’ve been through this with the Gamechanger folks, and they’re completely in the dark too. The problem is, there’s no centralized database everyone contributes to, so the only games you can use to make any determinations are the one they played against your team. It sounds like a neat little bell or whistle, but as described it sounds like a ton of work for little or no tangible results.

 

I thought I had it one time when I found out every HS team was ranked. I figgered I’d use a team’s ranking like they do when they figure rankings. Unfortunately, many times a ranked team plays a very weak team and throw their weakest pitcher and/or plays a lot of the 2^nd tier players to give them some PT. So why should the weaker team get full credit for playing the monster team? Also, to get the rankings is no mean task. I’ll do that at the end of the year to try to give more clarity to our season, but it takes a lot of work someone less anal than I about the stats wouldn’t even think of doing. In fact, when I did it last year and showed it to our coach, he thought it was pretty useless because the season was over and there was no way he could use the information.

 

So for right now I’ll continue to use the opponent’s W/L record when we play the game, and even with that, there are very few people who bother to look at those numbers.

 

 

 

 

Leagues are completely arbitrary, you can define them however you want. So, if all you care about is comparing your own players against equal levels of competition, that's pretty easy by just creating a league for each of your own players, you don't really need to know ahead of time who the good teams/players are for your opponents.

Just to be clear, games can be assigned to multiple leagues.  So if you have a league for each player in your starting lineup, you can assign that game to the league created for each player.

That doesn’t answer my question. How does the user choose the games s/he believes are quality/non-quality games?

 

For any of my stats, I can print just playoff games, just league games, just games played against any individual opponent, for any individual player or combination of players, and for the current season or all seasons combined as well as any combination or all of the stats. But, that still doesn’t let me choose which games I thought were “important”. I suppose I could put in a switch to print only those stats played against teams with a certain winning percentage at game time, or even put in a switch to flag an individual game or opponent as “important”, but I’m not at all seeing what that would buy me to warrant the work, even f it were minimal.

 

Because teams change so much from year to year or even during a season, it seems to me to get any kind of meaningful results, the game would have to be flagged on-the-fly rather than automatically, unless some kind of algorithm was used to flag the game based on some combination of stats. Like I said, I’ve been looking at this conundrum for more than a couple of years now, trying to find some way to make the stats more useful for someone like a scout or college coach, but it just doesn’t work to the point where the numbers come out significantly different than just using all the games and letting the averages work.

You don't need to know ahead of time which games you want to assign to which leagues.  The underlying data remains the same, and you can create the leagues after the fact to facilitate whatever comparison you're interested in, and the software will then group those games and report just those stats for that league.

The iscore is pretty awesome with its league feature. We found that our ace had twice as low ERA against better teams versus weaker teams. Turns out he was better at his mental and physical approach with better teams. You can also use the league feature to isolate trends by creating leagues based on  last 10 games, etc.

I get it. You guys who use IScore think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s the same way GameChanger people think about it, and for sure the way I think about my program. I’m not out to denigrate anything here, but am just trying to find out how you pick one team as opposed to another as being a “better” team. So far it sounds a lot like determining QABs, and everyone knows what I think about them.

 

So far it sounds pretty arbitrary, while at least I make some attempt at doing it automatically, based on their records when we play them. I know my way isn’t very good, so I’m always looking for a better way.