Fans Scouting Report Article
Dave · September 11, 2008 at 6:28 am · Filed Under Mariners
Tom Tango has written an article at The Hardball Times that looks at the differences between the average Mariners fans opinion about the team’s individual defenders and my own. Tom’s project is pretty interesting, so check it out.
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One issue Tom doesn’t mention is that probably a high percentage of Mariner fans who fill out the ballots are regular readers of this site, and will likely have been influence by Dave’s observations.
Though that doesn’t seem to have had much affect on opinions of Ichiro’s throwing accuracy.
Actually, that’s why I didn’t advertise the report this year. However, the bias is still there, because most of the balloters came from LookoutLanding (Jeff plugged it), and so they’re influenced by his opinions, which are basically the same as mine.
Although .17 is a decently close gap in the overall averages, it just shows that the fans have a close overall team score compared to Dave’s. When you look at each observation, the fans are off, on average by .352.
Look at Miguel Cairo and Ichiro. Ichiro was overrated a good deal by the fans, because for some reason or the other they think he is good (they heard he is good, he is fun to watch) . Cairo is underrated, for some reason most fans know that signing was awful (read it on a blog). However, as Tango said, this study is unweighted and Cairo’s 10.7 from Dave does not mean he is almost as good as Ichiro.
Considering that this is about scouting reports, the conclusion should be more along the lines that fans are not that good at scouting each individual player, but have a decent sense of how good overall the team is (maybe the standings help?).
I would be really curious to know the results from the causal fan sampling. Would a 100 fans exiting Safeco agree that Ibanez is such a liability?
I think that’s obvious to the naked eye.
I don’t have much of an informed opinion, but I keep looking Raul and thinking “Jeez, I could have reached that ball”.
I wasn’t surprised by Cairo’s fan rating being somewhat lower than Dave’s. We spend a lot of time gnashing out teeth over his presence in the lineup, and I agree, but he actually does a good job on defense.
How the heck can anyone evaluate Wilkerson? I can barely remember him at all.
The Cairo thing surprised me, honestly – I find it hard to believe that people could watch him play first base and not be impressed with his work with the glove. This should even be expected – if you take a middle infielder and stick him at a corner, he’s probably going to look terrific compared to other corner guys.
Cairo’s bat is lousy and he shouldn’t be on the team, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a pretty good defensive player.
I asked tango about that, scraps – I can’t remember if it was here or LL, but he discussed that issue a year or two ago.
I’m thinking this post is a partial answer to it, and it *does* show some interesting points of disagreement.
I love the project, but I still wonder if the std. deviation for M’s fans is lower than the std. deviation for players from other teams, because of the influence Dave/Jeff have.
The Cairo Effect, or a guy getting low scores because he’s a terrible hitter and doesn’t really belong on the team, probably happens everywhere.
Thanks for the interest.
I track the Agreement Level each year, which I show in the Annual reports along with the totals. The average level is usually around .70 or so. This year, it’s exactly .70.
The agreement level for the Mariners players is .693, which is 18th highest. Milwaukee currently leads at .77, and Padres are at the bottom with .61.
So, I don’t think there’s any kind of groupthink among Mariner fans, unless that groupthink is really affecting all the teams.
Seeing how strongly the Fans ratings match to objective measures, I don’t think that groupthink is really an issue.
Thanks tango – that’s fascinating stuff.
I don’t know how many people came to the rankings from LL or USSM, but I bet the percentage is quite high. I also don’t know if similar blogs for other teams funnel a high percentage of fans to the rankings, but at this point, I have to agree – I don’t see any data to suggest that groupthink is polluting these results. Again, that sort of surprises me, but that’s wonderful news.
The more I learn about this project, the more robust and intriguing it gets.
I agree with Dave about Cairo…as primarily a middle infielder, you’d expect him to play a good 1B, especially when compared with his “competition”. I’ve been tracking DEF all season, and the DEF numbers bear out the defensive improvement when Cairo is playing versus the other 1B we’ve used this year: Cairo-.705, Sexson-.680, LaHair-.674, others (Vidro, Norton, Reed)-.675. I know DEF has limitations, but it’s nice to see the data confirming the perception in this case.