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Maxwell Smart's avatar

Interesting stuff. How well do x stats do as a prediction of future production?

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Brian Joura's avatar

That's a tough question to answer.

ZiPS creator Dan Szymborski said this:

"As a simple rule of thumb, you won’t do too badly if you simply regress xStats a third of the way towards the actual ones. But as you might have guessed, that changes depending on the player’s number of plate appearances.

For BA, if you only look at the players with at least 600 plate appearances in the first season, the ideal BA mix is 37% BA, 63% xBA. When you only look at the players with between 200 and 300 plate appearances, that becomes 10% BA and 90% xBA, a drastically different number."

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/yes-hitter-xstats-are-useful/

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1999's avatar

Instructive and salient, this is why Mets360 stands out so well. Thanks, Brian!

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AgingBull's avatar

Thank you Brian. I appreciate your thorough, objective, and non-condescending explanations of statistics and analyses. Given my analytic bent and my love of baseball, my xComprehension is far greater than my comprehension.

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Bill Austin's avatar

Any theories as to why everyone is below their expected slugging averages? Tyrone Taylor ran into some great fielding against the other night, but I also suspect that there were a couple balls that were knocked down by the bad weather. The problem with blaming everything on the cold is that they have played half their games in Texas and South Florida.

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Brian Joura's avatar

I'm not inclined to blame the cold weather very much. It's just as likely to be a sample-size issue or at 'em balls or great fielding plays.

For me, the "why" isn't something that overly concerns me. Instead, I'll just take comfort in knowing that if they keep hitting the ball with authority that good things will come.

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