Brendan Katin

[gregmag]

I didn't purport to answer anything; I just asked a question, which you appear not to want to answer. You made a sweeping assertion about something you admit knowing little about. I just want to know what the basis for your assertion is. If the answer is that you have no basis for the assertion, then that would be helpful to know.

 

FWIW, I find the .376 => .272 translation for Katin really strange too. In fact, it just looks wrong to me. I've been looking at MLEs for a long time, but I have no expertise in calculating them. A quick Web search turned up this MLE calculator:

 

http://www.minorleaguesplits.com/mlecalc.html

 

I'm sure there are others floating around out there; this is just the first one I found, and at a glance the person who posted it seems to take the exercise seriously. For Katin (Nashville stats: .280/.376/.563), this calculator yields an MLE of .245/.304/.463. Much higher, but still a big deflation of a .376 OBP. But then if you run Mat Gamel's MLE on the same calculator (Nashville stats: .309/.387/.511), you get .270/.330/.427. The translation system -- at least the one this calculator is using -- appears to put some emphasis on batting average and strikeout rates as factors in a player's ability to maintain OBP at a higher level. Katin has struck out 88 times to Gamel's 64 in about the same number of PA, and Gamel has outhit Katin by about 30 points. (See the exchange immediately above between Louis Ely and battlekow.) Intuitively, for me, the notion that a .900 OPS in the PCL would translate directly to a .760 in MLB (Gamel), or a .940 with 40 percent more strikeouts to a .770 (Katin) doesn't seem at all strange.

 

I don't know where the poster to whom you were responding got his numbers. It would have been reasonable to ask. I do know that I've read studies and looked at numbers over the years that make MLEs appear very helpful in predicting future MLB performance. If you have some basis for believing they aren't, that would be very interesting to me, and I would still like to know what it is.

 

**************************

 

Re: your subsequent post: Patterson had 135 PA at Nashville last year. That's not much to work with. McGehee made an exceptional jump in production from the minors to the majors. That surprised everyone, and it surely did confound projection systems, but that doesn't make his 2008 minor league numbers any more impressive. Translations are imprecise, because they necessarily juggle a lot of factors, but all the MLE is doing is synthesizing and summarizing what minor league statistics allow us to infer about a player's present level of production.

[monty57]

MLE's are a projection tool that don't say what anyone has actually done. I've heard/read many people say they're very imprecise, so I haven't really bothered to look into them as much more than a baseline guess as to what someone could possibly do. When there is a statement such as:

 

A guy with the ceiling to be a reserve probably is not much of a reserve, he's more AAA depth. If Hart goes down for a month and you have a guy unable to get on base 30% of the time as his backup, he ain't much of a backup. His MLE is .272/.434, which again, is passable if he's a C or 2B, but not in LF/RF. It's just too many outs.

 

To me, that puts way too much emphasis on MLE as something more than it is. The seamheads.com (http://www.seamheads.com/...r-league-equivalencies/) article goes into how they're calculated. They're based on a simple premise that takes the aggregate stats based on numerous factors and assumes the regression for all players in the league will match the mean. This of course can't be true, but it seems to be a base premise for most predictive stats in the SABR world.

 

Simply put, Katin has never posted a .706 OPS in the majors, so to make statements that would seem to imply that he has is a mis-statement. It would be much more appropriate to say something such as "even though Katin's OBP is .375 this year, MLE's say his OBP in the majors would be .272 and even though that seems utterly ridiculous, since I believe the MLE is a good predictive tool, I don't think he'd have a high enough OBP to be a suitable MLB backup."

[Never Outhustled]

 

How does .280 avg / .376 OBP / .563 SLG at AAA translate to a .272 OBP / .434 SLG in the majors?

It doesn't. That MLE was Al using Katin's career AAA numbers, I'm guessing because he lives in the past. Katin's MLE's based on the most relevent data projects a greatly improved OBA. Al has never understood that players can improve, which Katin clearly has. Using a players pre-prime numbers to predict their stats in their peak years is a good way to be consistently wrong. This reminds of a long discussion here a few years ago after Fangraphs tried to convince everyone that Gavin Floyds 1st good season was a lucky fluke because of his earlier career periferils, not factoring in that his periferils would improve if he simply pitched better, which players do as they reach their prime.

 

No one is saying Katin is a budding superstar, but he is far more qualified for a big league job than a guy like Carlos Gomez.

[logan82]

Maybe Katin improved this year and maybe it is an outlier. His OBP before this year is not good to say the least. This year could be nothing more than an older guy repeating the same level for a third year in a row.

 

No one is saying Katin is a budding superstar, but he is far more qualified for a big league job than a guy like Carlos Gomez.

 

Not exactly a ringing endorsement there. Katin probably wouldn't be horrible if used in a platoon with Dickerson. On the other hand, it's one good year. I would be a little nervous if they used him as much more than the small half of a platoon.

[Never Outhustled]

Maybe Katin improved this year and maybe it is an outlier.

We see high batting average outlier years all the time, but a plate discipline outlier? I don't think thats too common, is it?

 

 

I would be a little nervous if they used him as much more than the small half of a platoon.

I agree with that.

[kramnoj]

It's not instructive to look at a handful of things that MLEs get wrong and think that means anything. Andy Marte was a top prospect, slugged over .500 in multiple minor league seasons yet couldn't translate that to the majors. Calvin Pickering slugged over .500 over his career in the minors and was a below average hitter in limited opportunities in the majors. I could go on, but it wouldn't be that useful, just as picking MLE misses isn't useful.

 

ZiPs uses some version of MLE to make its predictions each year, and it is one of the best predictors out there. It will have lots of misses, but it will hit lots of times as well.

[JoeHova]

MLE's are a projection tool that don't say what anyone has actually done.

MLEs are not a projection system. They don't claim to be predictive at all.

[monty57]

MLE's are a projection tool that don't say what anyone has actually done.

MLEs are not a projection system. They don't claim to be predictive at all.

 

You type in numbers and they give you a number of how that would translate to another league. In other words, they project how stats in one league would have played out in another league. How is that not a projection system? They (MLE is a tool, so can't really translate into a "they") may not claim to be predictive, but if you give someone a number which projects how the player would have done in a different league, some people will use that to assert that the numbers actually show something more than a projection. That's what I was arguing against.

MLE's are fine for what they are. They try to illustrate (if you prefer that to "project") what a player's stats in one league would have been in a different league. They take aggregate stats and project the mean on everyone. Of course that will be hit and miss, as individuals are going to be individuals and aggregates can't account for that. They are fun & moderately useful projections, but don't really tell anything that really happened. Katin never OPS'd .706 in the majors, no matter what the MLE's projected.

I'll stop now, as this thread shouldn't have been hijacked into the validity of a SABR tool.

 

[pete]

Actually, league equivalencies are a crude attempt to compare the relative quality of leagues. Just because someone puts up a webpage that executes a calculation doesn't mean much.

[gregmag]

The "projection" confusion is probably my fault, because I said MLEs are useful in projecting future MLB performance. MLEs are not a projection system -- an attempt to predict future performance. They are a translation system -- an attempt to figure out how a player in one league would have fared at the same time in a different league. They're useful for projecting minor leaguers' future MLB performance, because they give you MLB-translated stats as a baseline for projection, but they aren't projections themselves.

 

As to whether MLEs reflect a "crude" methodology . . . I generally think systematizing information is useful. It's one thing if you want to say "I know Mark Rogers could thrive in MLB right now, because he throws 101 mph, and performance stats don't adequately capture the importance of that fact." That may be right; we can argue about that assertion on its own terms. But if you're saying "I think Brendan Katin could do [whatever you think] in MLB right now because he has hit 24 homers in the PCL," then you're already talking about minor league stats, and I think MLEs advance that sort discussion helpfully. We can still argue about whether the MLE is systematizing the information in the right way, but for my money that's a better argument than having a bunch of guys just saying off the top of their heads what they think the PCL stats mean. Either way you're trying to figure out what the PCL stats tell you; MLEs just introduce some measure of rigor and consistency into that effort.

[jdoz]

While the debate around the merits of MLE continue on this thread, let me just remind everyone that Katin continues to rake. HR and 4 RBI today takes him to 25 and 74 for the year.

[TooLiveBrew]

Here's a guy I've thought of recently with the Katin discussion -- John Lindsey. If Lindsey can spend his entire career in the minors, it's entirely possible Katin could too.

[logan82]

Here's a guy I've thought of recently with the Katin discussion -- John Lindsey. If Lindsey can spend his entire career in the minors, it's entirely possible Katin could too.

The numbers look similar but his minor league career looks pretty injury plagued. He also looked old for each level he was at. I don't think one good minor league season is enough for a guy to get a chance at the majors unless he gets picked up by another team in the Rule 5 draft.

[Tedaldtada]

Did you know that Brendan Katin had the highest OPS of any minor league player in the Brewers' system this past year (.962)? Hawn may have passed him if you include his playoff number though.

 

Edit: Looks like Hawn finished at .960.