How Defensive Evaluations Can Help You Win More Strat Games
By Mike SanClemente - Managing Editor
03/28/2005
Every Strat year, in every Strat game, defense plays a potentially major role in the outcome. Understanding team defense is very important in a sport where you play 162 games per year. Sure, Gary Sheffield is better offensively than most other rightfielders, but his poor glove drags down his team's defense every single game he's out there.
Remember that one year you couldn't find a suitable starting second baseman and had to band-aid the position with some combination of Russ Johnson, Derrel Thomas, Bill Pecota, Tim Teufel, Ed Romero, or Mariano Duncan? All of those players have average or below average defense at second base, and it probably hurt your team more than you realize. Therefore, it's your job as GM to understand defense better in hopes of gaining an advantage on your opponents.
One recent example of the importance of defense involves the world champion Red Sox. GM Theo Epstein realized Boston would not get to the next level without better team defense. He made 2 trades before the deadline, both with defense in mind, and the club immediately improved its W-L record - not just a little, but dramatically.
There are several ways to evaluate defense in Strat. The first is something you did when you were first starting out, most likely.
It's easy, and involves simply calculating the different OBPs generated by every different fielding and e-rating combination. A little work with the fielding charts and presto, you have OB, OPS, even Flyball B percentages available to you. I'll use an old-school example from the early 1980's. From these numbers off the fielding charts, you see that Texas Ranger Wayne Tolleson's shortstop 4e8 compares favorably to Atlanta Brave Rafael Ramirez's 2e42 at the same position in terms of OPS:
Range E OPS
Tolleson 4 8 .702
R. Ramirez 2 42 .667
Ramirez holds the edge, but it's not a big advantage.
These calculations are easy, and most gamers that are past the 'beginner' stage have run through and understood these figures already.
What does that mean to you? It means the teams that consistently win the division in your league and in your tournaments probably reached this stage years ago, and are using these learnings against you. So, isn't the goal to outdo the competition? Assuming your answer is yes, you must find a way to gain an edge against those teams that consistently win. The DefensiveEvaluations tool does this for you.
While using this tool, I found the above OPS figures for Tolleson and Ramirez. If it could only provide me that much information and nothing more, I wouldn't be writing this article for you. Instead, it provides OPS along with the following information for every player you enter:
-out%
-hits allowed per year
-errors committed per year (NOT always the same as the e-rating!)
-extra groundball A chances
-baserunners allowed per year, and then the real kicker:
Runs.
Basketball is a game of points, hockey a game of goals, baseball a game of runs. Everything in our game MUST be boiled down to runs.
Isn't this why sabermetricians tell us that a double is worth 0.78 runs? Or that a caught stealing is worth negative 0.6 runs? DefensiveEvaluations adds up all the singles, one-base errors, three-base errors, etc. allowed by a particular player and tells you how many runs he will allow over the course of the season, something no other tool on the market can do.
The general layout allows you to compare one full set of ratings (for each position) with an alternate full set, both of your choosing. You could punch in the 1952 Braves in the first set, and the 1982 Brewers in the other. Both teams had big offenses: is there a difference in defense? Punch in the respective starting fielding ratings to see. Perhaps a difference in defense will give you a hint of what would happen if you matched the two teams head to head in a replay.
Or you could input your current team's starting lineup in the first set, then enter the defense you're planning to use in the 9th inning while protecting a lead in the other set. If the difference isn't that much, then maybe Henry Blanco or Doug Glanville should not be on your active roster. If it is a large difference, then you've done a good job hiding your 4-rated Burrells, Bellhorns, and Branyans.
I ran the 2004 Red Sox as an example. Scenario 1 was their team at the start of the season. Scenario 2 was the club after the Nomar trade, where I input their late-inning defense. Sure, the scenario with Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz is going to be better than that with Nomar and Millar...but just how much better?
If you had DefensiveEvaluations, you could have easily predicted the Sox' improvement. You knew the newer players would improve the defense, and the tool tells us the new OPS allowed by the defense was 19% better.
But OPS only scratches the surface. Again, in baseball, you MUST measure things in runs, and OPS - while easy to calculate - is an imperfect measure. Runs, however, is the optimal metric for our sport. The new players represented a 61% improvement in runs allowed by the defense, and this latter number did a much better job pointing to the dramatic improvement in the Sox' W-L record than what OPS predicted.
DefensiveEvaluations works on any device that has Microsoft Excel, and runs in the background while you're playing your game. Click here to learn more.