The Cincinnati Reds selected high school outfielder Jay Bruce with the 12th pick of the 1st round of the 2005 First Year Player Draft. Justin Upton (1), Alex Gordon (2), Jeff Clement (3), Ryan Zimmerman (4), Ryan Braun (5) and Troy Tulowitzki (7) were those selected ahead of him who have already established themselves as starting players in the major leagues.

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Baseball is the only sport where the exact size of the playing field is not standardized. Even if every field had the same dimensions, outcomes would still be affected by things such as elevation. Acknowledging these differences, there have been many attempts to measure how much each ballpark can change the outcome of each play.

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Building a losing franchise without the draft.

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Last week, Padres’ Greg Maddux registered his 350^th win.  There’s a good chance we won’t see that again in our lifetime.  While I still hold to my earlier posts that 300-game winners are not dead yet, there is serious cause for concern with the disappearance of consistent, high quality starting pitching.

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Roberto Clemente called the 1960 N.L. MVP voting an “injustice,” but was it really?

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Are 3000 hits an automatic ticket to Cooperstown?

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If Jimmy Rollins had the fifth best OPS on his own team, how can he be the Most Valuable Player of an entire league?

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What is Tampa Bay not telling us about Scott Kazmir and how will the Rays do without him?

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Cubs skipper Lou Piniella recently unveiled a new lineup that would be more productive with Kosuke Fukudome leading off instead of hitting fifth.

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Dusty Baker has been called a “OBP-hating Luddite,” but his theory about young hitters is no different than that of Bill James.

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How to make a stats geek hate your statistical analysis.

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Are Spring Training stats an accurate predictor of regular season performance?

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Major League Equivalents (MLEs) are a series of calculations designed to take non-major league baseball performance and estimate what that performance’s results would look like statistically in the context of the Major Leagues. Bill James gets credit for being the inventor of MLEs, as he outlined his method for batters in the 1985 Baseball Abstract. James was only interested at the time in making sense of minor league statistics, but MLE’s theoretically can be used to evaluate ANY baseball performance, including minor league, Japanese or other foreign league, Negro League, NCAA league, etc. Not only those, but you can actually use the basic MLE procedure to evaluate the performance of an American League player relative to the National League, or vice versa (NLEs, ALEs?), or perhaps calculate what type of batting statistics Ty Cobb’s 1909 performance would look like in the 2007 AL.

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I never like to assume, so once again a quick clarification from the previous segment:

In Step #4, Leagues Park Difference, the 13% Park Difference will expand or contract depending on the SPECIFIC parks a player is coming from and going to. For example, if a Japanese player is moving from pitcher-friendly Koshien Kyujo in NPB to hitter-friendly Coors Field in MLB, that 13% difference would be much smaller – perhaps 6% instead of 13%.

Secondly the statistics that follow are Major League Equivalents and not actual NPB statistics. For the NPB stats check this site.

Now, finally, on to the MLEs, and first up is……….(DRUM ROLL PLEASE)…………

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Before moving on to Part III, there’s a clarification I need to make regarding Part II.

In addition to factoring in the difference in league parks between any two leagues when doing MLE’s, you must also factor in the difference between league SCORING environments. In the previous Part II, I ‘plugged’ a 7% difference into the formula and called it the park difference. In reality, the 7% difference is actually the ‘context’ difference - a combination of park differences AND league scoring differences. Since we can calculate the league scoring difference, we really should use it, and plug ONLY the park difference.

In terms of the final results, it won’t change anything, but in terms of understanding how to ‘properly’ do MLE’s, not just for Japanese League players but for AAA, or Negro Leagues, etc., and for understanding the interaction of parks, leagues, etc. it’s important to understand how this works.

Japanese league scoring historically is less than MLB. Japanese League managers traditionally have used more one run, ‘small ball’ strategies, and the league scoring environments definitely reflect this. For the period 1962 – 2007, NPB scoring per game was 94% of MLB scoring per game.

I’ll walk thru complete examples for a hypothetical batter and pitcher again, this time doing it completely the ‘right’ way:

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