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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