You can't use a replacement level in your argument if you are not willing to recoginize who the replacement is.
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You can't use a replacement level in your argument if you are not willing to recoginize who the replacement is.
Replacement level is not the same as who a certain team's actual replacement player would be. Using a replacement level is a way to measure the value of two players that are on different teams using the same scale. A good way to think of it to get rid of the confusion of the term replacement" is to think of it as measuring how much a player is "above the average", except with the "average" a step below the actual average.Quote:
Originally Posted by boomboom
Using who the actual replacement player could lead to a situation where a clearly inferior player is considered more valuable than a clearly superior player, as my examples above illustrate.
Furthermore, we cannot actually compare a player to his would-be replacement because we don't know how that would-be replacement would actually perform given full-time play. We can estimate, but we cannot know.
But, for the heck of it, look at the case of Albert Pujols and Andruw Jones. If Pujols went down in 2005, he'd likely have been replaced by John Mabry, who hit .240/.295/.407 with an 81 OPS+ while giving poor defense. Jones would have likely been replaced by Ryan Langerhans, who hit .267/.348/.426 for a 101 OPS+ with good defense. This also leads to the conclusion that Pujols was more valuable. However, this is, of course, poor reasoning, because we don't know how Mabry and Langerhans would have performed if they played regularly, which is why it's better to compare players to the same baseline.