Dave on October 1st, 2007 10:49 am

Okay, for those still struggling despite the good explanations provided by tango, skyking, etc…, here you go.

Imagine we’re picking teams at a sandlot. 100 guys show up to tryout. We’ve got 10 positions to fill, and want to put the best team we can out there. We want to start separating the 100 guys into groups to give us chances to view the best options, so we start setting up qualifiers.

We know that our 3B/SS/2B all have to throw right-handed, as you can’t have a lefty trying to wing the ball across the diamond. So, sorting step #1: Take all lefty throwers and put them in their own group.

Now, you have 80 guys in one group and 20 in another. The 20 guys are now DH/1B/LF/RF/CF only, but the other 80 can still potentially play anywhere. Now, you sort again, this time based on footspeed. For CF/SS, you want a minimum 5.0 40-yard dash, so you have everyone run a sprint and time them.

Of the 20 left-handed throwers, 5 qualify. Of the 80 right-handed throwers, 20 qualify. So now you have four groups – 60 right-handed throwing “slow” guys, 15 left-handed throwing “slow” guys, 20 right-handed throwing “fast” guys, and 5 left-handed throwing “fast” guys.

Your shortstop and center fielder have to come from the fast group, so you’re going to pick the two best guys you can from that pool of 25 players, with the caveat that the shortstop has to throw right-handed. This means that if the two best guys both throw left-handed, you can only take one of them. So, let’s say you end up with the best and third best fast guys, and wham, you have your center fielder and shortstop.

Now, you’d naturally expect these guys to hit less than the other positions simply because you had filtered out 75% of the original pool of hitters. All the big lumbering oafs weren’t included in the SS/CF pool, so you know that you’re not as likely to get a great hitter there as you are at the other positions.

You continue on with this exercise, filtering out guys with weak arms from the third base pool, guys with bad footwork from the second base pool, and guys who just can’t run from the LF/RF pool. In the end, maybe your pool of available players looked something like this:

C: 10 guys
SS/CF: 25 guys
3B/2B: 45 guys
LF/RF: 80 guys
1B; 95 guys
DH: 100 guys

You knew you could pick absolutely anyone to DH, and almost anyone to play first base, but then, the filters started weeding people out pretty quickly after that.

Looking at these pools of players, your minimum expectations for offensive production would be way, way higher for DH than any other position because you could literally pick the best hitter and not have to worry about his defense. But, when it came to the other positions, you’d already ruled out most of the good hitters, so you might find yourself not even being able to take the fourth best hitter (out of 100, remember) because he doesn’t fit anywhere on your team.

This is what the position adjustment accounts for – expectation of offense from that particular pool of players. The larger the pool, the higher the expectation.

Tomorrow, when we tackle defense, we’ll begin to separate players based on their defensive abilities within the predefined player pools