Championship Caliber Guys
Posted: March 1st, 2008 | Filed under: Baseball | 41 Comments »
So, as I go back to my much-mocked Championship Caliber Guys theory*, I have to remember that people mocked Copernicus. I also have to remember that people mocked an old friend of mine who said he wanted invent edible soap. So, my thinking is that this CCG theory is somewhere between the earth revolving around the sun and soap you can eat.
*Wow, the Championship Caliber Guys theory gets ripped, then I post something from my scratchbook — after warning everybody right up front about how it was just a goofy little scribble pulled from the notebook — and THAT gets ripped. You know, I don’t like to complain and all but perhaps the whole “free blog” concept is eluding some people.
I’m not sure if I did a particularly good job explaining what I’m thinking here about championship caliber guys — maybe I did and it’s just incredibly stupid. But it was in the midst of another obsessively long post about nothing in particular, and I think it was written at like 2 a.m., so it’s at least possible that I did not explain it well. I did read some comments where some people seemed to think I was referring to championship caliber guys as some sort of mythical thing, like these are people with the heart of lions and the leadership skills off Churchill or whatever. I don’t mean it that way in the slightest. I also don’t mean simply “great players” or “good players.” I’m thinking something a little more specific.
Here’s my basic thinking — all my thinking is basic. To make the playoffs in the American League you need to be one of the four best teams out of 14. Obviously this isn’t precisely true — you can win a division with worse record than someone who misses the playoffs — but let’s keep it plain. You have to be in the top 28 percent to make the playoffs. In the NL, you have to be in the Top 25 percent which is even easier to figure.
OK, so what I’m curious is how many CCGs do you need — those would be players who rank in the Top 28 percent in the league at their position — to be a playoff team? I explained the first time in more general terms — I wrote that to me a CCG is someone who you could say, without qualification, is good enough to play every day for a championship team. Maybe that’s too vague. What I’m looking for here is how many playoff-ready guys do you need to win to win. Can you win with two? Three? Can you win with a team entirely made up of average guys?
Here’s what I did: I wrote down the 45 everyday CCGs in the American League last year — that’s an average of five at each position (I know I said four at each position, but there were some ties). I used OPS+ mostly to differentiate players but I also added a few points for defense or speed or whatever. Then, for pitchers, there were 44 of them who threw 150 innings last year. I took the Top 18 in ERA+ (that’s 120 ERA+ or better) and called them CCGs. I don’t mess with the bullpen right now — that’s a whole other thing.
So that’s a total of 63 CCGs –averages out to about four and a half per team. How were they distributed?
Boston 8 (Varitek, Youkilis, Pedroia, Lowell, Manny, Ortiz, Beckett, Schilling).
New York 7 (Posada, Cano, Jeter, A-Rod, Matsui, Abreu, Wang).
Cleveland 7 (Martinez, Garko, Peralta, Sizemore, Hafner, Carmona, Sabathia).
Anaheim 6 (Kotchman, Figgins, Anderson, Vlady, Lackey, Escobar)
Detroit 6 (Polanco, Guillen, Granderson, Ordonez, Sheffield, Verlander).
Baltimore 5 (Roberts, Markakis, Tejada, Bedard, Guthrie)
Seattle 4 (Beltre, Ibanez, Suzuki, Guillen).
Minnesota 4 (Mauer, Morneau, Hunter, Santana).
Toronto: 4 (Glaus, Rios, Thomas, Halladay … Burnett just missed).
Tampa Bay 4 (Pena, Crawford, Upton, Kazmir)
Chicago 3 (Thome, Vazquez, Buehrle).
Oakland 2 (Haren, Swisher).
Kansas City 2 (Meche, Bannister)
Texas 1 (Young)
Now, I could be wrong here, but that seems kind of interesting to me. The four playoff teams — Boston, New York, Cleveland and Anaheim — had the most CCGs (along with Detroit, which probably underachieved). Baltimore is next with five, which seems like a lot, but only Bedard is a dead solid choice — the others are borderline — plus the rest of the team was terrible. Seattle, Minnesota and Toronto all were pretty good at some point, and Tampa Bay, well, I’ve already mentioned I like the team this year. Chicago, Oakland, KC and Texas were pretty brutal.
Obviously, this is just one year — and I don’t have the strength or inclination right now to break down the previous few years — but my guess is that while it’s certainly possible to win with just two or three CCGs if you have enough pitching and good bench play and enough average players (that’s what Arizona did last year), your best bet is to go into the season with six or seven players you feel will be among the Top 4 in baseball at their position.
And I’m semi-interested in doing this years preview on this premise — figure out how many potential CCGs each team has and predict the finish that way. But that’s assuming I will write another blog post.
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Ah, that IS clearer – there is method to the madness!
Remember Joe, for every kvetcher there are 100 non-commenting readers.
… 100 non-commenting but appreciative readers.
(oops)
It would be fun if I ended up the first comment, being the initial ripper. I’d be a lot less likely to rip you on this point if everything else you wrote wasn’t so brilliant. But maybe that’s just me.
This makes so much more sense, though…and it’s really interesting how it all broke down last year. My guess would be that it wouldn’t usually work quite that well, because all the real superstars, Ortiz, Vladdy and so forth, were on teams that also had a large number of the lesser CCGs. All else being equal, for isntance, I think I’d much rather have Ortiz-Vladdy-Santana than Garko-Peralta-Vazquez-Beltre-Anderson-Kotchman…
“But that’s assuming I will write another blog post.”
Grow up, Sally. We like what you write, that’s why we’re hanging around.
I, for one, was happy to read about OPS+ and ERA+ instead of hearing about “the clutch factor” and other poetic bits of this variety. Job well done.
Ehhh…
I remember the first CCG post very well. I had just raved to my brother about the site. “You’ve got to read this guy. He wrote for the Post a decade or so ago, he’s doing a book about the Big Red Machine that we’ll have to buy, he’s just the best sportswriter in America right now.” I was very surprised when I got an email back that said, “I don’t know about this guy…” Then I clicked on the site and beheld Championship Caliber Guys.
I appreciate the attempt to quantify CCG, but to me this falls into the same trap as counting the rotation slot “number” of starting pitchers (i.e. “He’s a #3. They need a #2.”). It’s team building by focusing on a narrow ideal. Perhaps most “championship” level teams have a certain number of players above a certain threshold, but that’s hardly a useful way to look at things.
One player who plays far greater than 28% above the league average can make up for many who fall below the cutoff. And many average players can make up for a lack of CCGs. I’m reminded of Joe’s discussion of the underachieve 90’s Mariners, whose large number of CCGs was sabotaged by too many sub-replacement level players. Or the 2002 A’s, who made up for the loss of Championship Caliber Guy Giambi by making slight improvements across many roster spots.
As for the predictive value of the number of CCGs, I think the greater challenge is predicting playing time. I can think of many teams whose number of CCGs depends on how injuries play out. And I bet at the end of the year the ones least effected by injuries will fare better in the standings and have a greater number of CCGs.
Love your work and stay humble, Joe!
The only thing I’d say is that the theory doesn’t seem to include relievers, particularly closers. You have to figure at the very least Rivera and Papelbon would be “CCGs”, no?
I like the concept of championship caliber guys better than adjusted OPS and winshares and such.
I think it’s probably even more important to identify Non-Championship Guys: guys whose mere presence will ensure that the team can’t win it all. I’ve only noted two, ever: Jeff Blauser (out of action the year they won) and Jeff Kent (who may have grown out of it, but can’t prove it).
When Kent was on the Mets he was the most obvious NCG I’ve ever seen. Close game? HIDP and errors. Rout? Extra base hits forever…
Teams with better players win more games? Shocking.
I like the concept, but I think that’s all it’s actually saying.
I don’t necesarrily agree with Clayton’s examples of NCGs, the Jeff Kent comment reminds me a bit too much of the kind of nonsense you hear about A-Rod these days. However, I do agree that not having any horrible players can be as important as having a bunch of good ones.
The Indians last year gave a great example of this. For the first 2/3 or so of the season they had Josh Barfield and Trot Nixon going out to 2b and rf most days and those two were brutal. Barfield had an OPS+ of 54. 54! Nixon had an OPS+ of 78.
The rest of the team was good enough that the Indians were in 1st or 2nd place most of the beginning of the season.Come July Barfield and Nixon really bottomed out. The Indians started struggling to score. On July 8 they fell out of first and come August they were still trailing Detroit.
Eventually, the Indians replaced Nixon with Franklin Guttierez and Barfield with Asdrubal Cabrera. The team got hot and ended up tying for the most wins in MLB. Guttierez had and OPS+ of 103, Cabrera of 101. Nothing special there, but simply by getting average production (and better defense) at two spots where they had been getting terrible production, the Indians turned around their season.
And let’s not get too nitpicky with Joe on this, eh? I think it’s a safe bet that he knows that Vlad Guerrero is better than Ryan Garko.
This is a great concept and article for water cooler talk and online discussion, but if you try to actually use it to prove anything, it falls apart.
The big issue is that the CCG Theory ignores any matter of degree. ARod really should count as two CCGs all by himself. And the difference between some of the guys who qualifed and those who didn’t is miniscule. And I’m sure there’s a better way to rank the players, as I doubt most people would consider Brian Bannister a CCG instead of someone like King Felix, 2007 ERAs be damned.
One thing that’s really telling is Baltimore ahead of Toronto in CCGs — the Orioles have no idea how to fill out a roster, while the Blue Jays are great at finding good players who don’t put up huge traditional stats. They prefer to field.
GoGiggs points are well taken and the whole question is NGCs is clearly more about instinct than intellect. More Dionysian than Apollian and Sky’s ideas are right on. If anything AROD is worth maybe 4 or 5 Danny Haren’s.
The thing is, as beautifully quantifiable as baseball is, it cannot ever be properly quantified. Avg is cool, OPS may mean more, wins mean something that adjusted ERA doesn’t get at…the only reason that there’s no ghost in the machine is that there’s no machine.
I’ve never seen a number that begins to suggest what Mark Belanger meant to the Orioles, what the awful Kirk Gibson meant to the Dodgers that year that they took my cash…the entire preoccupation with stats is brilliant and only gets stupid when you think it’s definitive.
I don’t mind the concept and obviously you can define it any you want or not define it at all. But just giving it the old eyeball test, it seems you’re overrating at least a few guys, including Youkilis, Garko, Guthrie (!), and the two Royals. If the Royals have any CCGs on their roster (and it’s possible they have none), their names are Gordon, Butler and Greinke.
It seems to me that the whole point is wondering whether ARod is, in fact, worth two CCGs in himself, when it comes to actually getting to the playoffs. You can say he is, and he’s got the Runs Created, but the CCG thing is saying if you ignore all that you still may be able to make good predictions. Which if it’s true, would be interesting. Sadly, I think it’s much easier to do backward than forward, which makes it less interesting, but still possibly worth looking into.
People have done stats studies about whether there’s some sort of diminishing return on a single player’s dominance, and also whether multiple below-replacement players hurt more than the sum of their suckiness, but I don’t think anything was really convincing.
…
OK, I’ve gone through the NL quickly, and it looks to me as if the Phillies had 5 CCGs, Atlanta and Florida 4, New York Milwaukee and Colorado 3. The Cubs only had one (unless you count Soriano for some reason) and the D-Backs had maybe one.
Of the 33 guys I picked (one tie), I would say that maybe twenty were CCG in 2006, just going by name recognition. If you can’t predict who the CCG are going to be better than that, it’s going to be hard to use this to predict playoffs.
Thanks,
-V.
This is a fascinating concept. As someone well within the tentacles of the New York Media, the phrase “Championship Caliber Guys” gave me fever dreams of Derek Jeter, and blank cheques for his intangibles. To clarify: the bad kind of fever dreams, with lightning flashes of his (inefficient and inaccurate) Mikhail Baryshnikov leaping throw to first.
But this post was much more informative, and I like the category itself. As an amateur analyst who, when leaving the safety of the no-comment fence, leans on the post of cynicality – I agree with Jason and John R: these guys are all great players, and teams with more great players have a better chance at winning – as a fan, you just hold onto your hat and hope they stay healthy. For all the quantifiability of the game, a huge amount rests in the unseen hands and needles (sans modern implications) of the training staff, and their DL/rest recommendations.
But the overall concept of your post, it seems to me, is that mediocre players, within the standard deviations of an average baseball season, up or down, will rarely make an impact. Baseball seasons are won by the stars. True.
But seems your CCG’s rely upon established stars (and, it seems, a little bit of a backwards-looking bias – Adrian Beltre as CCG? Defense?) – you might consider FCCG (Future Championship Caliber Guys) as an equally important category. Braun, Pedroia, Ellsbury, A. Gordon, Bailey, Liriano, Milledge, etc. Their readiness, or often, their manager’s willingness to bring them to the bigs, is often the difference between Tavarez and Buchholz.
Full disclosure: Jay Bruce is my ’stud’ outfielder in my fantasy draft, just as Alex Gordon was my ’stud’ in 2007, and Delmon Young was my ’stud’ in 2006. I am not sure if my predictive powers or my consistent usage of the word stud disturbs me more.
This reminds me of a theory for predicting who will win the NCAA Tournament. I believe there have only been two teams (Syracuse ‘03 & Arkansas ‘94) since 1988 that have won the title w/o at least three future NBA first-round draft picks on their team. Same bottom line: Talent wins.
I LIKE the Championship Caliber Guys category and I kind of like the subjectivity in Joe’s initial methodology. It’s an emotion-driven title, the kind of description we used to be able to bestow upon players before fans (lots, not “all” or even “most”) evolved and became incredibly accurate with their player analysis. Baseball stats can be analyzed in more depth than any other sport but that doesn’t mean we can’t still have irrational, emotional opinion of certain players. The value of Joe’s writing is that if ever an irrational, emotional opinion were written, it certainly would be more intelligent and funnier than most others.
I think if I’d read about CCGs in a newspaper column or foxsports.com I’d brush over it but for a blog, it’s perfect material. To me, CCG is a topic that nobody can assemble an argument good enough to go to war with, yet can certainly have a fun discussion over. Really, there’s no better place to have this funscussion than on Joe’s blog, where it’ll be treated lightly, knowledgeably, and with references to delicious food items found in most unlikely places.
Fans, please! We can’t keep turning topics like CCGs into a Number Nerds vs. Eckstein Fans dichotomy; we’re all in this together! We must remember that the real enemy is people who say they don’t like baseball because it’s boring!
Joe, please don’t stop writing. There are very few blogs out there that have intelligent and talented people writing. If you can’t put up sketchs and half thought out late night ramblings here, where can you. If people only want to read your really good work, then they can get your books, or look at your columns. I’m sure you spend much more time on those than a blog post.
KC didn’t have a lot of Championship Caliber Guys last year, but man did they ever lead the league in getting rid of Guys Who Just Don’t Belong at this level.
One thing I’ve noticed since Moore came to the Royals is how much more benefit you get by improving the back end of the team than the front (particularly if that back end is as bad as the Royals’ was). Over the same number of innings, you get as much improvement from replacing a starter with a 6.0 ERA with a 4.0 as you get from replacing the 4.0 guy with a 2.0 Cy Young contender.
People should read Zach’s post again.
No, yo’d finish 81-81.
Depends.
Depends.
This is the issue, I think — all of a sudden, we’re asking silly questions and getting vague answers, which is atypical for this blog. I don’t see how CCG advances any understanding.
“I don’t see how CCG advances any understanding”
I see. You guys complaining about Joe’s “goofy little scribble” are looking for an advancement of your understanding.
May I suggest you need a Guru, not a sports blog?
I love the “goofy” concept of CCG, something I’ve often thought of, yet never “scribbled” down. To me it seems a fun, Spring Training appropriate musing.
Why is it that fundamentalists have no sense of humor? Some odd fear of triviality? They want everything black and white in a world full of color. The breadth of Joe’s blog, from intense analysis of statistics to fantastical ruminations is something to be encouraged, no?
To the nay-sayers I say “Bah Humbug”.
Peace.
Oh, and Joe – why is JD off the Sox list in this go-round?
Condescending and misguided “strawman” response there. I do greatly appreciate the breadth of Joe’s blog, as you put it well. If he gave us a well-written prose essay about how special it is to have a truly great player on your team, that would be fantastic. However, when he starts sorting players based on statistics, and counting and averaging numbers, I am taking that as an attempt to work with statistics and numbers. No?
And it doesn’t even lead to an interesting “beyond the statistics” conversation either, to say that if you have more good players, you’ll probably do better, unless the rest of your team is worse. Does it?
Joe, we love you man and greatly appreciate the blog. I think this is probably a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch. The silent (and sometimes not so silent) majority love the blog and look forward to each new post. Don’t let a few naysayers ruin what has become my (and I suspect several others) favorite blog on the web.
P.S. This post was not an intentional attempt to set the parenthetical per sentence ratio.
Oh, also, I’m a die hard Yankees fan who doesn’t even like the Royals (sorry Royals fans…I have my reasons!). I read a grand total of one blog that is not Yankee related, and it’s this one, because I know I can come here and get a well written entertaining blog post. So please, keep it going.
Joaldo,
Maybe I’m not a dedicated enough stats guy (actually, I’m definitely not a dedicated stats guy), but I liked this post. Seems to me (a not-dedicated-stats guy) that your use of CCG kind of bypasses whether or not one player (A-Rod) is worth two, three (or four) other CCG players. It could be the cumulative effect of the CCG’s on the team, not the strength of CCGness of any particular player. (Hey, I’m making sense to myself, anyway…..).
In any case, your results with last year’s American League teams seems to indicate you could be on to something (in my opinion).
P.S. This was an intentional attempt to set the parenthetical per sentence ratio. Thanks for the idea, Andy.
Joe don’t mind the haters, what you do entertains me for a bit every day and thats enough. The fact its free amazes me.
Post 25 gets at what I was going to say. Arod may have twice the value of an average player when calculating any particular stat, but that doesn’t make him worth two average guys. It’s been said many times, but baseball is a game where each player has to take his turn. If you could just throw the ball to Arod (so to speak), he’d be worth two average guys (hell, he’d be worth more than that). But he’s just one guy – so some other guy has to go out there and take a turn at bat or field a ball Arod can’t get to.
Put it this way: if you had to choose an offense, do you take 1-11-9-1-4-9-10-1-6 or 3-4-3-5-4-6-3-3-4 where the numbers represent whatever offensive stat you like at the player’s position. The first has three #1’s – dominant guys – and some holes. The second has no dominant guys but also doesn’t really have holes. I have a gut feeling that not having holes in the lineup is more important than having big mashers (think of it as overall team OBP, you just can’t have a guy go up there and make a ton of outs no matter how great the guy hitting before or after him is). I think this is where Joe’s idea has merit. Don’t just look at supergreat players. Ask yourself how many above average guys a team has. I’d suggest a better estimate would be CCGs minus NCGs. Solid players minus holes. Sure, talent wins. But talent distribution is, it seems to me, important. We all seem to know that one great player can’t win a championship alone (hi Barry, Arod, etc.) and, as pointed out above, a team of all average guys would be 81-81. So you must need something in between. A great player will help but not if you have to put him next to a hole.
Joe, please keep writing. I posted a comment on the last blogpost but didn’t mean it as criticism. I thought, for what it was, it was pretty funny.
Joe, this blog is becoming a total disappointment. You were supposed to do your pitchers preview part of the Royals, but you never lived up to that end of the bargain either.
It gets to a point where I just don’t even read the posts here anymore. Because it’s all unfulfilled promises with Joe Po.
I guess now that Swisher and Haren have R-U-N-N-O-F-T, that leaves Oakland with one one CCG, namely one Michael Sweeney.
I think CCB term is the problem. This is a subjective version of WARP, no?
I also like the use of CCG’s to measure a team’s star power — would you rather root for a team with two CCGs or six? Obviously the latter, which is another reason it’s tough to be a Royals and Rangers fan.
I am on board with the CCG, I think it has real merit and is an interesting way of looking at teams. I enjoy your blog very much by the way.
I liked Zach’s post (#18). I think he raises the more interesting question: do you win by having the most good players or the least bad players? Is one more predictive than the other?
My guess – and it is only that – is that if you played this exercise out over many years you’d see a better correlation to winning by having the fewest bad than the most good.
Joe –
Don’t stop writing this blog.
Eighty-six the comments section if you must, or at least require people to register to comment….but don’t stop posting. What a waste that would be.
Well, I actually like CCG’s. It’s a fun concept and interesting to mull over in a not-too-serious way. Imagine that. This is a game we’re talking about — do we always have to apply scientific rigor?
Joe is awesome precisely because of this kind of stuff. Sports writing should be fun. The blog haters in the MSM and forget this. The best bloggers don’t (even if some of their most avid responders do.)
Keep ‘em coming, Joe.
I, for one, really like the CCG idea because it’s basically the way I look at the teams when the season starts. Every year, the supporters of some team will tell me how they have the right mix of “veterans and scrappers” to win. And I look at the team and see a dearth of stars and know they’re fooling themselves.
When I look over the teams, I like to think “how may stud players has them team got”. The idea being that it is much easier to patch holes in a team than to find a star to push you over the 90-win threshold.
OPS+ and ERA+ are a good place to start but when it comes to predicting, I like to look over the team and see which players are likely to take a step forward or a step back. For example, with the Royals, I think Butler could step forward and be a CCG this year.
It would be cool to look at the other end of the spectrum — positions where teams have HOLES. That’s not an acronym for anything — it’s just important enough to be written in all caps.
Just out of curiosity, I looked at the 1975 Reds to see how many CCG’s they had. By my count, they had 5 position players (Bench, Perez, Morgan, Rose, Foster), 2 starting pitchers (Gary Nolan, Don Gullet) and possibly the 4 key relievers (Rawly Eastwick, Will McEnany, Pedro Borbon, Clay Carroll), each of whom pitched at least 90 (!) innings and had an ERA+ of at least 122.
#8 has the gist of it. If CCGs are just players who are good players, all the CCG count is saying is that good teams have good players. The problem people seem to have with it is that people are taking it seriously (both pro and con), it shouldn’t be either. It’s like asking what’s better Google or Mariano Rivera, there’s not point in arguing, its a just a goof.
There are a couple of knocks on CCG because it is just a listing of “established stars.”
Well, for goodness sakes, how did they become “established stars?”
I think it is an interesting measurement tool. I am also intrigued by Zach’s comment, and the GWJDB group.
Look at the Orioles, they rank high in CCGs, but are dragged down by their preponderance of GWJDB.
Good fun reading, but a lot of these guys don’t even play for the teams you list. DOH