re bo was a good player you shorts plus idiots in article c m d dv murdoch acc virginia edu drw l delmarva evsc virginia edu david robert walker writes bo jackson kcr kcr kcr cws maj maj this is what jackson looked like in with everything converted to a neutral park on the basis of run production his equivalent average started at in was up to in and in so let us say he had established in his last two seasons a level of play i m not quite sure how these numbers are generated it appears that in a neutral park bo s hr and slugging tend to drop he actually loses two home runs or do they what is equivalent average one thing when looking at bo s stats is that you can see that kc took away some homers normally you expect some would be homers to go for doubles or triples in big parks or to be caught and for that matter you expect lots of doubles and triples anyway but bo despite his speed hit very few doubles and not that many triples so i would expect his value to have risen quite considerably in a neutral park that is good very good in fact but it probably doesn t make the top ten in the league the th best eqa in the al in was dave winfield s thomas was first at first in the nl was bonds an incroyable tenth was bip roberts but is better than any season in the past five years by joe carter it is about what mattingly had in what felix jose had the last two years just ahead of time raines five year average better than ryan klesko s mles felix jose has been a player in a fairly neutral park i would offhand guess the bo at around a player maybe not even close he got more attention from the media than was warranted from his baseball playing though his hype was a lot better than his hitting that is the basis for the net comments about him being overrated the media would have you beleive he was a great hitter i think he was a good maybe very good hitter he was imo something like the th best hitter in the majors i d put him about there too note i hadn t realized the media had hyped him so much i thought he was always viewed by them as a better football player and only so so at baseball he did only have one hr rbi season and kc wasn t winning note i maybe have harped on this a bit in the past but there is a mistake being made by the sdcn s as they are known on this group with respect to players like bo and deion and lofton and perhaps others we find that if you look at a large group of players their past major and minor league numbers will predict their future numbers fairly well their are some caveats the younger they are the less good the prediction the lower the minor league the less good i imagine the more recent the player has left college ball etc now of course this prediction involves quite a bit of error sometimes a player with poor mle s dave justice the ventura becomes a star some hitters develop shane mack brian downing some don t oddibe mcdowell mickey brantley this error involves real things there are real reasons why oddibe didn t hit and shane did it may who knows involve parks and batting coaches and wheaties and injuries and lifting and so on but still you have this big pool of players and things work pretty well one of the reasons for these predictions accuracy is the common background of the players one thing we know about professional baseball players is that all of them or almost all have spent a good deal of time playing ball their backgrounds are similar what hasn t been established is what happens when you encounter a player with a different background is there some reason to believe that a bo or a deion or a lofton or a tony gwynn or an ainge or so on has such a different background that the standard model and standard assumptions fit this person slowly it hasn t been established that you can use mle s with two sport players it hasn t been established that you can t but then statistics is after all an art i personally think otherwise lucid individuals continually make completely nonsensical statements about bo and deion and lofton look at those good but not great minor league numbers they say well what happens if those numbers simply don t mean what they usually mean it might mean that ken lofton suddenly has a better year in houston than tuscon it might mean that deion suddenly has a better half year in atlanta than greenville then again it might not ken and deion might go right back in the tank this year live up to those poor mle s but you guys don t know what s worse you don t know that you don t and you don t know that there are other players you won t know about injuries and lifting and wheaties again you seem to think that the model is perfect and eternal it s not it s got some error oh well bill guilford still thinks hairy butt is truly ugly might be right
