| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Returning Talent | About the author, Boyd Nation |
Returning Talent
Publication Date: January 31, 2006
Who's Coming Back?
Don't take this too seriously; it's just something I've been playing with.
I've ranted periodically about the essential worthlessness of preseason polls, so I've decided to see if there's anything that can be done to actually provide useful a preseason rating stick for likely success. Even if I find one, it won't matter once the season seriously begins, but I understand why there are preseason polls, since we do need something to talk about in January. What I've done is to attempt to measure the contribution to the team's success that the returning players made for each team last year, so we can see if that turns out to be a predictive tool.
I got ragged last week by the too-much-detail crowd, so I'll skip the exact implementation details (so I can be ragged by the not-rigorous-enough crowd this time), but what I did was to compute the runs created above (or saved below, for pitchers) average, park- and competition-adjusted, for each player who was both on the 2005 and 2006 roster for a team and sum those to see who had the highest totals. There are a couple dozen teams who still don't have 2006 rosters up on their web sites (bad SID, no Mountain Dew!), with Baylor and Fresno State the most likely to be significant. Of the others, here are the 50 teams with the most returning firepower:
# Team RCAA 1 Oregon State 127.42 2 Georgia Tech 123.87 3 Rice 122.55 4 Florida State 121.02 5 Mississippi 106.14 6 Texas 101.15 7 Florida 95.55 8 Nebraska 85.98 9 Virginia Commonwealth 78.51 10 Cal State Fullerton 73.84 11 Dallas Baptist 73.06 12 Missouri 72.66 13 Central Michigan 70.81 14 Rhode Island 70.34 15 North Carolina-Wilmington 70.20 16 Tennessee 69.83 17 Texas Christian 68.43 18 Clemson 67.69 19 Miami, Florida 67.54 20 College of Charleston 66.84 21 San Francisco 60.24 22 Virginia 57.31 23 Tulane 57.21 24 Winthrop 56.95 25 Kansas State 56.58 26 Ohio State 56.05 27 Oral Roberts 55.81 28 Creighton 54.71 29 Oklahoma State 53.85 30 Kentucky 53.14 31 Stetson 50.44 32 Army 48.99 33 Illinois-Chicago 48.20 34 Southern California 47.73 35 Mississippi State 47.26 36 Liberty 44.29 37 Central Florida 44.13 38 Vanderbilt 43.72 39 Washington 43.33 40 Georgia 42.88 41 Kansas 42.11 42 Bradley 40.75 43 Stanford 40.45 44 Middle Tennessee State 39.11 45 Arizona 36.43 46 Boston College 36.34 47 Arkansas 35.53 48 South Carolina 34.67 49 Manhattan 34.44 50 Troy 33.68
Now, you'll notice that this bears some, but not that much, resemblance to the preseason poll of your choice. At the very top, the names are the same but jumbled, but after that it gets interesting. Mississippi, for example, is hanging around the bottom end of most top 25's because they lost Head and Pettway, but they also return a ton of talent, headed up by Chris Coghlan and Mark Wright. The Virginia Commonwealth placement shows the potential benefit of one great player, with Scott Sizemore worth almost 30 runs above an average player last year. How much that's worth in real life, though, is an interesting question, since it's likely that 30 runs is only worth about 3 wins (remind me to actually answer that question at some point) over the course of the season. Some other teams, like Clemson and Mississippi State, face the problem that they got "everyone" back, but they weren't really world beaters last year.
There are all sorts of reasons that this might not be a good method, of course, from the problems inherent with using average as a baseline to the lack of any notion of depth (an unused Texas bench player is probably better than an unused Towson bench player, but neither of them count here). The next step, though, is to go back and see how a list from preseason 2005 would have compared to the preseason polls. Unfortunately, that will involve finding copies of the 2005 preseason polls (ever notice how fast those get buried?), but I'll try to put it together for next week.
While I've got the data handy, I'll send you off with a list of the 50 most valuable players by this measure who returned for this season (ignoring injuries):
RCAA Team Player 61.16 Florida State Shane Robinson 42.78 Missouri Max Scherzer 39.36 Florida Matt Laporta 39.31 Pepperdine Chad Tracy 38.97 Mississippi Chris Coghlan 36.11 Army Nick Hill 35.75 Davidson Jay Heafner 35.59 Southern Mississippi Marc Maddox 34.40 Oregon State Dallas Buck 33.55 Nebraska Johnny Dorn 32.35 Campbell Mike Priest 32.16 Mississippi Mark Wright 31.15 Georgia Tech Matt Wieters 29.88 Manhattan Chris Cody 29.74 Rice Joe Savery 29.46 Georgia Tech Wes Hodges 29.37 Virginia Commonwealth Scott Sizemore 28.89 Austin Peay State Rowdy Hardy 28.55 Georgia Josh Morris 28.38 Louisiana-Monroe James Bennett 27.81 Nebraska Joba Chamberlain 27.76 Tennessee J. P. Arencibia 26.96 Stetson Chris Johnson 26.53 Southern California Ian Kennedy 26.31 Elon Chris Price 26.29 Miami, Florida Jon Jay 26.22 Middle Tennessee State Matt Scott 25.96 College of Charleston Chris Campbell 25.77 Texas Christian Chad Huffman 25.73 Texas Drew Stubbs 25.39 Florida Atlantic Mickey Storey 25.30 Manhattan Matt Rizzotti 25.22 North Carolina-Wilmington John Raynor 24.86 Middle Tennessee State Todd Martin 24.56 Oklahoma State Corey Brown 24.46 Akron Ross Liersemann 24.24 Pacific Justin Baum 24.23 Oregon State Jonah Nickerson 24.22 Rice Eddie Degerman 24.18 San Diego State Bruce Billings 24.09 College of Charleston Phillip Coker 24.09 Boston College Jared McGuire 24.03 Georgia Tech Jeff Kindel 24.02 Central Michigan Ty Dunham 23.67 Tulane Nathan Southard 23.64 Rice Josh Rodriguez 23.33 Florida State Ryne Malone 23.28 San Diego Shane Buschini 22.99 Vermont Miguel Magrass 22.85 Liberty Aaron GrijalvaIf you're interested in reprinting this or any other Boyd's World material for your publication or Web site, please read the reprint policy and contact me
| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Returning Talent | About the author, Boyd Nation |