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Voting Strategies

I've been given the opportunity recently to be part of the voting pool for a couple of online honors -- the CSTV Player of the Year award, which will have a weekly watch column starting next week, and the Black College Baseball poll. I wanted to take this week to discuss the methods I'll be using to fill out my ballots, not because I'm solipsistic enough to think that my ballot particularly matters to you, but just to give an insight into how the process works for those of us who try to justify our votes rather than just blustering through the whole thing. Neither of them are actually voting this week -- the PoY Watch starts up next week, and the BCB poll is bi-weekly -- so these aren't actual ballots but just what I would have done if I had voted this week.

It's probably worth it to start off with what this isn't -- it's not a prospect list. It's quite possible for someone to be the best college player of the year and not be a good professional prospect, since the games are subtly different. I suspect it's a lot more rare than most scouts would have you believe, but it is possible.

I am who I am, so the analysis is at least going to start with a look at a properly-constructed look at the statistics. There are some areas where that doesn't complete things, most notably in trying to measure defensive contributions, but it's a good framework. In the process of putting this together, I've actually created a new treat for you guys as well, as I've put together a second leaderboard, a Smart Stats Leaderboard, which contains up-to-date leaders for a couple of my favorite constructed stats, AOPS and RBOA. There's also a page which explains the methods used to compute those stats, which have evolved over the years into my favorite measuring sticks for hitters and pitchers respectively. Given that, here's the five who will be on my ballot, with comments following:

1. Danny Ray Herrera, New Mexico
2. Evan Longoria, Long Beach State
3. Kellen Kulbacki, James Madison
4. Wes Roemer, Cal State Fullerton
5. Wade Leblanc, Alabama

• Pitching at altitude is hard. If you don't adjust for park factors, Herrera is still leading the nation in RBOA by a tad. Once you throw them in, he's almost lapping the field.

• Longoria isn't quite the best hitter in the country, but so far he's second, and he's doing so while playing defense that's enough better than the guy ahead of him (Kulbacki) to make up the difference. Longoria's defense at short wasn't quite good enough to go pro there (one of those differences I talked about above), but he's managing quite well at third.

• AOPS suffers from the same problem that OPS does, in that it overvalues slugging a bit; I'm working on finding a better solution there. Nonetheless, Kulbacki has been quite valuable.

• Roemer's been pretty straightforwardly good; great performance against a really tough schedule.

• There are one or two guys with better stats records than Leblanc's, but I'm buying somewhat into the argument that conference games have a bit more leverage in the long run, and he's been really good there, which is helping Bama overachieve a bit in conference so far.

Here's my top 10, pulled from the ISR report:

               D1      All
BCB  #    ISR     W   L    W   L  SoS  Team

 1. 167   96.8   15  20   15  20  135  Bethune-Cookman
 2. 199   93.2    3  15    3  17   20  Chicago State
 3. 214   91.5    9  12   19  14  222  Savannah State
 4. 227   89.8   12  11   22  12  277  Prairie View A&M
 5. 229   89.6   13  19   13  19  233  North Carolina A&T
 6. 239   88.1   14  16   15  16  275  Norfolk State
 7. 242   87.9   12  11   13  13  285  Southern
 8. 257   84.8   11  12   13  16  286  Arkansas-Pine Bluff
 9. 262   84.0    9  17    9  17  260  Florida A&M
10. 263   83.7   15   9   16  11  293  Alcorn State

Rating the HBCU's is a fairly interesting task, because there are some fairly severe disconnects out there between the pools of teams. The only games between SWAC and MEAC teams come when the Alabama SWAC teams play Florida A&M, and since those are the two worst SWAC teams, there's not much to gauge by there. Savannah State is fairly well plugged in to the MEAC teams but doesn't play any SWAC teams, and Chicago State doesn't play any of the others.

I've looked for reasons not to just list these in ISR order but haven't come up with any yet. There are more non-D1 games on this list than you'd expect for a group of D1 teams, but there's not much evidence there -- the HBCU's so far have either lost badly to lower division powers like Delta State or beaten up on lower-division or NAIA weaklings. I'd love to hear from anyone with some insight that I might be missing.

It might seem odd for a 3-17 team to be at #2, and I'm not completely comfortable with that, but there's a huge difference in schedule strength between CSU and the rest of the field. Now, losing to a better class of bully shouldn't necessarily be rewarded, but they managed to take a scalp by beating Washington State, which is by far the most impressive win by an HBCU this season (the only other win over a top 100 team is Bethune-Cookman beating Jacksonville). I note that mine is a minority opinion, which I expect to be a common occurence in both of these polls.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East   Clemson               Winthrop             Washington
Atlantic 10    North Carolina        Purdue               Stanford
Atlantic Sun   Wake Forest           UC Irvine            Georgia
Horizon        Miami, Florida        Long Beach State     Arkansas
Ivy            Florida State         Cal State Fullerton  Mississippi State
MAAC           North Carolina State  Pacific              Alabama
MAC            Virginia              Old Dominion         Louisiana State
MEAC           Oklahoma              Rice                 Florida
Mid-Continent  Texas                 Houston              South Carolina
Mountain West  Kansas                East Carolina        Vanderbilt
NEC            Oklahoma State        Tulane               Elon
OVC            Baylor                Missouri State       College of Charleston
Patriot        Nebraska              Arizona State        Troy
Southland      Kansas State          Oregon State         Fresno State
SWAC           Notre Dame            Southern California  San Diego
Georgia Tech   St. John's            UCLA                 Pepperdine

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated. As always, I welcome actual pitch count corrections.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Voting Strategies

About the author, Boyd Nation