The Myth of Ryan Theriot's September
5 Comments Published by Colin Wyers on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 10:40 AM.
There is a growing myth in a set of Cubs fans that says that Ryan Theriot's numbers as a hitter just don't look so bad if you ignore his performance in September, when he was battling a back injury.
The first rebuttal is pretty obvious; it's rare to find a ballplayer that makes it through an entire season without some sort of nagging injury, and max-effort guys like Theriot are more likely to be injured than others.
But I've decided to try expressing the second rebuttal in a slightly different form. For a while now I've been saying that Theriot's pre-September numbers don't look all that impressive, either. But do you know what says it better than I can? Why, a graph! Just click on it to enlarge:
I absolutely love graphs, by the way, and I hope to make them a regular feature on this site.
Labels: Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Ryan Theriot
You seem to be pointing out that Ryan Theriot is a below average ML SS, at least offensively. I agree -- you are preaching to the choir here. Is there any known (accepted) way to put offensive and defensive stats together and analyze where Riot stands vs. the average ML SS? Is there any way to do the same thing for DeRo using his historical SS numbers? It would be interesting to see which would be the better overall SS, and whether either would be at least ML average.
Just go get Khalil Green and be done with it. :) Would be nice to see Riot's D vs the rest of the SS's out there.
Short answer: Theriot is about average defensively. Long answer will be provided in a little while.
If you're going to take away the low number because it's an outlier, shouldn't you also take out the high number? I wonder what it looks like taking out both September and July.
You shouldn't take out any numbers, really - more data is better than less, generally speaking.
Now, what you can do is weight the data based on certain factors - the more recent the better, usually. You regress to the mean. There's all sorts of tools at your disposal you can use to analyze the data at hand.
But Theriot really did hit well in July, and you need to account for that. Every baseball player looks better if you throw out their bad months and worse if you throw out their good months. It doesn't really tell us anything.