Correct DP Info for 1998 BlueWave

I see what happened. They put the number of players involved in double plays in both parentheses and as the total number (page 288).

According to "The Official Baseball Encyclopedia 2004," Orix turned 143 double plays out of the 807 Pacific League total. The rest of the numbers match.

Hope this helps. And I look forward to seeing seeing your article/report, if possible.

Thank you!

I don't feel financially secure enough to buy both books, and the BBRB has lots of extras not in the official guide. (My estimate was 147, BTW.)

If I ever get secure about my numbers, I'll post them.

I would be interested in your numbers 1) to help assess defense, which is the area in which my own work is most deficient, and 2) to see how they compare to my effort to at least partially cover that deficiency in my works at baseballguru.com. I would be willing to collaborate with you on that site if you wish. Don't worry about the numbers being perfect - if they're as good as you can get and do, you should put the info out there with appropriate disclaimers on what shortcomings you might think exist in your numbers. The information to be disseminated is valuable, and so long as you are intellectually honest about the numbers and share the facts with readers, I can assure you from my experience that you'll be rather well received. Heck, my now discarded "Greatness Points" system was loaded with problems, but it still (at the time) represented a step forward in the discussion. As such, it was well received.

Jim Albright

How flattering, Jim! Well, I've perhaps finished up complete Win Shares for 1996-1998, although I'm very unsure about my Park Adj. figures - they seem to differ quite a bit from Jim Allen's evaluations, even in 1996.

Still, the defensive figures wouldn't be much effected, if at all, and seem very reasonable (I was frankly amazed to find that NPB Gold Gloves were generally much more well-awarded than I had ever thought, except for Komada winning perpetually at first base) both comparitively between different players at the same position and as a percentage of their defensive value towards the team.

By having had to set up the whole Win Shares program and work out the bugs and errors made in doing so (I'm no wiz at this sort of thing) I have pretty much complete faith in its conclusions being the best currently possible by far. Everything seems reasonable at every step, and every big surprise can be seen as reasonable by going back to the raw data and looking at it from a new point of view.

Anyway, to the chase.

What are some sample numbers you'd like to see that I have?

Do you have access to Home/Away/Neutral stadium splits for runs and especially home runs data? Counting Runs in neutral stadium matches and HRs in each box score in the BBRB is not only time-consuming, but the HR totals are almost always off by a few, despite re-counts.

What Park Adj. factors do you use? And where do you get your Home/Away split data? Oh, and how (or what is your opinion) do you integrate the neutral park (Kitakyushu and Nagoya Dome for Pacific League games, etc.) data into the Park Factor?

Waiting to hear from you!

(I don't want to post my e-mail address here, but I know you have a contact site. I'll try to find that and send a copy of this to you there directly.)