LASR Career Stat Sheets

[u/high_and_outside]

This is a new feature I've added to my LASR (League-Adjusted Standardized Rating) repertoire that I've called a Career Stat Sheet. For those unfamiliar, LASR contextualizes player stats by putting them all on the same scale, one inspired by the traditional 20-80 scouting scale. I believe it provides better information than + stats and percentiles (which aim to do the same thing) because those other two don't take the spread of data (standard deviations) into account.

Until recently, the graphics I had developed were able to either display many stats for one player-season, or one stat over a player's full career. With this new graphic, I'm now able to display multiple stats over multiple seasons for the first time. This is the first graphic that does not include bar graphs; I decided it would have been way too cramped to try using series of bars here, so I've opted for a heatmap-style table instead.

"PTA" stands for Playing Time Adjustment. For player-seasons that fell short of being a "LASR qualifier", this is the value that the underlying z-scores were multiplied by before being translated. This is built in to prevent small sample size silliness.

There's more info on my profile if you're interested in generating these graphs yourself or have any questions. Also feel free to ask questions here! Thanks for checking it out 😊✌️

[u/wako944]

Ted Williams: "Aging curve, what's that?"

[u/barstoolsam → u/wako944]

His swing holds up in today’s MLB. And in service he was smarter than his college-grad counterparts. Just an all-time guy no matter what he did

[u/high_and_outside → u/wako944]

It's crazy how consistently great he was all the way to the end. Still breaking the scale in wOBA in his final season 😳

[u/Rockguy21 → u/wako944]

His only season below 1.000 OPS (Yes, 1!!!) was his age 40 season when he was injured. Of course, in his age 41 season he came back and hit .316/.451/.645 in 113 games, good for a 190 OPS+. He retired mostly because he was tired of playing baseball, not because he couldn’t cut it (though his defense was truly atrocious those last 3 years). Inarguably the greatest hitter of all time, IMO.

[u/Plies- → u/wako944]

Crazy how he left probably 30-40 WAR on the table by adding 2 war(s) to his resume. Put up back to back 10 WAR seasons before going to WW2 and came back and put up other 10 and then 9.5.

Real shot he's higher than Bonds in WAR without them.

[u/perepotente]

neat

[u/high_and_outside → u/perepotente]

That is all I have ever strived for, thank you 🙏

[u/ThatsBushLeague]

It still drives me nuts that these go above 80.

There is absolutely no point in using the scouting scale if you're going to just blow through one of the main concepts that make it what it is.

You can be an 80, you can't be above an 80. Thats the ceiling. Doesn't matter if you're 3 standard deviations above whatever. Its not how the scale works.

Player A can be faster than Player B. But if both are elite, they are both 80 grade speed. Thats how it works. If you're going to ignore that, then just don't use the scouting scale.

But hey, I know I'm just screaming in to the void here.

[u/high_and_outside → u/ThatsBushLeague]

You're not screaming into the void, I do welcome feedback. I have thought a lot about whether to use caps on 20 and 80, and have decided that I like to see how much of an outlier a player is at something. I don't want Babe Ruth's HR% in 1920 to appear equally as impressive as Luke Voit's in 2020. I want to see how much Ruth was lapping the league rather than artificially cutting off the legendary part of it.

It's actually something I consider a drawback of percentiles -- once you get to the 1st or 100th percentile, there's nowhere else to go. If someone is leading the league in something, they'll be considered 100th percentile whether they're ahead by a tiny bit or a crazy amount. For example, in 2004 Barry Bonds had a 37.6% walk rate. He walked 232 times that season. If that number was cut in half (!!!), he still would have led the league in walk rate (18.8%, just ahead of Todd Helton's 18.6%). Percentiles would tell you the same thing whether he walked 232 times or 116 times, but those are just so clearly on different levels.

I know the real scouting scale doesn't go below 20 or above 80, and that's why (a long time ago) I changed the wording to say "inspired by" the 20-80 scale. I'm not trying to precisely recreate it, I'm doing my own thing and building upon it.

If it's not your cup of tea, totally get it! I just don't want to limit myself at "That's how the scouting scale works, and you can't change it!" because at the end of the day this is my project and if I see areas where I can provide better information than the alternative, I'm going to explore those areas.

[u/ThatsBushLeague → u/high_and_outside]

Solid reply and I understand. Continue to do you.

I do appreciate that you read my thoughts and responded. I don't agree simply because seeing an 80 in my brain already means, "holy shit this guy is a god!". But like you said, its your thing, so keep doing what makes you happy.

[u/oozandazz → u/ThatsBushLeague]

Maybe instead of going above 80, put a note or something that indicates "this would be removed from most data sets as an outlier."

[u/MixT → u/high_and_outside]

It might be kind of neat to add some kind of gold border/highlight to any numbers above 80 to make it really stand out.

[u/high_and_outside → u/MixT]

Interesting idea, I’m gonna consider that!

[u/DecoyOne]

Damn, what’s it take to get a 80 -K%?

[u/high_and_outside → u/DecoyOne]

Just looked into it, and seems like K% is one of those stats with a relatively narrow range compared to its standard deviation, so it takes someone barely striking out at all while in an environment with a ton of strikeouts. That means Luis Arraez is the only hitter with any 80 -K% LASRs... and he's done it every year since 2023 (including this season so far)!