This isn’t a fun week – in a contracts class from 8-4 every day and then it’s into the office for another few hours to do a ton of work that got thrown at me because the people who are really responsible for it don’t know how to work with huge data sets. So there won’t be as much baseball work to get done this week as I would want, but I still have to keep up the blog posts! And obviously sitting in a classroom for 8 hours will give my mind ample time to wander and contemplate some things for this project.

For instance, today I found myself thinking more about what a true talent level actually means – basically an extension of the second paragraph of this post. As I said there, players have many different talents and trying to collect all of that information in a single statistic is going to be problematic. In what proportions do you mix these different talents? You could just assume that all hitters face pitchers with totally average pitches that they throw at the same rate as the major league average and have handedness in line with the actual breakdown in MLB by innings pitched. But is that meaningful? A left handed hitter that struggles against lefties may face a ton of LOOGYs and therefore face a higher percentage of lefties than normal – but then again he might get lifted for a pinch hitter in that situation or sit more often with a lefty on the mound and therefore face fewer than normal.

Regardless, there is no doubt that I’d rather be thinking about this stuff than the lifestyle of a Federal contract. Which is pretty good motivation to keep thinking about it even further.