Muncey, Vogey and the Gurriels: The Moral of their Story

Muncy, Vogey and the Gurriels.  Sounds a little like a band.  But if it was a band, it would be better as just Muncy (or Vogey) and the Gurriels. So it isn’t a band.

It’s a victims list.  These are players whose names were changed by Baseball Prospectus, and we didn’t notice right away.  So for a while our defense ratings weren’t being read for these players.

Let’s start with Max Muncy. Last year they were calling him Maxwell, but sometime at or before the season started they switched to Max. I don’t remember when I noticed, but it was apparently early in superlong April.  I adjusted his name to get the offensive stats in correctly, but did not think to do the same for his defense.

Last night, I noticed the Wolverines’ team defense was 26.something.  This was impossible — it put my team defense BELOW replacement. I only have one defender below replacement (Devers) and I have 0 replacement plate appearances.  So this couldn’t be true.

I asked Dave to help me find the problem. Dave, despite being preoccupied with other nagging issues like survival, ran a test. It showed the database assigning a team defense rating of 0 to second base. With some further looking Dave discovered that Max and Maxwell Muncy are not recognized as the same person in the database. He changed Maxwell to Max in the part of the database that gives us credit for our defense, and just this morning the Wolverines’ team defense blossomed to 33.2 for May (so far — this is a dynamic number).

I realized that Muncy was not the only player whose name BP changed this year. At the beginning of May, BP changed Dan Vogelbach to Daniel, Yulieski Gurriel to Yuli, and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr.  to just plain old Lourdes Gurriel.  Sure enough, Vogelbach’s defense was being treated as a 0 (when he’s actually rated 2.8 at 1b). The W’s will get another, smaller defense boost when Dave finishes his work.

For the Gurriels, we discovered that Yuli’s defensive allocations didn’t even take for May, so Tom will need to tell us what they were supposed to be in his original allocation.  Lourdes Gurriel has not played in MLB in May, so the Outs will be unaffected.

Here’s a sad thing for the Wolverines:  Muncy was treated as if his defense was 0 in April, too.  That cut about 6 points off the Wolverines’ April defense ratings, probably enough to cost them at least a game in the standings for the month, maybe more. (April was a super-long month, and when the defense ratings get down under 30, each point you lose costs a team more than a game over the season.).

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However, there is nothing the Wolverines can do about that.  Everyone has built their strategy on the April results.  I’m not sure we can fix a closed month without messing things up.  I had all of a very long month to spot the problem and alert league officials.  My failure to examine my team stats carefully is my problem.  It’s like not calling “UNO” before the next person plays, or (Settlers Reference Warning) not giving away the boot before making the play that puts you ahead. The Wolverines will have to limp through the rest of the season with the weight of that lost win (or more) on their shoulders, a constant lesson, the moral of the story of Muncy, Vogey and the Gurriels:

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BE ALERT!  

Pay attention to your team!

If a problem can be caught

it’s up to you to catch it

before the month is over. 

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