Minor League Equivalencies
Back in the ’80s, Bill James devised what he called “minor league equivalencies” (more commonly known as MLEs). In a nutshell, he created a system for translating minor league statistics into major league statistics based on level of competition, ballpark factors, and so forth. It’s not a predictive system, but rather a straight translation. It tells you what a minor-league player would have done had he played in the big leagues, not what he will do at the big-league level. But just as knowing what Albert Pujols did last year for the Cardinals is useful in trying to determine what he’ll do this year, so are having these MLEs handy when evluating prospects that might come up next year and help your favorite team.
An insanely detailed explanation of what the system is, how it works, and the calculations involved is available at Baseball Think Factory. But if you’d rather avoid the heavy math and get to the bottom line, you can also just download the files to your hard drive and do with them what you will.
Kudos to Dan Szymborski for running these MLEs and making them available for all of us to use.
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1 opinion for Minor League Equivalencies
MLEs Revisited
Sep 16, 2007 at 5:31 pm
[…] touched on minor league equivalencies (MLEs) as a method for interpreting a player’s minor-league performance. Now Chris Constancio […]
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